After a young man killed three young girls aged between 6 and 9 and injured many more in the town of Soutport in England.
Soon later, information on Twitter, now known as X, surfaced online claiming that the perpetrator was a 17-year-old Muslim refugee. This was not true, as the murderer, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain and had lived in the country all his life in a family of Rwandan origin.
Nevertheless, the fake news had an impact. A tweet claiming the murderer was a Muslim amassed 27 million views, igniting unrest across the nation.
The source of this misinformation was the site Channel3 Now, which poses as an American news agency but is not. Channel3 Now mostly collects and publishes fake news and has roots tracing back to Russia. The site’s YouTube channel, launched 12 years ago, originally featured videos in Russian from the city of Izhevsk. In 2019, this changed to English-language content about the Middle East.
Channel3 Now picked up a tweet by Bernie Spofforth, known for spreading conspiracy theories. Although Spofforth deleted his tweet almost immediately, Channel3 Now managed to share it and did not remove it. Channel3 Now became the source from which the misinformation spread through social networks and into other media. Leaders of the English Defence League also propagated it.
The resulting riots are still ongoing in various cities across the UK. Despite the fake news being debunked long ago, the riots continue. Local police are urging people not to participate, as civilians, local businesses, public places, and police officers are suffering, with several officers already injured.
In essence, Russian fake news have sparked large-scale riots across the UK, demonstrating the power of this type of weapon.
That’s a too simplified abstract of what the article is about. It’s not that Russia made the racist far-right in Western Europe and elsewhere (the Putin regime appears to provide some funding to European right-wing parties, though, as we have seen in Germany’s AfD, for example), it’s that Putin fuels that sentiment. The Russian government tries to actively destabilize the societies, that alone is a violent act and by many considered an act of war.
(And, no, Britain is not “racist AF”, some people over there are racist. We should not pidgeonhole a country, neither Britain nor Russia.)
Racist rhetoric in the press and in politics has been normalized to an extreme where it is apparently normal now to say Muslim voters are sectarian because they disagree with labour over its Gaza policy.
For how many years have mainstream politicians and public figures not blamed whatever problem on immigrants, or said that the border should be ‘secured’. I mean the Rwanda deal was literally a serious proposal this very year. Was that all Putin, or are the political elite looking for a boogieman to blame, rather than reflect how incredibly irresponsible they have been for the past decade.
Again, the racism in the UK and elsewhere is one problem, Putin’s misinformation campaigns are another. These are two different things. (And, again, not all are racist in the UK - or in any country - as we can see, for example, with the ‘Rwanda deal’ you mentioned as this very deal is history now.)
If Ivan on twitter can cause such political chaos I don’t think all problems are solved. And Russia is not UKs only geo-strategic rival that has access to twitter, so either the UK has to instigate a China level internet censorship regime or maybe fix the racism.
Just the reaction of the police to the riots compared to extinction rebellion should tell you enough about their priorities.
