Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport much worse
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
The X owner’s commitment to free speech absolutism contributed to a whirlwind of false reporting around the perpetrator’s identity. Why does he seem t...

Archived version

Within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings in Southport, a seaside town in northwest England, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.

None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.

The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.

One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.

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  • @talEnglish
    11•1 month ago

    but all social media is like this.

    I’m not a bot, and we’re talking on social media.

    • ScrubblesEnglish
      9•1 month ago

      *corporate. There’s a profit motive for them to encourage the behavior and be addictive

    • @tyler@programming.dev
      2•1 month ago

      We’re talking on a forum. This is not social media. It has none of the hallmarks of social media, like friending people, following their feeds, or being a spot where you post about your lives. Forums have never been and will never be social media.

      Just like Facebook Marketplace isn’t social media, just because you can do something on a site doesn’t mean that site belongs to a completely separate category of sites.

      • @talEnglish
        2•1 month ago

        This is not social media.

        I hate to break it to you, but Reddit and similar fall under the category of social media.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

        Lemmy is made up of a network of individual installations of the Lemmy software that can intercommunicate. This departs from the centralized, monolithic structure of other social media platforms.[9] It has been described as a federated alternative to Reddit.[10]

        • @tyler@programming.dev
          1•1 month ago

          It really doesn’t. It is pointless to describe forums as social media because then you’re really calling everything on the internet social media. News comment sections, blogs with comment sections, even Amazon product pages which have comment sections! You can even follow sellers on Amazon.

          There has to be a line somewhere and it’s definitely on the other side of forums.