Social media accounts began spreading inflammatory speculation about identity of attacker even as events unfolded
Flowers and tributes are laid outside the Atkinson art centre in Southport, Merseyside, after three children were fatally stabbed at a holiday club.Flowers and tributes are laid outside the Atkinson art centre in Southport, Merseyside, after three children were fatally stabbed at a holiday club.
Joe Ondrak, a senior analyst at Logically, a UK company that monitors disinformation, said the Muslim immigrant claim was amplified across social media as a result.Dr Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, reported there were at least 27m impressions of posts on X that stated or speculated the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, a refugee or a foreigner.
It is unclear what the first source was for the fabricated name, which appeared to have been chosen to reflect Islamophobic tropes, but it was amplified by a faux news website calling itself Channel 3 News Now. That site, which does not have any named personnel and features a mix of emotive US and UK news and sport stories, responded to an email from the Guardian about the report to say: “We deeply regret any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.
That said, Beard and other analysts point out there are definitely poor quality bots tweeting about the Southport incident though he also cautions that this is in the main “engagement farming”. Such bots have been around since 2010.
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