By The Center for Countering Digital Hate

Amidst the worst period of public disorder and violence targeting minority communities in recent history, social media platforms failed the British public. Worse still, they played a significant role in fomenting the lies, hate, extremist beliefs, and antipathy towards institutions that erupted over a series of warm summer nights into extraordinary spasms of violence across the United Kingdom. False claims about the Southport attacker’s identity – lies identifying him as a Muslim asylum-seeker – spread widely and quickly. Far-right agitators received millions of views on X, formerly Twitter. Towns and cities across the UK saw attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers, inspired by these online posts. My family was among those affected; my mother, sisters and nieces were among those to experience hate on British streets. While affected communities and authorities struggled to cope with violent attacks on- and offline, social media platforms did little to quell its spread and, worse still, profited from it. We have seen this before. In the immediate aftermath of tragic incidents, bad actors weaponise online spaces to spread disinformation and sow informational chaos. Before the facts are known, extremists capitalise on the opportunity to spread hate, mobilise new followers, and inject conspiracy into the public discourse at the moment of maximum vulnerability. Underpinning this cynical behaviour are powerful financial incentives: hate actors turn the grief that follows a tragic incident into online engagement for financial reward from social media platforms. One platform stood out. The owner of X, Elon Musk, shared false information about the situation to his 195 million followers and made a show of attacking the UK Government’s response to the outbreak of violence.i Rather than ensuring risk and illegal content were mitigated on his platform, Musk recklessly promoted the notion of an impending “civil war” in the UK.ii CCDH found far-right figures, previously banned from Twitter but reinstated under Musk’s leadership, receiving millions of views per day on X. The platform ran ads against posts inciting hate, encouraging the mobs to “permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.” iii Musk has transformed Twitter, once the go-to  source for journalists, politicians, and the public for real time news, into X, a platform with imperceptible moderation and the morality of Telegram. On the 16th of August, CCDH convened stakeholders from government departments, law enforcement, the online safety regulator, British advertisers, and frontline civil society groups to chart a path forward. The insights and policy proposals which emerged from that discussion are detailed in this paper. While recognising that there was undue criticism levied at the regulator for powers it cannot yet use under the Online Safety Act (OSA), there is also a case for action to ensure the OSA is fit for purpose. Future amendments will be needed to tackle its most glaring omissions 

London; Washington, DC: Center for Countering Digital hate, 2024. 19p.