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Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport, a small town in the UK, much worse (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)

submitted 3 months ago by tardigrada to c/technology

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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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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Local groups are the absolute worst. I realized exactly what you did, that it's the absolute worst most horrid people in my area all together. Nextdoor was even worse. I remember (no shit) a picture of a black man walking down a sidewalk with a caption "Anyone know why he's here?". I was horrified that my neighbors were like that, just the absolute horrible racism in doing that.

[–] Devi 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

My local nextdoor has an issue with non white people in vans. Like normal builders eating their lunch and Sharon down the road is posting "Anyone know why this man is here? Stayed there for 45 minutes, very suspicious, might be stealing dogs".

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

People with too much time. My wife had a busy kid drop off/pickup / work schedule. If she was done work early she would park a block away from school and sleep in the car till dismissal time...some Karen came out complaining she can't sleep in her car and needed to leave. lol

[–] Devi 7 points 3 months ago

Awful woman

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