Riots in the UK make a case for social media supervision
The UK’s image as a multicultural country is the obvious loser from the far-right violence of the past fortnight, but in time these tragic events may have wider implications for the policing of social media everywhere. The role of X in disseminating often-false information and lionizing rabble-rousers, as well as X owner Elon Musk’s provocative tweets and irresponsible retweets, are all under the microscope.
This week, Thierry Breton, a high-ranked European Union commissioner, issued a strong warning to X over “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence". Musk’s fan-boy interview with Donald Trump this week as well as his retweets of the inflammatory messages of the far-right’s Tommy Robinson will only cement the view that X is all too frequently a megaphone for extremists.
Breton’s letter to X reminded Musk of X’s “due diligence obligations" under the EU’s digital services laws intended to police hate speech. X hit back saying that the EU was overreaching as the interview pertains to US politics.
This is true enough, but it was clear that heightened EU concern about X is because of riots in the UK. These were triggered after fake news spread on social media that the man who stabbed and killed three young girls at a dance class in Southport in the north of England was a Muslim immigrant, even though the alleged attacker was born in the UK and is of Rwandan origin.
Robinson, tweeting from Cyprus, sought to use the incident to spread ill-will towards Muslims, and in turn mosques were attacked. At a time like this, it might seem easy to conclude that the UK has not conquered the demons of racism that were omnipresent in the late 1950s and 1960s in response to waves of immigration at the time from the
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