Online misinformation is fueling tensions over the Southport stabbing attack that killed three children

LONDON – Within hours a stabbing attack in northwest England which killed three girls and injured several other children, the fake name of an alleged suspect was circulating on social media. Hours later, violent protesters clashed with police outside a nearby mosque.

Police say the name was false, as were rumors that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. Detectives say the suspect charged Thursday with murder and attempted murder was born in the United Kingdom, and British media, including the BBC, reported that his parents are from Rwanda.

This information did little to slow the spread of the fake name or stop right-wing influencers from blaming immigrants and Muslims.

“There is a parallel universe where what was alleged by these rumors were the real facts of the case,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that analyzes issues such as integration and national identity. “And that will be a difficult thing to manage.”

Local lawmaker Patrick Hurley said the result was “hundreds of people invading the city, invading Southport from outside the area, with the intention of causing trouble – either because they believe what they wrote, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote in first, in hopes of causing division in the community.”

One of the first media outlets to report the fake name, Ali Al-Shakati, was Channel 3 Now, an account on social media platform X that purports to be a news channel. A Facebook page with the same name says it is run by people in Pakistan and the US. A related website on Wednesday showed a mix of news and entertainment stories possibly generated by AI, as well as an apology for “misleading information” in its article about the Southport stabbings.

By the time the apology was posted, the misidentification had already been widely repeated on social media.

“Some of the major players are probably just generating traffic, possibly for monetization,” Katwala said. The disinformation was then spread further by “people committed to the UK domestic far right”, he said.

Governments around the world, including Britain’s, are grappling with how to curb toxic material online. UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites.

Katwala said social platforms like Facebook and X worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time following mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Since Elon Musk, a self-styled champion of free speech, bought X, he has destroyed teams who once fought misinformation on the platform and reinstated banned conspiracy theory and extremist accounts.

Rumors arose in the police’s relative silence about the attack. Merseyside Police issued a statement saying the suspect’s name was incorrect, but provided little information about him other than his age and place of birth in Cardiff, Wales.

Under UK law, suspects are not publicly named until they are charged and those under 18 are generally not named. Some activists have seized on this to suggest that the police are withholding information about the attacker.

Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defense League, accused the police of “gaslighting” the public. Nigel Farage, a veteran anti-immigration politician who was elected to Parliament in this month’s general election, published a video on X speculating “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the attack.

Brendan Cox, whose wife of lawmaker Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right attacker in 2016, said Farage’s comments showed he was “no better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit”.

“It is unacceptable to use a time like this to spread your narrative and your hate, and we saw the results on the streets of Southport last night,” Cox told the BBC.