After a young man killed three young girls aged between 6 and 9 and injured many more in the town of Soutport in England.
Soon later, information on Twitter, now known as X, surfaced online claiming that the perpetrator was a 17-year-old Muslim refugee. This was not true, as the murderer, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain and had lived in the country all his life in a family of Rwandan origin.
Nevertheless, the fake news had an impact. A tweet claiming the murderer was a Muslim amassed 27 million views, igniting unrest across the nation.
The source of this misinformation was the site Channel3 Now, which poses as an American news agency but is not. Channel3 Now mostly collects and publishes fake news and has roots tracing back to Russia. The site’s YouTube channel, launched 12 years ago, originally featured videos in Russian from the city of Izhevsk. In 2019, this changed to English-language content about the Middle East.
Channel3 Now picked up a tweet by Bernie Spofforth, known for spreading conspiracy theories. Although Spofforth deleted his tweet almost immediately, Channel3 Now managed to share it and did not remove it. Channel3 Now became the source from which the misinformation spread through social networks and into other media. Leaders of the English Defence League also propagated it.
The resulting riots are still ongoing in various cities across the UK. Despite the fake news being debunked long ago, the riots continue. Local police are urging people not to participate, as civilians, local businesses, public places, and police officers are suffering, with several officers already injured.
In essence, Russian fake news have sparked large-scale riots across the UK, demonstrating the power of this type of weapon.
Even if the murderer had been a Muslim and/or refugee, that would not have justified the violence used.
The far right is way too easy to influence.
Everybody are. You would like to think that it’s only “them”, but sad truth is, people are just easy to manipulate.
Everyone can be manipulated. People who want to be outside of every norm are more easy to manipulate and the far right belongs to those groups.
I think it would be quite difficult to persuade me I can solve problems by burning down a Citizens Advice centre.
When acting in a group, it is easy to turn people into a mob. So all the propaganda has to do, is get people to go on the streets and have one or two shitheads starting something. I don’t think many of the rioters went out that day with the explicit goal to burn the centre down. Maybe some had the goal to set something on fire, or smash something, but i doubt it to be aimed at this specific place beforehand.
In other words destabilizing propaganda just needs to start something without it having to be anything specific.
Yeah, the Kremlin supports extremest politics of many flavors. The George Floyd riots are a good example of something similar happening on the left.
After reading the article i thought about how legit united24media probably is.
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Why are big media sites not accountable for Missinformation of their users? Apparently it’s not a problem to find and block copyright violations on YouTube and ban repeat offenders when Hollywood lawyers knock on the door…
The one harms profit, the other generates it. Copyright holders will go after the Platforms consistently. However there it also seems to be mostly a matter of size and legal threat, rather than veracity of the copyright claim.
Given how much we know about russian disinfo operations, it’s criminal how little is published about it.
Almost like the amount of people who understand how media works is limited to russian bad actors and the people in this thread. Certainly no one in the actual media seem to.
In essence, Russian fake news have sparked large-scale riots across the country, demonstrating the power of this type of weapon.
It‘s a good story, but probably not true:
That Britain is racist AF is clearly the fault of Putler, and not at all to do with having the racism dial at 12 for the past decade. Even Starmer has vowed to ‘stop the boats’, not to speak of the shit that the Tories or the Tabloids have been saying.
Maybe solve your own problem in your country rather than pretending that Putin is some kind of Machiavellian puppeteer that causes all bad things to happen.
I’m not disputing the claims of this article, it is 100% believable that Russia tried to destabilize a geo-strategic rival. But you don’t start a race riot after reading a refugee did a murder, if you’re not already really F-ing racist.
Edit: Here is an extensive summary of how both Labour and the Tories used islamophobia for their own political gain.
Edit 2: obviously not all Brits are racist, but the political culture has normalized it to the extent where this is possible, with or without Russian help.
You’ve basically said it all.
Russia’s entire tactic is just stoke the fire, stir the pot, etc. They don’t have to make people racist they just have to rile them up.
That’s a too simplified abstract of what the article is about. It’s not that Russia made the racist far-right in Western Europe and elsewhere (the Putin regime appears to provide some funding to European right-wing parties, though, as we have seen in Germany’s AfD, for example), it’s that Putin fuels that sentiment. The Russian government tries to actively destabilize the societies, that alone is a violent act and by many considered an act of war.
(And, no, Britain is not “racist AF”, some people over there are racist. We should not pidgeonhole a country, neither Britain nor Russia.)
Racist rhetoric in the press and in politics has been normalized to an extreme where it is apparently normal now to say Muslim voters are sectarian because they disagree with labour over its Gaza policy.
For how many years have mainstream politicians and public figures not blamed whatever problem on immigrants, or said that the border should be ‘secured’. I mean the Rwanda deal was literally a serious proposal this very year. Was that all Putin, or are the political elite looking for a boogieman to blame, rather than reflect how incredibly irresponsible they have been for the past decade.
Again, the racism in the UK and elsewhere is one problem, Putin’s misinformation campaigns are another. These are two different things. (And, again, not all are racist in the UK - or in any country - as we can see, for example, with the ‘Rwanda deal’ you mentioned as this very deal is history now.)
If Ivan on twitter can cause such political chaos I don’t think all problems are solved. And Russia is not UKs only geo-strategic rival that has access to twitter, so either the UK has to instigate a China level internet censorship regime or maybe fix the racism.
Just the reaction of the police to the riots compared to extinction rebellion should tell you enough about their priorities.
What has the police’s reaction here to do with Russia’s disinformation? It’s just about raising a new issue to point the finger to anywhere else.
Again, I’m not talking about Russia, I’m talking about racism in the UK, if you think the police is unrelated to this, I really don’t know what else to say.
Blaming foreign influence for our problems is what got us here.
Did you read the article?
Yes. It highlights Bonnie Spofforth as a source - a domestic source. Shifting the blame to Russia shifts the responsibility and perpetuates the domestic xenophobia that I would argue is much more responsible than Russia, or any outside source.
How so? I don’t see it.
I searched for the mentioned Channel3 Now. The YouTube channel has been removed. They still have a LinkedIn profile (where you need an account to report them).
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