UK Riots Show How Social Media Can Fuel Real-Life Harm. It’s Only Getting Worse

The recent widespread anti-immigrant riots in the United Kingdom, as well as the bogus viral claims that fuelled them, maybe the clearest, most direct example yet of how unregulated misinformation on social media can lead to real-world violence and harm.

Even after authorities identified a UK national as the perpetrator of a series of brutal stabbings targeting children, misleading allegations about the attacker’s identity and origins fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment and propelled far-right marches.

Riots | Independant Image

UK Riots Show How Social Media Can Fuel Real-Life Harm. It’s Only Getting Worse

Extremism experts claimed the fraudulent claims spread widely, particularly on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Police have openly blamed misinformation for the recent violence in the country, with rioters throwing bricks at mosques, setting cars on fire, and chanting anti-Islamic slogans while clashing with officers in riot gear.

The recent events are far from the only example of the link between online misinformation and politically motivated violence: from the Rohingya genocide to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, false and misleading claims have consistently been at the centre of high-profile incidents of political unrest and violence.

It is a pattern that has persisted despite years of appeals from governments and civil society groups for social media platforms to limit inflammatory, abusive remarks and promises by firms to do more.

A recent pullback from content filtering by certain key platforms, however, shows that the problem of misinformation-fueled violence may worsen before improving.

Governments and human rights organisations have contended that online platforms have resulted in massive societal costs for nearly a decade.

Critics of social media have often accused the sector of prioritizing corporate profits over users’ mental health or opening the door to foreign meddling without doing anything to protect the globe from these threats.

An economist may refer to them as negative externalities; they, like pollution, are byproducts of a profit-seeking firm that, if not handled, everyone else must either learn to live with or offset, generally at tremendous collective cost. The ramifications tend to be long-term and have large-scale, systemic implications.

This week, it’s difficult not to wonder if politically motivated violence based on nothing more than bad faith, evidence-free speculation has become a permanent fixture among social media’s various externalities and if we’re being asked to accept it as a consequence of living in a digitally connected world.

Many social media businesses have invested significantly in content moderation over the years. However, the industry’s recent track record suggests a gamble – or perhaps a hope – that the public will endure some additional pollution.

There are some signs of resistance. The new Digital Services Act in the European Union aims to hold social media corporations liable for propagating misinformation. In the United Kingdom, the Online Safety Act, which requires social media networks to remove illegal content, might go into effect as early as this year.

UK Riots | Wired Image

Even stricter measures may be on the way due to the riots. “We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a video released to the public on Friday.

Individual offenders of internet wrongdoing, however, are already facing consequences. Jordan Parlour of Leeds, England, was sentenced to 20 months in prison on Friday after being found guilty of disseminating written material designed to incite racial hatred. The 28-year-old shared the material on Facebook.

The United States has lagged in platform regulation, owing to congressional dysfunction and legal and constitutional distinctions that give online platforms more freedom to control their own websites.

Still, policymakers took some action last month when the US Senate enacted the Kids Online Safety Act, which tries to tackle mental health risks for kids associated with social media.

UK Riots | FT Image

UK Riots Show How Social Media Can Fuel Real-Life Harm. It’s Only Getting Worse

It may be tempting to dismiss social media’s role in the UK riots as a reflection of underlying political tendencies or the outcome of activity that would have occurred on other platforms regardless.

However, this detracts from the calculation that certain platforms appear to have made: at least some of the time, some level of misinformation-fueled violence is a reasonable cost for society to bear.

SOURCE | CNN