On May 26th a car ploughed into a crowd of Liverpool FC fans celebrating the club’s victory in the Premier League. The incident injured more than 50 people with several sent to hospital. Although the suspect was swiftly arrested and charged, misleading claims about their identity started appearing on social media. Recognizing the potential for further harm, Merseyside Police shared details of the suspect’s ethnicity and nationality, stating that the suspect was a “53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area”.
While it is unusual for police in the UK to release such details about a suspect, Merseyside Police did so in response to rumours and unconfirmed information about the incident that had rapidly begun to circulate on social media. By acting swiftly to release key details, Merseyside Police sought to prevent the rapid spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the attacker, their background, and possible motivation.
The spread of hate and misinformation following the Southport attack
This latest incident comes less than a year after a 2024 knife attack on a dance class in Southport that left three young girls dead and injured many others. Following the tragedy, false information about the attacker went viral on social media platforms, supercharged by platform algorithms, and stoked by hate profiteers. Hate and misinformation spread online helped fuel the subsequent far-right riots across the UK.
CCDH raised the alarm about viral hate and misinformation in the aftermath of the Southport attack. Our analysis pointed to the central role played by social media platforms in facilitating the explosion of rioting and violence after the tragedy:
CCDH’s research showed that hate actors like Tommy Robinson were instrumental in stoking hatred following the Southport attack and amassing millions of views on social media posts that promoted false claims or conspiracies.
We showed that Elon Musk’s X was profiting from amplifying extreme voices like Robinson, and that X’s algorithm, which is designed to reward controversial content, helped false and hateful posts to reach tens of millions of views each day.
We found that the user-generated fact-checks called “Community Notes”, claimed to be the best tool for addressing false information, were incapable of responding to the deluge of false information in the attack’s aftermath.
How the aftermath of the Southport attack made the police change tack
By releasing details about the suspect, Merseyside Police sought to prevent wild conspiracies like those which followed the Southport attack from spreading about the Liverpool crash. CCDH Chief Executive Imran Ahmed welcomed Merseyside Police’s intervention, saying that the police were reacting to a rapidly evolving information environment on social media: “Given what happened after Southport, it’s sensible, proportionate and welcome that [Merseyside Police] are trying things to ensure that disinformation is spiked before it can go viral”.
However, Ahmed went on to point out that the entity most responsible for addressing viral falsehoods (like those which stoked riots last summer) are the social media platforms on which they spread: companies that platform rumours and falsehoods, algorithmically boost their spread, and profit off the online harms they create.
What’s next?
Merseyside Police addressed the potential danger from social media conspiracies in the information vacuum following major incidents like the Liverpool crash. But coming so soon after the 2024 Southport attack, the incident has placed fresh pressure on social media companies to take responsibility for their role in the problem. Despite the UK online safety regulator, Ofcom finding a clear connection between online social media posts and the post-Southport riots last summer, the UK’s Online Safety Act does not yet contain sufficient powers to force platforms to address the misinformation and conspiracies that lead to offline violence.
CCDH continues to press the UK Government to recognise that police forces alone cannot solve this problem and to adopt the policy levers necessary to force social media companies to act.