Within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings in Southport, a seaside town in northwest England, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.
None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.
The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.
One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.
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The problem is that elected officials are using the unelected tsar’s social media to share official announcements and engage in public debate.
Elected officials, journalists, activists, it’s gradually becoming clear that everyone who uses centralised social media is part of the problem. Promoting the fediverse and keeping it resistant to takeover by fascists or anyone else ought to be a national security goal.
I’d have to agree. An official Mastodon instance for announcements, and then just echo posts wherever desired.
Could go further, have public libraries get funding to run public instances or similar, but I think you are already seeing non-profits and maybe some co-ops formed to run Fediverse instances, so the need is less.