this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Technology

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177
Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport, a small town in the UK, much worse (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
submitted 3 months ago by tardigrada@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Archived version

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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[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 8 points 3 months ago

It doesn't matter whether your feed is "tamed", though. This is a massive issue that extends well beyond the happy fantasy land you've created filled with rainbows and ponies. Even those who don't use mainstream social media at all are affected when it influences the real world.