Simmering Narratives and Southport Nonsensemakers
Why epistemic embarrassment alone will not derail the Polarisation Express
A year short of a week has passed since the triple murder of young children in Southport, England. In the days that followed, grief was eclipsed by fury, fuelled and directed by a surge of misinformation that ripped through and across social media platforms, exploiting an unavoidable information void and long-creeping weeds of wrath, including many planted from abroad.
False claims about the identity and history of the murderer, their spread facilitated by confluences of tech and incentive design decisions, instigated and focused rioting across the realm, leaving behind a trail of material and social damage, especially to Muslims, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority immigrants. Drawing from my open-source intelligence investigations, I earlier wrote up a tactical forensic analysis of how this phenomenon unfolded here:
That was not to be the end of it, though. In the months following the attack and the ensuing riots, and even after the initial waves of misinformation were thoroughly debunked and dissected by government and fact checkers, a steady stream of new rumours, conspiracy theories, and allegations of official cover-ups has kept the misinformation mindset on simmer. It seems an eruption of anger and distrust of such intensity can’t be left unexploited.
Thug Life
Indeed, hardly a week had passed before the first attempt was made to farm copium poppies upon the manure heap that remained of the xenophobes’ credibility. It began with a classic conflation manoeuvre: presentation of the Prime Minister’s characterisation of the rioting as “far-right thuggery” into characterisation of anyone on the right as thugs, much as some dishonest types have long read “manhood is being tarred as toxic” into any mention of “toxic masculinity”.
From there, a Spartacus-type hashtag meme was launched in “#FarRightThugsUnite”, aiming to get right-wingers to make it trend. Like the misinformation that spread on the day of the attack, this too gained viral traction same-day. While there was no shortage of actual right-wingers only too happy to participate in this mass deception, instances of inauthentic conduct were detected in this event too, including the use of scrub accounts and genAI images.
Axel Spin
Things were mostly quiet on the Southport front for a couple of months, until the end of October—that’s when two additional charges were raised against the murderer, Axel Rudakubana, regarding his production of a biological toxin, and his possession of a manual “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.
This resulted in two oft-merging strains of ruckus-raising. One was of attempting to make Rudakubana’s crime out to be an act of terrorism, based on the toxin production and manual possession charges. However, the perpetrator profile lacks a critical qualifying factor for a terrorism charge: a political motivation specific to the crime. All indications are that Rudakubana was obsessed with violence in general, and did not hold any particular ideology.
This also ensured that he slipped through Prevent’s net each of the three times he was referred, as revealed in January. A change in the process and criteria for counter-extremism programmes might be necessary to detect and neutralise threats from potential Mixed/Unclear/Unstable or MUU-category violence perpetrators in future. But the fact remains that a stabbing doesn’t become “terrorism” unless it is driven by some ideological motivation, or we’d be up to our eyeballs in “terrorism” by a wider definition.
Taqiyya Takes
Perhaps a qualifying ideological motivation could be found in the other strain: attempting to make Axel Rudakubana out to be a jihadist (based on the manual possession charge). After all, the manual was called “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual”. A smoking gun?
Well, not exactly. First of all, the “manual” is accessible openly and for free at a .GOV website run by the US Government Publishing Office (just don’t download it, I guess?), embedded in an American counterterrorism report, heavily interspersed with editorial commentary, and available to download at a click. Anyone looking for violent material, as he did, would come across it, as it can easily be found with a simple online search.
Simple online searches were also what likely led him to material about Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and the Irish Republican Army—in all of which he found objects of obsession, and none of which were/are jihadist. This is also consistent with his broader violence obsession, and with Prevent’s judgement of him as non-ideological—and therefore non-jihadist. Given some of the false positives in a number of past referrals to Prevent involving Muslims, it’s highly improbable that such a judgement would have been made lightly, and especially thrice for the same person.
That, however, hasn’t stopped some people from dropping unaccountable hearsay in support of this yet-unsubstantiated claim.
Downstairs Neighbor
The jihadist/Muslim claim acquired new legs in November, as allegation of Axel Rudkubana actually being an observant Muslim appeared on the socials.
All of these social posts cite or quote citations of the testimony of one man who claimed observation of this observance while imprisoned at the same facility. It must be noted that the imprisonment was specifically for violation of injunctions related to a libel case he lost. Additionally, the claim of Axel Rudakubana “attending mosque” had to be walked back in December, to him engaging in “activity” in “a multi-faith prayer room”.
In the real world, Axel Rudakubana was raised in a very observant *Christian* family, becoming an actual “choir boy” at one point. Sure, it’s possible that he converted to some militant strain of Islam at some point before the attack without anyone noticing, despite having been catechised six ways to Sunday (which the Dominionists assure us is the panacea for all social ills). However, given that no actual evidence supporting that has been forthcoming (apart from the aforementioned X-pert testimony of unnamed Reform candidates and pseudonamed libel case losers), and given that everyone who actually has something to lose by being proven wrong has been suspiciously silent on this ostensible bombshell since, I’m not inclined to credulity.
Pop Case
But the real straw-grasping happened with the spread of two sets of claims in late January about the Rudakubana family.
One tried to implicate his parents as liable for their son’s violence. This line of attack threw together an incoherent cocktail of hindsight bias as to their prescience, along with claiming that their having been “linked to genocide” (as the ethnic minority Tutsi target population thereof) somehow made their kid want to kill random little girls in England.
Per this reasoning, we should be deporting anyone for having a violent child and/or should have canned the Kindertransport during World War II.
The other line of attack had its origins in JAQ insinuations emerging in late November, singling out and attempting to paint Axel Rudakubana’s father as a perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide, and from there to a human rights legal representation by one (drumroll …) Keir Starmer.
This was apparently based on some 2003 legal document someone trawled up, related to a case for asylum seekers from multiple countries, with Starmer’s name on the front. Indeed, examination of the document does reveal that one of these asylum seekers (subject 3 in section 30) was a Rwandan national. And female. And 42 years old then. And of Hutu ethnicity. The smear was so far out of the ballpark that even infamous tabloid The Daily Mail had to come out and debunk it.
This didn’t stop the claim from erupting once again in late January, with much more confident assertion that Alphonse Rudakubana was a “warlord” who was “linked to” or “involved in” genocide, saved from extradition to Rwanda by Starmer’s lawyering. It bears mentioning that Alphonse was a soldier in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, which (successfully) fought to end the genocide—he was “involved” in it in the same way as the Maquis were “involved” in the Holocaust. Needless to say, he was not in any danger of extradition, or in need of asylum.
But this misinformation surfaced and resurfaced anyway, because it provided a convenient master explanation for why the riots were firmly suppressed, why various rumoured claims about the murders and the murderer were being “covered up”, and even why the Tories’ Rwanda asylum seeker deportation deal was dropped.
Operation Dampsquib
On the topic of conspiracies, there have also been frequent eruptions of attempts to shift blame for the violence away from the violent by blaming it on infiltrators and provocateurs, J6-style. One particularly desperate one was pushed by a now-suspended account with a post-egg “Twitter egg” avatar in late January, ambitiously branding the supposedly explosive discovery as “Operation Firestarter”, and tagging everyone and their grandma to try to get it trending. With gratuitous use of highlight edits, slow-motion stretching, and hi-drama soundtrack, it posited that one of the rioters at the Southport Mosque was an agitator planted by the police, evidenced by him making it past the police line. Note the direct reference to J6.
It ended up getting a good deal of replay thanks to a few B-listers, making the rounds among users straddling both the offering of apologetics for rioting and the blaming of it on shady outside agitators.
Of course, anyone who examines the full original source video after the point that the alleged agent provocateur evidence clip cuts can see that the man who breaks past the police line during a mass bum rush thereof escapes notice for all of 20 seconds, before one of the reinforcement officers grabs him and hauls him back across the police line.
Vibe Farming
All of these unsubstantiated, demonstrably false, and outright incoherent claims emerged because it is the standard strategy of this ecosystem: throw everything until something sticks (in impression, if not in expression); beate ye olde retreate to motte when bailey framing is challenged; pull a “well, we were kinda sorta right if you squint” move by decontextualising or omitting select facts; and trust that the target audience will either not encounter fact checks soon enough, or will have otherwise been primed to dismiss them. Cognitive biases—conservatism bias in particular—are exploited to ensure that an impression of “directional truth” or “vibe veracity” persists in their favour even when individual falsehoods are exposed as indisputably false.
For all the ominous pre-trial hand-waving about a grand “cover-up”, I have yet to see any of the hand-wavers specify post-trial what exactly was covered up that they had correctly stated to begin with, or even supports their narratives (except when it was naked racism, that is). It’s something of a let-down when someone keeps asking, “what do they know?”, and it turns out that what “they” knew was a nothingburger.
To the extent that anything was a “cover-up”, and in a very broad sense of the term, it was only information contradictory to the disinformers’ riot-targeting claims, and for entirely procedural reasons related to information not having been ascertained immediately, the minority age of the attacker, and standard pre-trial prejudice mitigation protocol.
That was not the first or the last time an information void was exploited—the very same type of misinformation was spread by some of the very same type of actors immediately following recent (thankfully, non-fatal) church fires in Wales and Northern Ireland, as I described here.
Although even when details are released to preempt misinformation (Merseyside Police can’t catch a break, it seems), the usual suspects show themselves to be at least not entirely deterred from attempting to call “cover-up” regardless, if the published facts are inconvenient to the narrative.
Unfortunately, it’s a strategy that works: some of the misconception surrounding the incident seems to have actually increased between the time shortly following the attack and around the time of the trial.
See, the narrative engineers have been hard at work this past year, attempting to resculpt this affair into their version of what January 6th was to their US counterparts, complete with perpetrator apologetics, false flag and agent provocateur conspiracism, “two-tier” tactical riot response accusations, and continued distrust-sowing with sundry other “cover-up” allegations. They will likely continue to do so until a similar outcome has been achieved in the UK. The platforms who stand to benefit from such an outcome, as they have in the US lately, will continue to deny, obstruct, or shirk obligations of transparency, accountability, and interoperability. And, as it was starting the very next day, blame for information disorder will be redirected at those drawing attention to and attempting to mitigate it.
Red Alert
This situation calls for a nationally—if not internationally—coordinated and locally networked information battle station operating at tactical and strategic levels, involved in:
Active monitoring of sources and spreaders: we need to catch patterns of and address emerging information threats before they spread further, especially in known ecosystems of misinformation spread.
Tracing, mapping, and archiving of information transmission: this is needed within and among platforms, especially ones lacking native archiving and outlinking, and ones with ephemeral-by-design hosting.
Investigation of content generation and amplification for signs of inauthenticity: this would include identification of astroturfing and grift operations and operators, and would be implemented neutral to the content itself.
Provision of platforms for sensemaking at different geographic levels: in this way, neighbouring locations can preempt getting dragged into misinformation surrounding emerging events nearby, especially during information voids.
Assembly, hosting, and serving of citable, change-archived information on current events vulnerable to information threats—including of unknown/classified information, along with reasons, sources, and timelines for discovery/revelation.
Assembly, hosting, and serving of citable, change-archived evidence for response to emerging information threats: these can be propagated downstream through location-/topic-specialised channels and interest subscription feeds for early access and response by authorities, media, and volunteer users at all geographic levels.
Use of academic and other institutional research to develop effective strategies to detect and deal with information threats, conscious of potential for future dishonest framing
Work with academic researchers and open-source intelligence investigators on listening and data storage/service infrastructure to accumulate and serve real-time data and historical data of use to them: them having to depend on third-party scrapers and archives, or on building their own, especially with all the opacity and obstacles tech platforms throw their way, leads to critical delays, inefficiencies, and data gaps.
Long among my leading causes in this field, legal changes are needed to compel tech providers to supply the data needed for effective monitoring and investigation—in full, in real time, and driven by the needs of researchers/investigators—complemented with government archiving and access as critical information hygiene infrastructure. This, too, is more likely to happen with international solidarity. And none of this violates anyone’s freedom of expression.
Additionally necessary is training of authorities and media in tactically dealing both with current-event information voids, and with longer-term follow-through vibe-farming campaigns, in a way that leaves as little room as possible for dishonest reframing of their efforts. Models and prototypes have already been initiated (I’m working with one), and I’m hoping more attention and resources are put into these, so that the sensemakers can hold the line against the nonsensemakers.