CNN
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Last week’s widespread anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom, and the viral falsehoods that fueled them, are perhaps the clearest and most direct example yet of how unchecked misinformation on social media can lead to real-world violence and harm.
Even after authorities identified a British national as the suspect behind a series of fatal knife attacks on children, false claims about the attacker’s name and origins continued to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and spark far-right demonstrations.
The false claims were widespread, especially on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, extremism researchers said. And police have openly blamed this misinformation for the violence that has rocked the country in recent days. Rioters threw bricks at mosques, set cars on fire and chanted anti-Islam slogans while clashing with police in riot gear.
The events of the past week are far from the only example of the connection between online disinformation and politically motivated violence: from the Rohingya genocide to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, false and misleading claims have consistently been at the center of spectacular political unrest and violence.
This pattern continues to repeat itself, despite years of governments and civil society groups calling on social media to curb inflammatory and hateful posts, and despite companies themselves promising to do more.
However, the recent suspension of content moderation by some major platforms suggests that the problem of violence fueled by misinformation may get worse before it improves.
For nearly a decade, governments and civil rights groups have increasingly argued that online platforms have imposed enormous social costs.
Social media critics have repeatedly accused the industry of putting corporate profits above users’ mental health or opening the door to foreign interference without doing enough to protect the world from those risks.
An economist would call these negative externalities – like pollution – byproducts of a profit-driven enterprise. If they are not addressed, everyone else must either learn to live with them or mitigate them, usually at high collective cost. The consequences tend to show up over long periods of time and with large-scale, systemic impacts.
This week, it is hard to avoid asking whether politically motivated violence based on nothing more than malicious, evidence-free speculation has become a regular part of social media’s many externalities, and whether we are being asked to put up with it because we must live in a digitally connected world.
Many social media companies have invested heavily in content moderation over the years, but the industry’s recent track record suggests the public may be willing to tolerate a little more pollution after all.
There are some signs of resistance. In the European Union, officials want to hold social media companies accountable for spreading misinformation under the new Digital Services Act. In the UK, the Online Safety Act could come into force later this year and, among other things, require Social media platforms to remove illegal content.
And even As a result of the unrest, stricter rules could follow. “We will have to look more closely at social media after this unrest,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday in a video distributed to the media.
The United States lags behind in regulating platforms, partly due to the effectiveness of Congress and partly due to legal and constitutional differences that give online platforms more freedom to manage their own websites.
Still, some action was taken last month when the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act, which aims to combat psychological harm to teens caused by social media.
It may be tempting to dismiss the role of social media in the UK unrest as merely a reflection of latent political trends or the result of activism that would have taken place on other platforms anyway.
But that distracts from the calculation that some platforms seem to have made: At least sometimes, a certain amount of violence fueled by misinformation is a reasonable price for society to pay.
Olesya Dmitracova contributed to this article.
