Misinformation and online safety experts have praised Merseyside Police for swiftly sharing the details of the ethnicity and nationality of the man who has been arrested after a car ploughed into a crowd in central Liverpool.
On Monday evening the police force said they had arrested a “53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.”
While police forces do not usually publish this much detail about a suspect who has been arrested, it comes after rumours began to circulate about the man’s identity following the attack, which the force also quickly said was not being treated as a terrorist incident.
Liverpool’s mayor, Steve Rotheram, said the police had managed to “dampen down” the spread of misinformation by sharing such information rapidly.
“The police, with their messaging, were able to stem and to dampen down some of that wild speculation,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live, while acknowledging the existence of “nefarious groups that are only interested in stirring up hatred.”
Far-right misinformation and UK riots
The potential for hatred spreading will have been at the forefront of the force’s mind following the riots that engulfed England last summer, driven by rampant misinformation and disinformation in the wake of the Southport attack in July, in which a 17-year-old murdered three young girls.
Far-right activists, fake news websites and conspiracy theorists advanced falsehoods about the killer’s identity, with some circulating a fake name and falsely claiming that he was Muslim and an asylum seeker.
For legal reasons, the only details that Merseyside Police had initially released about the Southport suspect were that he was a Cardiff-born 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire.
The UK has strict contempt of court laws, which limit which details can be published about suspects in criminal cases before trial. Suspects are not named by the press until they have been charged and under-18s are usually not named at all.
A judge went on to allow the Southport killer, Axel Rudakubana, to be named, partly to correct the “misinformation” that had been spreading.
Dangerous potential of information voids
Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology in society at Cambridge University and an expert on information ecosystems, told Euronews that plugging information gaps is crucial to halting the spread of misinformation.
“Information voids are almost a gravitational force for conspiracy theorists. Whenever there’s an information void, people will fill in the gaps themselves and aided by the virality that you see on social media, that often turns into speculation, rumour, unverified theories, and sometimes harmful misinformation,” he said, adding that this had been the case with last year’s riots, though he noted that the suspect’s age had been a “complicating factor” in that case.
Van der Linden has been in talks with police forces about the dangers of information voids.
“I’ve been talking about how important it is to try to pre-bunk, rather than debunk, and pre-emptively release details, when they can, to make sure these kinds of rumours and speculations don’t have time to accumulate.”
“In this case, it’s good – they quickly released the information … There’s an opportunity for bad actors to exploit the information void with ideologically motivated rumours that then get traction and go viral on social media and turn into offline violence.”
But he noted that it would not be possible to always release such details and recommended that police are transparent about this.
Rapidly evolving information environments
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, also welcomed Merseyside Police’s intervention.
He told Euronews: “The police are having to react to a rapidly evolving information environment. Given what happened in Southport, it’s sensible, proportionate and welcome, that they’re trying things to ensure that disinformation is spiked before it can go viral.”
“That said, what they can’t do is deal with the source of the problem – platforms’ refusal to deal with disinformation on a systemic level.”
He noted that the platforms had increasingly slashed safety features and moderation.
“Things have been getting worse for the last couple of years. We see platforms rolling back safety features, bad actors becoming more sophisticated, frequency of events. Part of the problem is we now have a much more complicated and unpredictable threat environment, in part caused by the way in which social media has become an incredibly dynamic breeding ground for new conspiracy theories, malignant ideologies and the mobilisation of people for violence.”
Ahmed said that while police had responded to “rapid speculation” about the ethnicity of the attacker in this case, he did not see it as setting a precedent.
“I think it’s an experiment, not a precedent. I expect to see police using different tools as the situation demands. Given that they did see rapid speculation about the ethnicity of the attacker, it makes complete sense – you don’t need hard and fast rules when it comes to dealing with dynamic and unpredictable situations.”
“[The conspiracy theories] that go viral are not in the hands of the police, they’re in the hands of platforms and their algorithms. They need to have a range of tools available that they can deploy depending on the situation.”
