Far right exploits Taylor Swift event stabbings with misinformation amid violent protests
The online torrent came after three girls were fatally stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed party and coincided with a night of racist street violence.
After three young girls were fatally stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event, a torrent of false claims from an online ecosystem of far-right extremists spread across the social media platform X, coinciding with a night of racist street violence spreading fear in an already-grieving English town.
A large group of far-right, mostly white men threw bottles and bricks at police officers and a mosque in the northwest town of Southport on Tuesday night. Twenty officers were injured and a police van was torched as the crowd chanted racist slogans against immigrants and Islam.
It is an unedifying pivot in a country that had been largely united in disbelief and sadness by the events of the day before. Rather than respectful mourning, the narrative was now centered on the hijacking of a vigil by extremists promoting a lie — that the attacker was an asylum-seeker, Muslim or both. It also risked puncturing the sense that Britain, which just weeks ago delivered the moderate center-left government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a colossal parliamentary landslide, had managed to evade the hard right and anti-immigrant turn taken by some countries on the continent.
Police arrested a 17-year-old on suspicion of murder and attempted murder. The suspect was born in the Welsh capital of Cardiff and had lived for years in a village near Southport itself, police said.
But there was much police did not say, owing partly to the suspect’s age, as well as strict media rules in Britain around arrests and prosecutions. Into this vacuum stepped a thriving trade of willful falsehoods — some of it from anonymous influencers but much of it from well-known public figures.
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