Southport attack: Did social media fan the flames of riot?

Many of these accounts have purchased blue ticks, which means their posts feature more prominently on others’ feeds. They are based all around the world too, with several right-leaning American profiles boasting hundreds of thousands of followers becoming very involved.

They reshared variations of the false claims, using them to push anti-immigration views and ideas. That was in turn met by backlash denouncing the speculation – which also racked millions of views, but proportionally less than the original claims.

Because the issue was picking up so much engagement, it was promoted further by X’s algorithm, so that my own feed and those of several others who reached out to me were dominated with these posts as soon as they logged on to their X accounts.

Some of the false claims seemed to originate not from these prominent political commentators or known conspiracy accounts though, but from anonymous profiles and pseudo-news accounts.

Among the first accounts to share the false name, for example, was Channel 3 Now, which purports to be a legitimate news outlet, but whose origins are very unclear. The social media profiles belonging to the channel suggest it is based in the US or Pakistan, with little information about who actually works for the site.

The site has since issued a “sincere apology and correction” following their article and posts, which says “we deeply regret any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused” and admitted their content was “not accurate”. They have not replied directly to the BBC’s questions.

Other profiles – not using real names or images – copy-and-pasted the fake name to their own timelines across different, separate accounts to share the claim more widely.

Some of these profiles seemed to belong to real users based in the UK, but others sharing this had the hallmarks of inauthentic accounts. These accounts can be automated or run by groups aiming to manipulate the online debate, and have a track record of posting only divisive content about issues like immigration.