Southport riot: How a LinkedIn post helped spark unrest – BBC tracks its spread

The post implies that Mr Murray’s family were at the scene of the attack.

In fact, the BBC has been told that although they were in the neighbourhood, they had been turned away from the dance class because it was full.

Mr Murray’s post is one of the earliest examples of local testimony to incorrectly use the word “migrant”.

He later told us he was only posting the information he had been given.

What happened next demonstrates how an unsubstantiated claim can spread at speed, with no concern for whether it is true.

In the hours immediately after the stabbings, little information was released by Merseyside Police. It is normal for officers not to release information about a suspect under arrest – especially, as in this case, when they are under 18. Even in cases where the suspect has died, it can be many hours before they are named officially.

A short police statement was issued just after 13:00 to say that “armed police have detained a male and seized a knife”.

What followed was intense speculation – most of it on social media.

Mr Murray’s post was only seen by a few hundred people and it was later taken down. LinkedIn told us the post had been removed because it didn’t meet its policies on “harmful or false content”.

However, by then it had been copied and posted elsewhere and, within a few hours, had been viewed more than two million times on social media, according to BBC Verify analysis.

We found that on X, within an hour of the original post, a screenshot had been posted by an account calling for mass deportations. This would go on to have more than 130,000 views in total.

Next, at 16:23, an online news website based in India called Upuknews shared a retweet of Eddie Murray’s post, which it described as “confirmed”. This had more than half a million views.