Internet shitposters are out of the tree - and inside Westminster

DURING the grimmest period of Covid I took a call from my then news editor asking me to investigate reports that the local ice rink was to be used as an emergency morgue.

The claim was one of many circulating during a time that was, much as now, rife with anxiety and fast-spreading rumours.

As it turns out the ice rink story was entirely untrue, although I was able to confirm contingency planners had indeed earmarked a hangar at Birmingham Airport for a similar purpose. 

During the often chaotic weeks and months that came after I also had to investigate reports of army helicopters conducting flights over the borough, plans to bring the area into local lockdown and care workers without PPE using bin liners for protection.

Some claims were true, others were partly factual but perhaps exaggerated or distorted and some proved entirely bogus.

The job of any responsible reporter when alerted to a whisper on Twitter or an anonymous email is to establish quickly whether there's anything to it.

This process depends heavily on fact-checking, going to official bodies for comment and knowing which sources can be relied on.

A local councillor you know well and is likely receiving direct briefings from the NHS and council bosses is far more trustworthy than some random observer on social media who is perhaps reporting a theory from a local WhatsApp group as fact.

Whatever the flaws of local reporting, "standing up" a story is one of the first things drummed into any trainee journalist.

"Does it have legs?" my first editor would ask during our deadline day meeting on the stories of the week. To put it more plainly is what we have been told true, half-true or utter bollocks?

The dangers of failing to verify something are self-evident, if a claim is about an individual you could be destroying a reputation, if it is about a community you could cause division. In other instances giving credence to a false narrative could cause undue fear or panic. Avoiding this is one of the most obvious responsibilities for anyone with a platform to reach very many people.

I don't want to claim that the traditional media always gets it right; the 24 hour news cycle has added pressure to get stories out first and harvest more of the much-desired clicks. During BBC training a few years ago I remember some colleagues rather startled by the threshold the corporation set for publishing an article on a local chemical spillage. The common consensus, rather sadly, was that web teams in rather less rigorous newsrooms would have the live blog up-and-running at the first sniff of a story.

This rush can lead to embarrassing lapses of judgement. It was excruciating to watch a raft of both local and national outlets publish a story a few years ago about a supposed comeback for Woolworths. The source for the story turned out to be a single, recently opened Twitter account with more typos than followers.

A sixth-form media project on misinformation had inadvertently hooked some of the country's most popular news sites. A salutary lesson on how journalists under pressure to drive traffic can be pushed into putting out content which fails the basics - a handful of calls and the story would have fallen to pieces. Instead by midday published pieces were being rapidly pulled from websites and corrections being issued.

If this was a case of the professionals failing to follow proper process, it is worth remembering that in terms of social media there is no process. The amount of utter bilge quoted on community Facebook pages, as if the facts had been carried down from Mount Ararat itself, is alarming.

On one occasion the council I covered was inundated with angry calls from bereaved families after an entirely misleading report that tributes left at plots were to be stripped away. My suspicions were first raised when it was suggested the decision would be rubber-stamped by MPs, betraying a rather limited understanding of local government. 

In another instance of knee-jerk nonsense, a local salesman branded a "danger to children" after a passer-by spotted him talking to a youngster. If the wheels of justice once moved slowly, online they turn as if Lewis Hamilton himself was at the wheel. And plenty get run over in the process...

That old, apocryphal story about the local paediatrician receiving unwelcome attention from a group of concerned citizens is not actually that far removed from the very real risks of misinformation and misunderstandings of this nature.

On another occasion during the pandemic a next-gen mobile phone mast on a local council estate was burned to the ground amid a frenzy of speculation the 5G towers were the cause of Covid-19. When workmen were sent to repair the structure they were repeatedly abused by those taken in by the same conclusion of amateur epidemiologists. 

With police being attacked and injured and asylum centres being torched these local examples now feel like an early warning about the real-world consequences of social media shitposting utterly disconnected from reality.

But if delusions are dangerous we should not forget the role that often senior public figures have in promoting them. As the unforgivable violence of the past week has proven, it's not just anonymous accounts operating out of Moscow that should be held up to scrutiny.

Media commentators, influencers and even sitting MPs have helped fuel the falsehoods that sparked the disorder.

Step forward Reform UK's Nigel Farage who was all too quick last week to suggest that police were keeping the truth about the Stockport murder suspect from the public. This was undoubtedly giving oxygen to entirely baseless claims from far-right figures that the teenager concerned was a Muslim and/or had arrived on a small boat.

Farage himself noted claims - also since debunked - that the accused had been on some sort of MI5 watch-list. While he would argue he was only raising the possibility, to many of the millions watching an online video on the subject of unanswered questions it was clear which version of the truth the MP was more inclined to believe.

When later challenged about this, he quickly defended his intervention noting that the concerns he had raised had been circulated by alleged human trafficker and culture warrior Andrew Tate. 

If Farage - who lest we forget still earns a lucrative sum for his reporting on GB News - had the slightest understanding of (or regard for) media best practice, he may have stopped to consider if a bloke with an obvious axe to grind who doesn't even live in this country was likely to have the inside track on police intelligence in Merseyside.

He may also have considered that the delay in naming the suspect was not the"woke" cover-up implied but the simple fact that police forces identify no-one before charges are brought and UK law dating back almost a century does not allow the automatic naming of any alleged or convicted criminal under the age of 18. Whether to waive that ban is a matter for courts to decide, not ideologically-motivated backbenchers.

Some may defend Farage and his fellow travellers for the ill-advised but ultimately well-intentioned attempts to raise matters of genuine public concern. But this would be paying far too much respect to a man who has a long and disgraceful record of stoking divisions. He would have known full well the political capital to be made from hinting about the background of someone accused of one of the most heinous crimes in recent years.

Nor should we forget that this is an individual with a history of promoting conspiracy theories. After a Channel 4 report recently revealed appalling racist comments among Reform canvassers in Clacton, Farage promptly accused one of the nation's biggest broadcasters of hiring an actor to play the part of a noxious bigot in order to discredit his party. Again a claim without a single shred of evidence, with a formal complaint swiftly dismissed by Ofcom.

The problem of misinformation is very real but if we are to challenge it we need accountability. And that means confronting the uncomfortable truth that some of the biggest peddlers of lies occupy senior positions, have huge online followings and run media empires. More troubling still law-makers will need to acknowledge that some among their own number are the biggest culprits of all.