Riots in the UK make a case for social media supervision

The role of X in disseminating often-false information and lionizing rabble-rousers, as well as X owner Elon Musk’s provocative tweets and irresponsible retweets, are all under the microscope. This week, Thierry Breton, a high-ranked European Union commissioner, issued a strong warning to X over “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence”. 

Musk’s fan-boy interview with Donald Trump this week as well as his retweets of the inflammatory messages of the far-right’s Tommy Robinson will only cement the view that X is all too frequently a megaphone for extremists. 

Breton’s letter to X reminded Musk of X’s “due diligence obligations” under the EU’s digital services laws intended to police hate speech. X hit back saying that the EU was overreaching as the interview pertains to US politics. This is true enough, but it was clear that heightened EU concern about X is because of riots in the UK. 

These were triggered after fake news spread on social media that the man who stabbed and killed three young girls at a dance class in Southport in the north of England was a Muslim immigrant, even though the alleged attacker was born in the UK and is of Rwandan origin. Robinson, tweeting from Cyprus, sought to use the incident to spread ill-will towards Muslims, and in turn mosques were attacked.

At a time like this, it might seem easy to conclude that the UK has not conquered the demons of racism that were omnipresent in the late 1950s and 1960s in response to waves of immigration at the time from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent. 

British member of parliament Enoch Powell, who fiercely opposed a Race Relations Act to outlaw discrimination, notoriously warned of “rivers of blood” in response to immigration. The opposite has turned out to be true. The UK is more productive, more colourful and has superb food today because it has successfully absorbed and assimilated so many immigrants. 

The Economist in March quoted research that showed that schoolchildren whose first language at home is not English do about as well as children born in the UK who are native speakers of English. 

A standardized educational test conducted in many developed world countries showed that “in many European countries the children of immigrants score far worse than natives… in Britain, immigrants’ children are a shade behind in reading and a shade ahead in maths,” The Economist reported. 

More than three quarters of the children of immigrants expect to go to university; for the native born population, the percentage is 62%. Part of the explanation is surely that among recent immigrants, the UK, like the US, is cherry picking well-qualified ones. 

Even so, these statistics say a lot about successful integration. Indians cornered as many as 163,500 visas to work in the UK in 2023 and Zimbabweans 46,200. Poles, who used to have easy access to the UK before Brexit, had dropped to less than 2,000.

This weekend, I happened to be reading British writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s memoir of family food and the experience of being forced out of Uganda in the 1970s and settling in the UK. One of her anecdotes involves her mother being told by a London bus conductor that she should get off the bus because she smelled like a “currypot.” 

I was shocked at many levels, but also because such a thing could never happen in London today and was so far removed from the welcoming London I encountered in the 2000s. Before I returned to India, I spent almost three decades overseas. No place I worked and lived in was as profoundly diverse as London and celebrated its immigrants quite as thoughtfully. 

This ranged from trivial courtesies—my decision to wear a bandhgala jacket to work as often as I wore a suit was routinely complimented—to profound actions such as a commemoration for victims of the tsunami in 2004 that included flower petals representing each country affected by the calamity in Asia and Africa.

The far-right riots may have grabbed headlines, but in fact it was the peace rallies in Belfast and elsewhere that were far more numerous, with people marching this past weekend calling for tolerance and condemning racism. 

Opinion polls show that the vast majority in the UK condemn such violence and those fanning its flames. The majority of those arrested who appeared in court, meanwhile, had past records of violent attacks and football hooliganism.

For these reasons, I remain optimistic that the UK will get past these terrible weeks with its commitment to multiculturalism intact. X and other social media, however, if they fan incitement to violence, must face legislation and court prosecutions. 

A former Twitter executive, writing in the Guardian, recently called for an arrest warrant to be issued against Musk if “he keeps stirring unrest.” Musk drew criticism for his appalling comment on X that in the UK “civil war is inevitable.” 

In a telling comment in his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote, “He thought of it as a technology company when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.” 

Given this reality, more governments would be wise to police and on occasion prosecute X and other social media platforms on issues of hate speech. Perhaps the UK and the EU should lead the way.