farri right edl founder Tommy Robinson look what we've achieved in six months we've gone from through the roof thanks to Elon Musk conspiracy theorist Alex Jones it's exactly what the CIA wants and it's just it's it's a disaster a misogynist influencer Andrew Tate all have at least one thing in common reinstated by X or Twitter after Free Speech absolutist Elon Musk took ownership they've gathered more followers than ever before in Robinson's case dubling the violent riots after the Southport attack were fueled say the multiple police forces confronting them by misinformation false claims about the suspect's
identity giving way to Violent attacks on mosques on minorities on hotels housing Asylum Seekers with social media companies under Fire over the hate that spilled from their platforms and onto the street we along with a digital media expert from Northwestern University have taken a forensic look at how inflammatory misinformation thrived in the aftermath of the Southport attack for example a small account that's since been locked makes a claim about an unrelated crime it says a Somali couple have been arrested in connection with the murder of a woman called Anita Rose in the following days as
the riot spread and Far Right content rips across the internet this claim was then Amplified exponentially by an account called Europe Invasion saying they were Somali immigrants that gets more than 5 million views when suffk police intervene via a local newspaper saying this is dangerous misinformation that's seen by just a few thousand Daniel trilling is a far-right expert and says promoting misinformation and conspiracy is part of the business model of many platforms you know these are money-making machines or at least our owners would like them to be money-making machines and they Thrive off what's usually
called engagement uh and very often the lowest common denominator is for people to just post stuff that is obviously wrong or inflammatory or upsets people because that gets a lot of replies that's then rewarded by um often rewarded by the algorithms but with Twitter there's something kind of extra going on which is the way the changes that musk has made to the platform since he took it over have both added sort of extra dimensions of monetization and downgraded the the controls regulation that are there to regulate hate speech and misinformation and so on so you've
been studying the far right for 15 years how have you seen them change in the way they operate so the big change in recent years is that individual far right influencers have played much more of a significant role than S traditional formal political parties it's very difficult for farri right activists and people who do believe in that kind of stuff to to recruit people to their cause you know if they just go out to random members of public in the street and say you know would you want to join in join my group or so
on they'd get rejected 99% of the time um so what they're always looking for a ways to radicalize themes that are there in mainstream politics and find the points where people are susceptible to misinformation on August the 3D the day of violent riots in Stoke claims about two white men being stabbed by Muslim men circulated Tommy Robinson tweeted two posts with videos this one since deleted the clocked up nearly 3 million impressions that same day staffer police confirmed on X that this wasn't true there was no stabbing but even so this got a fraction of
the views I think there's now a big constituency of people who for various reasons have gathered around different types of conspiracy theories and misinformation uh you know people were bought into covid denialism covid conspiracy theories uh people have been very engaged by the rhetorical attacks on Asylum hotels or on Muslim communities in the last few years and then you've got these very prominent farri influencers and other kind of grifters and other kind of misinformation factories that are that are really sitting at top all of that and exploiting it and it's when all those things come
together you get this sort of explosion of lies and propaganda basically it was in the hours after the Southport Riot that saw more than 50 officers injured and a mosque surrounded and attacked that the term two tier K emerged at first getting a thousand or so views within a week week though it takes off exponentially is adopted by reform UK and when Elon Musk tweets it himself he gets nearly 4 million views within 8 hours bringing the total at that point cumulatively to 30 million are we going to end two-tier policing sir the Met commissioner
s Mar roelly has said officers have been put at risk by the he said serious voices amplifying accusations of police bias against white rioter so there's not two-tier policing we cannot say those kinds of comments are simply not relevant right now that is not correct it is not correct and while politicians across the Spectrum including the former Home Secretary pretty Patel dismiss it the term has taken hold the idea of tuer policing is not a new idea that's been around on the far right for a number of years related to the idea that migrants Muslim
communities different Faith or ethnic communities are un unduly favor in the legal system policing for example and that relates the idea that white people are perceived to be um the victims of some kind of replacement or some kind of cultural erosion that's not to say that everyone that shares that hashtag is necessarily understanding that what they're doing relates to an existing conspiracy theory but that is the impact it's having on communities and so you get this really difficult disconnect where we call it borderline content it's not specifically illegal it's not overtly hateful but we know
what it infers and the impact it has on communities and we find that in the 10 days after the Southport attack that hashtag was viewed over a 100 million times we contacted X as well as other accounts mentioned in this report with no response the EU has an ongoing case with X over measures to tackle disinformation and last night commissioner tiar Breton told musk in a letter that in the context of events in the UK he was compelled to remind him of his legal obligations musk's response this Tropic Thunder meme saying your own face musk's
response regardless a sign that those who accuse him of sacrificing truth or safety at the altar of Engagement in law or in letter might simply for now be wasting their paper immedia Jen with that special report while joining me now is Nina yankovitz she's the former executive director of the disinformation governance Board of the US Department of Homeland Security and now co-founder and CEO of the American sunlight project an organization tackling disinformation thank you very much for coming on the program thanks for your patience um so Elon Musk I would say um while creating all
this trouble on this side of the pond is would say I'm exercising My First Amendment rights of free speech and what's the difference between me expressing my far-right opinions you might call the moderate onx you know compared to Fox News for instance doing the same thing on TV well you know I think musk is right about that there's actually not much difference except his megaphone is much much larger and travels much farther uh than some Fox programs and also he's not subject it seems to the same rules that normal ex users are subject to a
couple of weeks ago before all of the horrible events in Southport we saw him sharing a deep fake video that claimed to be kamla Harris's new campaign ad but it was actually deep faked audio that he shared without any sort of notification to users about that that actually goes against the platform's terms of service in two ways but apparently when you're the owner of the platform you can do what you want which is extremely troubling and we know that when he amplifies claims of you know disinformation when he amplifies false uh rumors and things like
this that actually leads to offline violence in many cases and so we do need some regulatory mechanism that can push back on on his claims and keep him and his platform in line and is the really big difference here the size of his megaphone the that he's got what is it 145 million followers and X reaches Millions upon millions of people around the planet well I it's I think 194 now million followers and growing by the day but also he's empowered this uh extremely radicalized group of people on the platform I would say it's not
just the likes of Alex Jones and others that he's reinstated to the platform but the platform has materially changed since he took ownership of it as someone who uh has received her Fair share of online abuse and harassment myself those things aren't getting actioned as much and people who follow musk feel empowered to harass to threaten uh because they know there's not going to be a consequence for them so while Elon Musk might be able to share a silly Meme and make a joke that empowers the people who F uh who are his acolytes to
do much worse and then there's no consequence for that and that's where we get into this accelerationist uh situation that's really really troubling well he wasn't mening his words today or his tweets today he was telling the EU to basically F off what can anyone whether it's the EU or the US government should they want to or the UK government do about musk well you know I wouldn't hold your breath for the US government doing anything certainly not in the next couple of months we don't even have basic deep fake regulations on the books right
now which is kind of scary given the election that we're about to head into um you know I think the Online safety act in in the United Kingdom is a good start I think it needs to be constantly revamped and improved to uh reflect the new advances and technology that we're seeing and the ways that these platform owners are acting uh in Australia they've got an e safety commission that has actually gone head-to-head with musk several times um and they are able to impose fines on owners of platforms much like the Online safety act does
in order to get them to fall in line now I would encourage governments to make those enough that they actually matter to these multi-billion dollar corporations but can you envisage a world in which America does nothing about musk either because because Trump is president or because of the power of First Amendment Free Speech rights and then suddenly the UK fearing what he might do online will say we're going to have to ban people from using X in this country the way that they do in Iran you know or in North Korea well certainly that's not
something that I would condone and we have seen other governments flirting with that idea Russia namely uh has talked about banning platforms I think any democratic government would be very unwise to consider something like that but with the Online safety act with the digital Securities uh digital uh safety act in uh in the uh EU we've got a number of regulations on the table I think that can patch together to make a regulatory framework that will work in lie of the United States doing something but I I absolutely agree with the premise of the question
which is that the United States not acting to uh aim for transparency and oversight of these platforms that are headquartered in our country is a total dereliction of Duty and we need to step up and I hope to see the next Congress do that and very briefly do you think it's possible that we might see people just going off X as some labor MPS in this country suggested just boycotting it well I think we've seen a pretty big Exodus of American users and then of many UK journalists over the past several weeks since the uh
the incident um in Southport and I think that that is uh is understandable we're seeing them migrate to other platforms like threads and it'll be interesting to see if that holds the next several weeks Nina Yankovich thank you very much inde
