Social Media Bans Won't Solve the Riots

(No matter how much it might make MPs feel better)

When Sir David Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamic State Sympathiser, the outcry from MPs and the political media landscape as a whole was to request a ‘David’s Law’ cracking down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity. Mark Francois took the time to declare how he would “drag Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey (then-CEO of then-Twitter) to the bar of the house, if necessary kicking and screaming so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions or rather their inactions that make them even richer than they already are”. This, in spite of the fact there is no evidence to this day that David Amess’ attacker was radicalised on either site.

In fact, the only social media network the attacker was known to have used was Telegram, and was a listener to the hate preacher Anjem Choudary. Choudary was legally banned from having social media accounts, and when the legal conditions of the ban expired – was banned within 10 days of joining Twitter and Facebook. The most charitable interpretation is Francois knows little about social media, and thinks it’s all just Twitter and Facebook. The less charitable interpretation is Francois wants to talk about the most high-profile people because it’s more sensational than the lesser-known CEO of Telegram. Additionally, Facebook and Twitter are quite compliant with governments, and so it’s easier to score “wins”, even if they do not make the public safer. Telegram and Signal however, are more privacy focused, and have threatened to withdraw services from countries that seek to break that privacy.

The response to the recent riots across the United Kingdom similarly miss the mark. Calls to restrict social media anonymity are removed from the reality that we know Tommy Robinson’s real name, and the current protestors are not wearing facemasks or hiding their identities at all. These individuals are open and upfront with what they are thinking and doing, and in the case of Rotherham, clearly motivated by issues that run deeper than the recent tragedy in Southport. In this clip from the BBC, we can see again that as a country we refuse to acknowledge that these issues are conflated in the minds of protestors because we feel they ought not to be conflated.

At the time of writing, it does not make sense to conflate the Southport attack with the events in Rotherham. The Southport attacker was the child of Rwandan immigrants, whereas the Rotherham offenders were Pakistani. The Southport attacker was a Christian, the Rotherham offenders were Muslim. This does not matter to protestors, regardless of ideology. Jacob Blake was reaching for a knife, yet this, and many other events similar to it, lead to protests with damages comparable to what we have seen in Rotherham. None of this justifies the damages or actions of any protestor, what it does do is highlight that protestors cannot be won over by explaining simply why they are wrong.

In which case, it may seem prudent to remove social media anonymity and to crack down on social media. If protestors cannot be talked out of their actions, then perhaps they can be prevented from co-ordinating by cracking down on the sites they use to co-ordinate? Not so. Firstly, the event that incited these protests, the Southport attack, was not caused by the attacker being on social media. The protests in response were people in the area coming together in response to that attack, social media would not have prevented them from protesting any more than it would have in a pre-internet era. As for removing internet anonymity, Tommy Robinson has promoted a number of protests on his Twitter account and is willing to do so with no consideration at all for anonymity.

One Guardian article put the blame on Telegram, Bitchute, Parler, and Gab. But this also mistakes how these services came to exist to begin with. Prior to the election of Trump, a number of figures who used these services were on mainstream platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. When they were removed after the focus on the ‘alt-right’ came with Hillary Clinton’s speech and Trump’s election, they shifted to these services to interact with their audiences. Social media censorship already created these ‘alternative information ecosystems’ to begin with, further action from the state would either need to be so severe as to make social media companies seriously reconsider their participation in the UK market, or ineffective.

Moreover, Telegram is free and open source software. Anyone can download and use the code. Equally, the seriously dedicated can set up their own websites. Nick Fuentes, for example, has his own website for livestreaming after being banned from YouTube and DLive. If people want to communicate, they can and will. If they need to make their own encrypted channels, they can watch any number of YouTube videos to do so. If they need to livestream to millions of people, they can use peer-to-peer communication to do so.

What both the death of Sir David Amess and the Southport attacks have in common is not technology, which is ubiquitous and therefore common in all cases, but extended and prolonged failings of the British state. In this case, it appears the individual was never referred to an anti-extremism unit. In the former case, the subject was referred to multiple anti-extremism organisations, and nothing was done. Both of these events could have been avoided had the British state both been more vigilant, and acted upon those it had found. The unwillingness to tackle extremism in one population directly feeds into the extremism of the others. In the case of the Manchester protests, where a white police officer kicked the head of a non-white suspect, Kier Starmer emphasised he shared their concerns. In the case of the Gaza protests where Nazi salutes were given, we saw little to no enforcement at all. Those rioting now are playing by the rules set for every other group. They saw an event in which members of their group were attacked by a member of another group, and took to the streets in anger.

The reason Kier Starmer and the Chief of the Met cannot deny the accusations of two-tier policing is because it is true. And as long as that basic reality is in place, no amount of social media bans are going to stop the violence.