Before the fires spread through the streets of Belfast, rumors and fury spread on social media. Footage of a horrific knife attack in North Belfast began circulating on Monday night (June 8). Platforms such as TikTok and X were flooded with comments about the identity of the author, a Sudanese man in his thirties who had been granted permission to stay in the UK. Far-right activists such as Tommy Robinson quickly seized on the attack to advance their anti-immigrant agendas. He called on supporters to protest in the streets against this “invasive attack”, providing a list of locations across the UK where protests would take place on Tuesday night. His X post was reinforced by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who called on citizens to protest “repeatedly and loudly” to change the government’s immigration policies. The leader of Restoring Britain, Rupert Lowe, went so far as to pledge that his party would support mass deportations and the return of the death penalty to prevent further atrocities committed by “barbarians”. Meanwhile, WhatsApp messages from anonymous accounts began circulating throughout the day, calling on men aged 18 and over in Northern Ireland to “prepare to fight or face arrest”.
Dozens of young people answered the call. Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable John Boucher urged members of the public not to be “fooled into violent disorder” by people online “inciting appalling behaviour”. But news that the suspect had been charged with attempted murder did little to quell tensions in parts of Belfast on Tuesday night. The PSNI reported that there were sporadic street protests across the region at the time mentioned in the list shared by Robinson, with several vehicles burnt in east and north Belfast. Later that evening, there were several reported incidents of racist violence in towns including Ballyclare and Portadown, with homes and businesses owned by black people being set on fire. More police officers are being deployed across Belfast last night, ahead of further protests and unrest.
We’ve seen this playbook before. In the past two years, far-right actors have often used online platforms to weaponize such horrific incidents as part of their anti-immigration campaigns. Most notably, far-right groups used online platforms to incite agitation during the Southport riots in August 2024, with online hate speech and disinformation becoming a defining characteristic of the riot. And Northern Ireland itself has seen previous examples of racist violence fueled by anti-immigration protests, such as in Ballymena last June after two Roma teenagers were accused of sexual assault. Businesses and homes were attacked in what the PSNI described as “racially motivated”, with people from minority ethnic backgrounds using to display union flags on their doors to avoid being targeted by rioters.
As with Southport, there was much debate over the extent to which online platforms had fueled this racist violence. Numerous false claims about migrants, including a rumor that they were given access to GP services before local residents, circulated on public Facebook pages run by loyalist groups such as the Protestant Coalition. Many of these can be traced back to far-right agitators who peddle racist conspiracy theories like “The Great Replacement” to mobilize support for their protests. And there is growing evidence that extremist groups such as the British National Socialist Movement are deliberately targeting loyalist communities with online messages that paint migrants as a threat to women and children and their way of life. There have even been signs of a developing cross-border infrastructure for anti-immigrant mobilization on the island of Ireland, with loyalists in the north and nationalist activists in the south promoting each other’s anti-immigrant protests online and offline. Both appear to be united by a perception that they have been left “back” while immigrants have been prioritized by their respective governments, even if there is little or no evidence to substantiate such claims.
Politicians and public figures must do much more than say “not in our name”. They must take some of the blame for creating a toxic discourse about immigration that makes asylum seekers and immigrants “other”. Misinformation and misinformation about immigration takes root in some communities, as politicians and commentators repeatedly tell them that asylum seekers are given priority access to already chronically underfunded public services. A constant refrain among politicians is that these are “legitimate concerns”, even when there is often very little evidence to support many of these claims. This mainstreaming of far-right views on immigration is reinforced by media coverage that often fails to check false claims about issues such as the benefits that asylum seekers are entitled to claim. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that immigration features so prominently in the issues of most concern to citizens.
Attention will now turn to how politicians should respond to the attack in Belfast and the violence of recent days. While online platforms can clearly do better at regulating inflammatory content, we need our public figures to fix the problem they helped create. What we need is a sober narrative on immigration that avoids hyperbole and stops blaming asylum seekers and refugees for social ills. We’ve seen this week how the debate will play out without one.
(Further reading: Violence in Belfast, Britain’s fury)
