At least 47 people were arrested in an operation to “deter further disorder” in Leicester, England, as the city dealt with unrest amid tensions involving mainly young men of Muslim and Hindu communities.
It was reported that the unrest started after a Pakistan vs India cricket match after which news reports of kidnapping of a Muslim girl by Hindu groups emerged online.
The unrest continued for weeks. Most of the fake tweets fueling the violence came from India, reports Reuters.
“It is a powerful illustration of how hashtag dynamics on Twitter can use dubious inflammatory claims to … escalate tensions on the ground,” said a spokesperson at fact-checking site Logically, which analysed the posts’ veracity.
Experts say most of the incendiary tweets, rumours and lies came from India, showing the power of unchecked social media to spread disinformation and stir unrest a full continent away.
“I’ve seen quite a selection of the social media stuff which is very, very, very distorting now and some of it just completely lying about what had been happening between different communities,” Peter Soulsby, Leicester’s mayor, told BBC radio.
Rob Nixon, who runs Leicestershire Police, concurred, telling the BBC that misinformation on social media had played a “huge role” in last month’s unrest.
To counter some of these claims, police took to social media themselves, saying they had fully investigated reports of three men approaching a teenaged girl in an attempted kidnapping, and found no truth whatsoever to the online story.
“We urge you to only share information on social media you know to be true,” they said.
Many of the misleading posts alleging that Hindus and Hindu sites were being attacked came from India, analysis showed.
Some 80% of tweets with geographic coordinates, or geo-tagged information, were connected to India, Logically said.
“The ratio of tweets geo-tagged to the UK versus those geo-tagged to India was remarkably high for what, ostensibly, was a domestic incident,” a spokesperson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“The involvement of high-profile figures in India setting the discourse was a key element.”
“The events in Leicester did not happen out of the blue,” said Keval Bharadia at the South Asia Solidarity Group, a British community non-profit.
