THE majority of posts that stoked up violence and rioting in the wake of a stabbing attack in Belfast and the arrest of the man who killed Henry Nowak in Southampton came from accounts based overseas, new analysis shows.
The Guardian has found that 55% of accounts posting about the two incidents came from overseas.
Tensions were high after the man who killed 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was jailed in June. Nowak died after being handcuffed by police, who did not realise he had been stabbed, after being accused of racially-motivated assault on his killer Vickrum Digwa.
Later in the same week a man in his 40s sustained significant injuries to his face, neck and back after a stabbing attack in Belfast. A 30-year-old Sudanese man was arrested and charged following the attack.
The two events attracted widespread attention from the media, politicians and users online.
Using X/Twitter's location tag system -- which shows where accounts are based using a device's IP address and app store data -- the Guardian identified that of the 8672 accounts that had posted content relating to the two incidents, which also accumulated more than 1000 combined views, and the following disorder, just 45.3% were posting from the UK.
One in six (16.8%) were posting from the US, 4.5% from Ireland, with around a quarter coming from across Europe and the remainder from the rest of the world.
This was combined with findings that almost a third of the 43,000 posts analysed by the newspaper contained racist or anti-immigrant comments, with around one in 10 posts about the Belfast attack advocating for violence, including the use or creation of paramilitary or vigilante groups.
Violence erupted in the two cities in June following the two attacks with high-profile right-wing commentators including Elon Musk stoking the flames with posts and reposts calling for people to gather in different cities and various far-right slogans like "millions must go".
In one post, Musk reshared a user saying "white solidarity is the only way to survive" with the a supportive "100" emoji, indicating 100%.
He reshared a post from far-right agitator Tommy Robinson calling on people to gather in cities across the UK. This call resulted in riots in many cities, including Glasgow.
The findings have been analysed by Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who said posts on X/Twitter have become a "weapon of choice" for foreign actors attempting to stoke up division.
He said their goal appears to be to "to amplify local tragedies and crises, intensify racist narratives, and incite violence in communities they have never set foot in and to whom they have no real connection.”
Julia Ebner, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Oxford, said flashpoint episodes such as in Southampton and Belfast had become “strategic events” for far-right actors seeking to amplify and exploit them.
“They are using the UK as a negative example, smearing the UK to promote their own narratives of western civilisational decay or social collapse,” Ebner said. “But the other purpose is to influence UK politics, and European politics more widely,” using crisis moments to “promote a strong, strengthened far-right wave across the world”.
