The Aftermath of the 2024 UK Riots: Reporting on Social Media, Misinformation, and Crime

On 30th July 2024, the UK saw its worst riots in over a decade following a knife attack in Southport that left three girls dead and ten injured. False claims about the attacker being a Muslim asylum seeker spread rapidly online, turning vigils into violence as far-right groups used X, TikTok and Telegram to coordinate attacks on mosques, asylum centres and local businesses. Many of the rioters received prison sentences for arson and racially aggravated offences. Information disorder played a central role in the 2024 riots, both triggering unrest and intensifying violence through the rapid dissemination of false narratives. Disinformation acted as the initial spark, later transforming into misinformation as unaware individuals reshared it. Social media sites such as Telegram involved the sharing of extremist material that merged transnational and domestic narratives. Global disinformation and local grievances became intertwined, merging foreign interference with home-grown mobilisation. As the riots took place there was evidence an online-offline feedback loop which resulted in prosecutions that relied heavily on digital evidence. This paper examines a corpus of newspaper reports on the issue of social media, disinformation, and crime in the ensuing two-year period since the riots. The news media sources were derived from a search using LexisNexis, a web-based archive of news titles in the UK. This is involved a selective search of news from the range of broadsheet and tabloid titles across the political spectrum. The key search terms were ?Stockport?, ?riots? ?social media?, ?misinformation?, ?disinformation? and ?police?. A discourse analytic approach was applied to the reports that reveal the different political stances taken on the issue of social media, misinformation, and crime. These are bound up with rhetorical constructions concerning the release of police information on the identities of alleged offenders, the control of social media, and social and political divisions in the UK.