The riots that weren’t in response to a terror attack?
ParkedUpWithCoffee on
**The terrorism watchdog has called for more information to be made public in the event of mass casualty attacks or risk undermining trust in public institutions.**
*Jonathan Hall, KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned of an “information vacuum” after the Southport attack that led to riots across the country, and said that lessons needed to be learned.*
*One of the problems highlighted by the attack was the consequence of giving out so little information about what motivated the killings of three young girls.*
*Hall said: “I think we are at a point in time where trust in public institutions should not be taken for granted and when matters of high importance in the public mind happen that, as far as is possible, the police, the government and the media, should level with them.*
*“Those institutions will not continue to enjoy the trust that they have had to date if there is any general sense that things are being hidden and that is exactly what the conspiracy theorists and the grievance merchants depend upon.”*
*He said there was a “huge, huge interest” in the identity of the Southport attacker and the circumstances of the attack and people “quite reasonably wanted to know as much as possible about a massacre of children”.*
*There were people who “undoubtedly fed upon the information vacuum by circulating false stories and they appear to have incited and enraged and inspired people to those really bad attacks by the absence of information in circumstances where people were dying”.*
*Britain’s contempt of court laws mean that once a suspect has appeared in court very little information can be published in order not to “substantially” prejudice legal proceedings.*
*However, experts point out that more information has been divulged in the past before charges have been brought without prejudicing the prospect of a fair trial.*
*Hall, a practising barrister, said: “I would like to see really rigorous application of the need for transparency and only restrict information so far as it is really justified by the contempt of court rules.*
*“Judges are very experienced in directing juries to put any prejudicial information they may come across out of their minds and I think there is also a need for realism — there is a fade factor and there is bound to be a gap of time before the case comes to court.”*
*Hall said people were “inevitably going to worry” after any future attack and “it is unrealistic to expect people not to speculate in those circumstances”.*
*He added: “As long as social media companies provide a facility for user-generated content, there will be disinformation, because there is no way that you can, on the basis of the current model, monitor factual assertions in real time.*
*“The brutal reality is that at some stage in the future, there will be an attack by someone who is an asylum seeker or who came on a small boat.*
*“It is better to be as level and as straight as you can be because terrorism is about attacking institutions, and if institutions do not appear to be transparent, then they suffer.”*
*Earlier, Hall told a conference organised by the Counter Extremism Group, a think tank: “One of the problems and the consequences of the Southport attack was that there was an information gap, a vacuum, which was filled with false speculation.*
*“I personally think that more information could have been put out safely without comprising potential criminal proceedings.”*
*Lord Carlile of Berriew, who previously held the post, agreed: “I think we should get out more information if we possibly can. We have learned from these events that when somebody is arrested, and there was a potential issue like this arising, the police probably need to tell the media who has been arrested and what their background is.”*
*Three children were killed and eight others injured, along with two adults, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29.*
*The attack has not been classified as a terrorist incident but Merseyside police have not explained what they believe motivated the killings.*
*Serena Kennedy, chief constable of Merseyside Police, made a statement on the evening of the attacks, saying that they had arrested a 17-year-old male who was born in Cardiff, in an attempt to head off false speculation that he was a Muslim asylum seeker.*
*However, rumours continued to circulate on social media, which were seized on by the far right and led to an attack on a mosque in Southport and a hotel used to house asylum seekers in Rotherham as riots spread across the country.*
SlySquire on
The Government is in an information war against mis information. The only way to tackle it is to been seen to be as open and honest as possible as fast as possible. There is such little trust as it is at the moment.
We no longer wait to find out about something on the 10 O’clock news or read an update in a newspaper the following day. Even with that in the past you may have gotten more information than is received in the media at the moment with the reluctance to investigate in detail live police investigations and prosecutions through fear of prejudicing a potential trail.
Thetonn on
I think between the riots and the Letby case, a quite big underlying problem with criminal justice in the UK nowadays is that a massive number of people’s primary experience of the justice system is via television, which is often through American TV news and drama shows.
That creates a massive issue when they routinely send out their police chiefs on the day of a tragedy to share as much information as they have avaliable, when they have cameras and even livescreens of trials, and where the first amendment gives significant journalistic protections to the media in order to cover trials.
In contrast, the British approach with a lot of secrecy and restrictions can end up appearing like a grand evil conspiracy, because in those TV shows and most of the news stories where it comes up, that sort of thing is usually clear and obvious evidence of police misconduct or a cover-up from the American perspective.
antbaby_machetesquad on
He’s got a point. The old rules are simply unworkable in the modern information age with 24 hour news and a malevolent social media environment.
Whilst you’ll never be able to dissuade the conspiracy nuts with facts, it’s a simple reality that misinformation thrives then there’s no genuine information put out there, and misinformation now travels faster than ever.
Simply waiting to put out a statement in the morning papers isn’t a viable strategy anymore. Even saying something like ‘we don’t know everything- but here’s what we do know’ is better than their pathetic ‘we urge people not to speculate’ script.
StagnantMonk on
SIS will always have the numbers and probably agree to publish them. Home office :NO WAY I’m not having the country panic while I’m head of the department!
TheFergPunk on
Yeah this is something that inevitably needs to be done. In this case the restrictions that came about with the Southport case due to the perpetrators age need to be gone, they just don’t work in an age where social media is a thing.
The misinformation isn’t surprising to me. If you pay attention to tragedies like this, you’ll find that the far-right tends to take advantage of the information vacuum which presents itself shortly after a tragedy in order to push an agenda.
If you recall the Uvalde mass shooting that happened in the US, in the period of time after it before the identity of the perpetrator was known there were people pushing a lie that it was a Trans person (they even paraded a picture of an innocent trans person, blaming them for the crime). In the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, I recall various Facebook profiles being setup pretending to be that of the killer while trying to link them to things like Antifa, the Democrats and so on.
So the misinformation isn’t a new thing or surprising. What really made things worse here is that due to the restrictions in place due to the age of the perpetrator, that misinformation got to spread for much longer without correction. It reached more ears, and the fact that restrictions existed in the first place fed into the conspiracies being told.
I remember how I used to always hear in regards to the US mass shootings that they shouldn’t name the killers because it gives them the fame that they might be after. Here we’re seeing the problem with such a method. In todays age if you don’t provide that information, an opportunist will take advantage of it.
queen-bathsheba on
The govt gave us plenty of misinformation on the 19 o’clock news regarding Iraq war.
The govt are concerned they no longer have a monopoly on misinformation
judochop1 on
The title sounds like it’s absolving the rioters of any fault.
Goawaythrowaway175 on
If the government really cared about terrorism why is there news reports every week on the leaders of paramilitary organisations such as the UDA and UVF in Northern Ireland including their names and pictures?
Arrested for sharing Facebook posts but if you run a terrorist organisation then let the papers get you famous while you stand back? Make it make sense.
Edit – this isn’t a post even slightly related to race. I’m literally fuming about terrorists being ignored regardless of race. The examples I have given are all white British. I wan ALL terrorist organisations to be cracked down on hard.
tebbus on
This is so incredibly stupid. It will more than likely lead to incorrect information being released without due care or process. Educate people on critical thinking.
11 Comments
The riots that weren’t in response to a terror attack?
**The terrorism watchdog has called for more information to be made public in the event of mass casualty attacks or risk undermining trust in public institutions.**
*Jonathan Hall, KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned of an “information vacuum” after the Southport attack that led to riots across the country, and said that lessons needed to be learned.*
*One of the problems highlighted by the attack was the consequence of giving out so little information about what motivated the killings of three young girls.*
*Hall said: “I think we are at a point in time where trust in public institutions should not be taken for granted and when matters of high importance in the public mind happen that, as far as is possible, the police, the government and the media, should level with them.*
*“Those institutions will not continue to enjoy the trust that they have had to date if there is any general sense that things are being hidden and that is exactly what the conspiracy theorists and the grievance merchants depend upon.”*
*He said there was a “huge, huge interest” in the identity of the Southport attacker and the circumstances of the attack and people “quite reasonably wanted to know as much as possible about a massacre of children”.*
*There were people who “undoubtedly fed upon the information vacuum by circulating false stories and they appear to have incited and enraged and inspired people to those really bad attacks by the absence of information in circumstances where people were dying”.*
*Britain’s contempt of court laws mean that once a suspect has appeared in court very little information can be published in order not to “substantially” prejudice legal proceedings.*
*However, experts point out that more information has been divulged in the past before charges have been brought without prejudicing the prospect of a fair trial.*
*Hall, a practising barrister, said: “I would like to see really rigorous application of the need for transparency and only restrict information so far as it is really justified by the contempt of court rules.*
*“Judges are very experienced in directing juries to put any prejudicial information they may come across out of their minds and I think there is also a need for realism — there is a fade factor and there is bound to be a gap of time before the case comes to court.”*
*Hall said people were “inevitably going to worry” after any future attack and “it is unrealistic to expect people not to speculate in those circumstances”.*
*He added: “As long as social media companies provide a facility for user-generated content, there will be disinformation, because there is no way that you can, on the basis of the current model, monitor factual assertions in real time.*
*“The brutal reality is that at some stage in the future, there will be an attack by someone who is an asylum seeker or who came on a small boat.*
*“It is better to be as level and as straight as you can be because terrorism is about attacking institutions, and if institutions do not appear to be transparent, then they suffer.”*
*Earlier, Hall told a conference organised by the Counter Extremism Group, a think tank: “One of the problems and the consequences of the Southport attack was that there was an information gap, a vacuum, which was filled with false speculation.*
*“I personally think that more information could have been put out safely without comprising potential criminal proceedings.”*
*Lord Carlile of Berriew, who previously held the post, agreed: “I think we should get out more information if we possibly can. We have learned from these events that when somebody is arrested, and there was a potential issue like this arising, the police probably need to tell the media who has been arrested and what their background is.”*
*Three children were killed and eight others injured, along with two adults, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29.*
*The attack has not been classified as a terrorist incident but Merseyside police have not explained what they believe motivated the killings.*
*Serena Kennedy, chief constable of Merseyside Police, made a statement on the evening of the attacks, saying that they had arrested a 17-year-old male who was born in Cardiff, in an attempt to head off false speculation that he was a Muslim asylum seeker.*
*However, rumours continued to circulate on social media, which were seized on by the far right and led to an attack on a mosque in Southport and a hotel used to house asylum seekers in Rotherham as riots spread across the country.*
The Government is in an information war against mis information. The only way to tackle it is to been seen to be as open and honest as possible as fast as possible. There is such little trust as it is at the moment.
We no longer wait to find out about something on the 10 O’clock news or read an update in a newspaper the following day. Even with that in the past you may have gotten more information than is received in the media at the moment with the reluctance to investigate in detail live police investigations and prosecutions through fear of prejudicing a potential trail.
I think between the riots and the Letby case, a quite big underlying problem with criminal justice in the UK nowadays is that a massive number of people’s primary experience of the justice system is via television, which is often through American TV news and drama shows.
That creates a massive issue when they routinely send out their police chiefs on the day of a tragedy to share as much information as they have avaliable, when they have cameras and even livescreens of trials, and where the first amendment gives significant journalistic protections to the media in order to cover trials.
In contrast, the British approach with a lot of secrecy and restrictions can end up appearing like a grand evil conspiracy, because in those TV shows and most of the news stories where it comes up, that sort of thing is usually clear and obvious evidence of police misconduct or a cover-up from the American perspective.
He’s got a point. The old rules are simply unworkable in the modern information age with 24 hour news and a malevolent social media environment.
Whilst you’ll never be able to dissuade the conspiracy nuts with facts, it’s a simple reality that misinformation thrives then there’s no genuine information put out there, and misinformation now travels faster than ever.
Simply waiting to put out a statement in the morning papers isn’t a viable strategy anymore. Even saying something like ‘we don’t know everything- but here’s what we do know’ is better than their pathetic ‘we urge people not to speculate’ script.
SIS will always have the numbers and probably agree to publish them. Home office :NO WAY I’m not having the country panic while I’m head of the department!
Yeah this is something that inevitably needs to be done. In this case the restrictions that came about with the Southport case due to the perpetrators age need to be gone, they just don’t work in an age where social media is a thing.
The misinformation isn’t surprising to me. If you pay attention to tragedies like this, you’ll find that the far-right tends to take advantage of the information vacuum which presents itself shortly after a tragedy in order to push an agenda.
If you recall the Uvalde mass shooting that happened in the US, in the period of time after it before the identity of the perpetrator was known there were people pushing a lie that it was a Trans person (they even paraded a picture of an innocent trans person, blaming them for the crime). In the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, I recall various Facebook profiles being setup pretending to be that of the killer while trying to link them to things like Antifa, the Democrats and so on.
So the misinformation isn’t a new thing or surprising. What really made things worse here is that due to the restrictions in place due to the age of the perpetrator, that misinformation got to spread for much longer without correction. It reached more ears, and the fact that restrictions existed in the first place fed into the conspiracies being told.
I remember how I used to always hear in regards to the US mass shootings that they shouldn’t name the killers because it gives them the fame that they might be after. Here we’re seeing the problem with such a method. In todays age if you don’t provide that information, an opportunist will take advantage of it.
The govt gave us plenty of misinformation on the 19 o’clock news regarding Iraq war.
The govt are concerned they no longer have a monopoly on misinformation
The title sounds like it’s absolving the rioters of any fault.
If the government really cared about terrorism why is there news reports every week on the leaders of paramilitary organisations such as the UDA and UVF in Northern Ireland including their names and pictures?
Arrested for sharing Facebook posts but if you run a terrorist organisation then let the papers get you famous while you stand back? Make it make sense.
Edit – this isn’t a post even slightly related to race. I’m literally fuming about terrorists being ignored regardless of race. The examples I have given are all white British. I wan ALL terrorist organisations to be cracked down on hard.
This is so incredibly stupid. It will more than likely lead to incorrect information being released without due care or process. Educate people on critical thinking.