The outpouring of rage in the Merseyside town came after disinformation about the attacker’s identity was amplified and seen by millions on social media.
Merseyside Police said on Monday night that a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who was born in Cardiff, had been arrested on suspicion of murder.
Despite this – and laws in the UK making it a criminal offence to identify a suspect who is a minor, at least until legal proceedings have completed – false claims began to circulate online purporting to name the suspect as “Ali Al-Shakati” and claiming he had arrived in the UK on a small boat in 2023.
One such source of this disinformation, which also falsely claimed the suspect was known to MI6, was an outlet calling itself Channel3 Now – whose post at 5:51pm on Monday featuring an article on the attack racked up close to two million views on X, formerly Twitter, before being deleted.
According to journalist Katharine Denkinson, who concluded that the post was “racially motivated click-bait”, the website purports to be based in the United States, but has no named journalists and appears to have started out 12 years ago sharing Russian-language videos of men in cars before pivoting to US news five years ago.
But false claims about the attacker’s identity were rapidly spread on social media by right-wing accounts with large followings.
According to Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation researcher associate professor at Doha’s Hamid bin Khalifa University, there were at least 27 million impressions on social media posts stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner.