Opinion
8th August 2024
The duty of Truth
The recent wave of riots occasioned by the racist right against mosques and those associated with asylum seekers has given us all pause for thought. Of course, it was inevitable this would provoke their opponents to mount counter-demonstrations and last night those were in great evidence although their expected target did not appear. Just as well, as that would simply have escalated the disorder.
At one level, the great non-event of last night’s mass turnout was, perhaps, predictable. Although the anti-fascist groups were gearing up to resist the right and police were taking no chances, the police had said they had no intelligence to suggest any major far-right demonstrations were planned. There had been threats online to attack the offices of legal firms handling asylum and immigration matters but the police did not expect these to lead to action. Let’s hope the message is finally getting through. The suspect in the tragic murders of children in Southport was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, and even if he had been, the police had been clear from the beginning this was not a terrorist attack.
I will not address the specific case further. It would be inappropriate for both legal and compassionate reasons. I have no knowledge so can offer no insight.
However, what is apparent is the part played by social media in empowering extremists to spread lies directing anger at innocent people. I have already written a Pulling Together article about the folly of treating publicly visible media as private communications, an unfortunate precedent set by US law. However, this case exposes the shortcomings even of treating SM as communicators rather than publishers for, like the tabloid press in past decades, that would still enable them to circulate lies, half truths, and innuendoes to the detriment of people who could be treated as guilty by imagined association. According to the BBC, (see www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygo, about three quarters down the page) the earliest online comment searchers could find containing the lie was traced to an ordinary woman with sceptical views about other public concerns. What she wrote has subsequently been twisted by others who picked it up and repeated it in a manner allegedly aimed at stirring up violence against Muslims, migrants, and those who assist them. Where the hatred expressed or encouraged was against groups recognised by the Equality Act it would be illegal.
However, the shortcomings of that Act have been rehearsed many times here, and this is no less an illustration of them. It could not prevent the original lie being propagated within the UK and has not kept the peace or maintained a public sense of justice. What it has done is create an environment bringing two opposing groups out onto the streets with the intention of fighting the matter out. We need better laws than that.
I have already addressed the need for a new Equality Act in earlier articles elsewhere on this website. Now we see how much the dissemination of falsehood on social media threatens free democracy, for democracy is not free if people are afraid to go out in case they encounter marauding gangs of one ideology or another. We need a law requiring people speaking or writing in public to tell the truth.
At this point my fellow Free-Speech advocates will throw their hands up in horror. “Who decides what the truth is?” they will chant in unison, “Do you want us to be like Putin’s Russia?” I am not impressed. I know very well the difference between the truth and some ‘official’ line, just as likely to be manipulative and deceitful as any other. No, of course I’m not calling for censorship. I’m calling for responsibility, and I’m calling for it to be required of all who publish to ensure they can account for their words. That’s already the law around defamation, protecting the rich. Now can we protect everyone, both individually and collectively, including as a democratic whole? That should not be too much to ask.
What those who oppose that really want, I would suggest, is not Free Speech, but the freedom to spread misinformation unaccountably. They do not demonstrate an interest in the power of truth, just in their own power to say what they want whether true or not. That’s not a power I think anyone should have. It rouses rabbles, brings dictators to power, and keeps them there. I don’t want that.
(Edited to remove comments about one person’s actions following news of an arrest after initial publication.)