In the hours after the fatal attack on a dance class in Southport in 2024, a parallel outbreak of false information began to spread across X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The consequences were not confined to comment threads. The posts contained misinformation that fuelled race-related riots in towns and cities across the United Kingdom, as far-right actors seized on the attack to promote a false narrative about the suspect. Despite an official police statement confirming that the suspect had been born in Cardiff, an account called ‘Europe Invasion’ claimed instead that he was ‘a Muslim immigrant’. That single post was seen by close to 4 million users. Further posts invented a false name for the suspect and claimed that he was an asylum seeker who had arrived in Britain by boat the previous year. All of this was false, yet the corrections that followed did not receive anything like the same reach. This was not an isolated moment of online chaos. It was a symptom of how people now consume news. As audiences shift from traditional broadcasters and newspapers to social media feeds, false claims spread further than corrections ever will. The Southport case became a violent illustration of that asymmetry: a lie reached millions in hours, while the truth struggled to catch up and ultimately could not undo the damage. The algorithm did not create the lie, but it provided the fuel. It rewarded outrage, amplified the most extreme content and ensured that users who had not asked for that information were presented with it anyway. That is the environment in which modern news is consumed, and it is the environment in which the next false story will be measured not by its accuracy but by its engagement.
Even X’s own owner, Elon Musk, has contributed to the problem. He reposted a fake headline styled to look like it had come from The Telegraph, claiming that Keir Starmer was considering building detainment camps on the Falkland Islands to free up prison space. The post originated from the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First. Musk deleted it after around 30 minutes, but by then it had already been viewed nearly 2 million times. The episode offers a perfect case study in the mechanics of misinformation: a false story, designed to look credible, adopted by a powerful figure, amplified to millions, and then quietly removed only after the damage has been done. Deletion is not the same as correction. The two million people who saw it had already absorbed the claim, and many will have shared it, screenshotted it, or formed a lasting impression from it. The fact that the amplification came from the owner of the platform itself is particularly damaging because credibility is contagious. When a public figure with enormous status shares false content, it legitimises it in the minds of many users. It also demonstrates that platform owners are not neutral conduits; they are participants in the very system that allows misinformation to thrive. That is why the debate about false information cannot be reduced to a handful of bad actors or foreign bots. It is a structural feature of platforms built for engagement, and the people running those platforms are sometimes among the most powerful amplifiers of all.
This matters because the proportion of UK adults who get their news from social media is not small; a very large proportion of the public is therefore exposed to this misinformation. A recent Ofcom report on UK news consumption habits found that despite a fall in interest in news, there is still a demand to keep up with it, with almost 96% of UK adults consuming news in some form. Social media is now used by 51% of UK adults to get their news, with Facebook remaining the most popular social media platform, used by 30% of the people Ofcom spoke to. For young people, online platforms are being used far more than traditional platforms. Eight in ten 16-to-24-year-olds use online platforms to get their news, and three-quarters of the young people Ofcom spoke to said social media was their main way of accessing news. Most strikingly, X is the leading platform for 12-to-15-year-olds for weightier news topics, such as politics and current affairs. This is a deeply troubling statistic given how much false information is circulated on the platform. It means that the algorithmically selected content many children see on politics is not chosen by editors or checked by fact-checkers; it is chosen by engagement metrics. If false, inflammatory content generates more clicks, it will be promoted over accurate reporting. For a generation still forming its political views, that is a direct threat to the possibility of an informed public.
The gravity of the problem has been quantified. The Social Market Foundation, supported by the BBC, analysed over 125,000 social media posts across local Facebook groups, X searches and Nextdoor communities. They found that two in five local Facebook groups and over four-fifths of X searches featured at least one piece of misinformation in the most recent 1,000 posts. When the analysis was narrowed to news-related content, the figures became even starker: nearly one in 26 posts on Facebook, or 4%, was misinformation, and over one in four posts on X, or 28%, was misinformation. This pattern is present locally as well as nationally. Analysis of four Facebook groups in Gorton and Denton during the recent by-election found that 7.3% of news-related posts were misinformation. Looking more broadly at locations in the UK that held local elections in May, news-related misinformation posts rose from 8.2% to 12.9% in the weeks before polling day, a 56% increase. That surge in the final weeks of an election campaign is exactly when accurate information matters most. Misinformation is not limited to text. It comes in many forms, and AI doctoring is becoming an increasing worry. In Wakefield, councillor Armaan Khan and his ward colleagues were digitally edited into a photo standing next to a housing estate they had actually opposed; the original image showed the group standing next to open fields. The manipulated image was designed to flip their record into something false, and voters would have had no easy way of knowing it was fake.
The wider risk is that misinformation is not merely a nuisance; it is changing political reality. When thinking of the broader rise in populism, not only in the UK, the stakes of misinformation are only rising. The fact that 12-to-15-year-olds are turning to X as a news source raises genuine concerns about the quality and accuracy of what they are absorbing. Part of the issue is structural. The X algorithm is designed to recommend content based on prior engagement. The platform’s help centre states: “The choices you make when using X, such as the accounts and topics you follow and the lists you create or join, help determine the content you see.” In principle, that sounds like a reasonable form of personalisation. But when more than one in four news-related posts on X contains misinformation, the algorithm will inevitably amplify falsehoods. It becomes easy, especially for younger users, to be exposed to a large amount of false content without ever searching for it. A teenager who follows a political account may be recommended ever more extreme versions of the same ideology, not because the algorithm cares about politics, but because outrage drives engagement. Against a backdrop of a rise in right-wing populism and increasingly racist and xenophobic rhetoric in political spheres, exposing young people to this misinformation is only reinforcing those ideologies. The risk compounds when the source is someone widely trusted. People are more likely to believe and share information that aligns with what they already believe, especially if it is being reshared by a recognisable figure like Musk. Trust becomes a transferable currency, and falsehoods arrive wearing the face of authority.
Platforms like X and Facebook are not solely to blame. The deeper failure may lie within an education system that is not teaching children how to fact-check what they read. However, that is not an immediate fix. These platforms cannot rely on readers catching misinformation that they do not know how to spot. Moderation has to move faster than a repost. Safeguards must be put in place, specifically in a world of increasing polarisation. The problem is not going to be solved by asking users to be more careful, because the systems feeding them information are deliberately designed to keep them scrolling, not to keep them truthful. A democratic society cannot function if its citizens are making decisions on the basis of false information, and a generation of young people cannot be expected to defend themselves against algorithms that have no interest in whether what they see is real. The false post about Southport, the fake Telegraph headline shared by Musk, and the doctored photograph of the Wakefield councillor are all warnings of what happens when the information ecosystem is allowed to run on engagement alone. The corrections, when they come, are too slow, too quiet and too easily ignored. The next lie is already being prepared, and it will be measured, again, by how far it can travel before anyone notices.