Southport riot: How a LinkedIn post helped spark unrest – BBC tracks its spread


The riots following the fatal stabbings at a children’s dance class on 29 July 2024 were fuelled by misinformation on social media that the suspect was an illegal migrant. Numerous posts from a mixture of sources, including self-styled news accounts, began sharing false claims in the hours immediately after the attack. This misinformation soon merged together. By the time violence started in the Merseyside town on the evening of 30 July, some of the claims had been amplified or repeated by well-known online influencers such as Andrew Tate, who had millions of views repeating false narratives.

One LinkedIn post in particular appears to have had an outsized effect in stirring up the false belief that the dance class suspect was a migrant. It was written by a local man, Eddie Murray, who posted a message about three hours after the attack, stating that a migrant had carried it out. The post implies that Mr Murray’s family were present at the scene of the attack, but in fact, they had been turned away from the dance class because it was full.

Mr Murray’s post was only seen

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