Lies, Damned Lies And Lies 🟐 The Globalisation Of Untruths

Barry Gilheany ✍ It started with a lie.

Just two days after the unimaginable slaughter of three primary school age girls and the wounding of nine others at a Taylor Swift themed summer dancing event in Southport, Merseyside by a deranged adolescent with a knife, a name, ethnicity and immigration status was tagged to the suspect and spread on anti-social media: Muslim from Pakistan, recent migrant being monitored by MI5 and with concerning mental health.

Totally unfounded. The suspect was born in Cardiff to Rwandan Christian parents but, on the maxim of never letting the truth get in the way of good racist narratives, a week long orgy of riots against mosques, migrant centres and general community facilities like a Merseyside branch library is triggered and the flames fanned by the great and good of Britain’s Alt Right.

It nearly started with a lie. The body of a 55-year-old dog walker and mother of five children is found near the village of Brantham on the idyllic Essex/Suffolk border where John Constable painted his masterpieces two centuries ago. A murder investigation is started and soon the supposed identity of the suspected murderer is revealed on anti-social media: a Somali immigrant. The local constabulary take the unprecedented step of refuting completely this untruth to prevent another racist or nativist uprising in this part of England’s green and pleasant land.

It started with a lie. In Dublin on 23 November 2023 three children and a care assistant were stabbed in broad daylight outside an Irish language medium primary school. The alt-right website Gript, or should that be Grift, quickly moved to reveal the assailant’s identity as a Muslim asylum seeker and to portray the attack as an act of Islamist terrorism. Gript then, to its well-deserved embarrassment, admitted it had identified the wrong man and is facing libel action from the wrongly accused individual. But the trick worked. From 5pm on the 23rd when a mob of two hundred anti-migrant “protestors” assembled at the site of the multiple stabbings Dublin was subjected to the worst night of violence in the history of the Irish state. Needless to say, what didn’t form part of the Gript story was that one of three brave men who fought off the attacker was a Brazilian delivery driver.

But of course, these riots did not emerge in a vacuum. Knowsley in Merseyside had witnessed earlier in 2024 a violent attack by far-right rioters on a Travelodge hotel housing migrants pending decision on their immigration status. Dublin’s North Wall and Coolock districts and smaller towns in the Republic of Ireland have been scenes of constant agitation leading to physical disturbances against the siting of migrant centres.

It started with a lie. A 12-year-old boy called Willian was found dead near the city of Norwich in 1144. On the discovery of his body, the finger of suspicion is automatically and falsely directed at the city’s Jews. Just as with the murdered children of Southport, there was a ready made but bogus target for ire. Over the centuries that followed, the blood libel, whereby Jews murdered Christian children in order to draw blood for the preparation of Passover or Matzo bread, would be deployed repeatedly against Jewish communities prior to their massacre.[1] Europe’s first recorded act of mass murder leading to expulsion occurred at York Castle in 1190.

The long history of pogroms would continue until the ultimate auto-da-fe – the extermination of six million European Jews in the Shoah/Holocaust in 1941-45 which was built on the edifice of Nazi lies encompassing not just the blood libel but on the lethal fantasies of cabals of Jewish power operating to destroy the Gentile world.

It started with a lie. Donald Trump, in looking, for a suitably scabrous subject to launch his political career latches onto and promotes “The Birther Conspiracy” in which President Barack Obama could not be an American let alone be President of the USA because he was not born in the USA, and forged his birth certificate to that end. Despite Obama’s pre-release of his birth certificate prior to his election to the Presidency in 2008 proving that he was born in Hawaii (and not Indonesia), the ‘birther’ movement never lost its momentum on the Republican Right. Adding spice to this latter-day nativist fairy tale was Obama’s middle name “Hussain,” which was supposedly evidence that he was a secret Muslim – a demographic that is more and more in the crosshairs of the Alt Right on both sides of the Atlantic.

Despite the obvious ridiculous nature of the ‘Birther” theory, upwards of 25% of Americans believed it in the years leading up to Trump’s stunning success in winning the US Presidency in 2016. His victory was built on a concatenation of falsehoods around Mexican immigration, the illegally obtained Podesta emails which amplified the sordid and unfounded allegations that there was a paedophile ring with connections to the Democrats in the basement of a Washington pizzeria and Q-Anon the viral conspiracy movement that posits Hillary Clinton and other prominent liberals at the centre of a global satanic ring.

The Trump Presidency but, sadly, not the Trump movement, ended with the Big Lie of the stolen election and the attempt by Trumpian mobs to overthrow US democracy at Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021. Whatever the result of the 2024 Presidential Election, some degree of lie fuelled disorder looks likely to accompany it. In his libidinal desire to be a dictator, Trump has done and continues to do what is lifelong default setting, whether in business, personal relationships, and politics – lie.

With another narcissistic “World King” on this side of the Atlantic, it began with a lie. It began with seemingly innocuous tales about EU regulations of bendy bananas and condoms by the Brussels editor of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s – Alexander Boris de Pieffle Johnson or Boris. He had form for lying in the journo trade, having been sacked by the Times and would eventually experience the same fate at the hands of Max Hastings, the then Telegraph editor. But the bylines filed from Brussels by Boris were to insinuate themselves into the common sense of the British public as the Eurosceptic narrative about the diminution of British democracy and ways of life at the hands of “the unelected bureaucrats” of the European Commission became steadily mainstreamed. It was Boris’s unprincipled but strategically astute decision to offer his fairy tale spinning at the disposal of Vote Leave that arguably more than any other manoeuvre that swung the outcome of the EU referendum of 2016 in favour of Leave.

Boris then proceeded to undermine the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by the then Prime Minister Theresa May with the EU in cahoots with the Brexit purists of the European Research Group in the Tory Party and ultra free marketeers of think tanks like the Legatum Institute. Eventually, May was forced out of office and Boris won the succeeding contest for Tory Party leader and Prime Minister - and won a stunning 80 seat majority in the 2019 Westminster election on a platform of “Get Brexit Done” – an objective built on a pyramid of unicorns promising world beating trade deals outside the EU bloc while guaranteeing full access to the EU Single Market and Customs Union which he pledged to leave and no customs borders either on the island of Ireland or the Irish Sea. Along the way, there was the small matter of the attempt by Boris to prorogue Parliament in order to thwart the efforts of MPs to prevent a no-deal exit by the UK from the EU; an action which was ruled unconstitutional by the UK Supreme Court.

In office, Boris’s lies, duplicity and “cakeism” caught up with him. After promising the ten MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party (who by their opposition to the Withdrawal Agreement had exposed themselves to Boris’s deceptions) that there would be no Irish Sea border, he went on to agree precisely that in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement that came into effect on 1st February 2020. Cue Unionist outrage, riots in Loyalist parts of Belfast, the collapsing of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly by a righteously angry DUP and further political polarisation.

Of even greater import was the notorious “Partygate” affair in which at the height of the Covid pandemic restrictions on socialising which he and his government had imposed on England, he was found to have facilitated after work parties in 10 Downing Street in direct violation of Covid regulations and then received fines from the London Metropolitan Police. He then went onto mislead (i.e. lie to) Parliament about his culpability on more than one occasion and left office as shamelessly as he had entered it continuing to protest faux innocence in his well remunerated Daily Mail columns.

Cheap Speech

The first refuge or defence of the many scoundrels that have acted as vectors in the disinformation economy, be they antivaxxers with their “Plandemic”, and censorship at the hands of the Big Pharma/Nanny State nexus narratives; antiimmigrant and nativist nationalists who claim that “political correctness” stifles debates about race, ethnicity and migration or 9/11 or Syrian White Knight conspiracists resides in the right to “free speech”. For what liberal objects to free speech? As intrinsic to liberty and democracy as motherhood and apple pie is to, admittedly, very cliched views of America, surely?

Well no, for as is widely pointed out in legal scholarship around free speech; the latitude of free speech has always been circumscribed by libel and defamation laws (which can be inimical to particular types of free enquiry and expression), laws preventing incitement to hatred and violence and laws to prevent affront to “common decency” and the protection of certain religious or moral sensibilities (again a serious break on legitimate freedom of expression with blasphemy laws being a particularly egregious example).

For what the content of information spewed out by so many, online especially, media outlets do not constitute free speech but rather cheap speech. In a strikingly far-sighted article in a 1995 Yale Law Journal symposium titled “Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment”, an UCLA law professor, Eugene Volokh, in his article “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do”, predicted the rise of streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, the emergence of Kindle type tablets for reading books, the disappearance of many local newspapers due to diminished advertising revenue and the rapidly decreasing costs of producing written, audio and video output, which he labelled “cheap speech” that would create revolutionary new opportunities for media consumers to customise what they read, see and hear which in the process would undermine the power of intermediaries, including publishers and bookstore owners.[2]

Thus cheap speech – speech that is both inexpensive to produce and often of markedly low value – raises serious questions whether disseminated on social media, cable news channels, and other low budget platforms.[3] Millennial Utopian forecasts as to the emancipatory potential of the new media, while not totally unfounded, have given way to darker visions of our information ecosphere to match a darkening world in which liberal democracy looks to be in retreat and where authoritarian bad actors hold the seats of power in Moscow, Beijing, Budapest, Manila, New Delhi, Istanbul and Caracas among others (similar actors held office in Washington from 2017 – 2021 and in Rio de Janeiro from 2019 -2023). Many analysts of the globalised disinformation sphere point to the baleful impacts of artificially generated bots, algorithms which customise partisan and often hate spreading content to segmented users, the monetisation of hate and disinformation for the modern social media behemoths and the addictive nature of clickbait news stories designed to hit the spot for the easily aroused.

But whereas the Mark Zuckerbergs of the online world can be accused of passively facilitating the aforementioned maladies on their sites but have also taken some - maybe token or ineffective - steps to remove hateful and toxic content from them, one figure stands accused not just of commercially exploiting toxic content on his site but of actually being an active participant in the dissemination of inflammatory material. That figure is Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter.

Almost as soon as he bought X, Musk decided to make it a safe space for racism and hate. He reinstated the account of Steven Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson with his almost million followers and soon he had posted a list of rendezvous venues for “patriots” to assemble to “protest” the murders of the Southport Taylor Swift child dancers. One analysis of tweets found a “nearly 500% rise in the use of the N-word in the twelve-hour window immediately following the shift of ownership to Musk.”[4]

But Musk himself has joined the ranks of the far-right hate superspreaders. He shared with his 193m followers the fake Telegraph headline falsely claiming that Keir Starmer planned to set up “detainment camps” in the Falkland Islands for rioters and doing it by quoting the leader of the neo-fascist Britain First organisation. He furthermore stoked the flames of the cauldron by tweeting of the UK “Civil war is inevitable”[5] and has promoted the “two tier policing” refrain of far-right agitators. His intermittently live streamed love-in with Donald Trump this week is just conformation of his Alt-Right credentials.

Musk’s activities on the forum that he owns thus crosses lines that not even controversial newspaper proprietors like Rudolph Murdoch or editors like Paul Dacre and Kelvin McKenzie have ventured or would dare venture. It is inconceivable that the Sun or Daily Mail would permit vile racist slurs on black footballers in their pages as those aimed at Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka or refuse to cooperate with the police investigation on grounds of protection of “free speech”[6] But so far racist and other hate speech plus anti-vaxxer lies and disinformation is posted with impunity on X.

One immediate solution would be to award social media companies the legal status of publishers with all the associated rights and obligations on accuracy and integrity of reporting and comment. Social media owners would then be hit in the pocket for failures of stewardship. Desertion from X by public figures and advertisers happening now on an escalating scale is a welcome trend. Schools should teach information hygiene.[7] But ultimately global disinformation needs to be countered by global cooperation and global legislation to deal with this pandemic style evil. This should be one of the first items on the agenda of the first meeting between Prime Minister Starmer and President Kamala Harris in 2025.[8]

[1] Jonathan Friedland, You know who else should be on trial for this? Elon Musk Guardian 10th August 2024

[2] Richard L. Hasen (2022) Cheap Speech. How disinformation poisons our politics – and how to cure it. London and New Haven: Yale University Press.

[3] Ibid, p.21

[4] Jonathan Freedland, Guardian 10th August 2024

[5] Ibid

[6] Gaby Hinsliff The Liz Truss school of free speech? Attack anyone but her. Guardian 16th August 2024.

[7] Freedland, op cit

[8] Freedland, Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.