How Social Media Rumours Fuelled A Riot In Merseyside

A video of a teenage girl being harassed was shared before far-right activists clashed with police, Lizzie Dearden writes

-  Lizzie Dearden

On 7 February, a 30-second video started spreading on social media. It showed a man, who said he was 25, asking a schoolgirl for her phone number. "I'm only 15," the girl told him. "You don't do that in this country, you go to jail."

The footage was seized upon by far-right activists, who claimed that the man was an asylum seeker, as evidence to support their belief that refugees present a sexual threat to white women.

One figure with almost 23,000 followers on Telegram shared it with the caption: "Hotels across the country are filled with the same mindset third world scum." In one of many similar posts, a white supremacist wrote to more than 16,000 Telegram followers that the man was a "migrant" who had "propositioned" the girl, adding: "Men like this are being sent to towns and cities all over the UK."

Police have not established whether the man in the footage is an asylum seeker, or if he lives in the Merseyside area, and say that local concerns have been fuelled by "misinformation and rumour". But the events that followed culminated with a mob clashing with police and pro-refugee protesters outside a hotel housing migrants in Knowsley.

Lit fireworks were thrown at officers, while a police van was smashed by protesters armed with hammers before being set alight, in violent scenes that sparked condemnation from the home secretary.

As the police probe into the disorder continues, The Independent has investigated the build-up to the riot, which broke out three months after a far-right terror attack that targeted a migrant processing centre in Dover.