As the dust starts to settle on the horrific murders of three children and rioting in Southport two important questions start to emerge for public sector communicators.
Firstly, how to communicate on a hyperlocal level in an emergency?
Secondly, how to challenge the world of disinformation that can come with it?
Communicating on a hyperlocal level
Ofcom’s Review of Local Media correctly shows the dartboard-shaped new landscape of communicating locally.
It starts with your street as the bullseye and radiates out to your neighbourhood, town or city then your county nation or region. It looks like this:
The channels radiate from WhatsApp and Facebook groups locally right up to TV and radio nationally.
In an emergency, Twitter has been the default first platform for the public sector to communicate on since 2011.
The Manchester Arena terror attack and the London Bridge terror attack, for example, were all communicated by emergency services through Twitter first and in almost real time.
Indeed, London Ambulance Service stopped answering the phones to the media and relayed their statements on Twitter as the incident played out.
But Twitter, now X, is not what it was. The limit on tweets you can see has blunted its effectiveness at reaching people. Its timeline is no longer in chronological order.
What is now happening is the local emergency and the disinformation that surrounds it is playing out first on WhatsApp and Facebook groups.
The big problem is this escapes the gaze of police, fire & rescue, NHS and council people who operate on a town, county or regional level.
It’s important to say there is no criticism in this post of those organisations responding to what was a triple murder in Southport followed by a riot then recovery. Quite the opposite, teams from Merseyside Police, Merseyside Fire & Rescue, North West Ambulance Service, Mersey and West Lancs NHS Trust and Sefton Council stood up to be counted.
Like this post.
In an emergency, information rather than click-attracting content is key.
I’m sure there will be a more detailed study into the events and lessons learned but as a blogger some things struck me.
The timeline for Southport
Firstly, let’s look at the timeline to see how it measures up against the Ofcom dartboard.
At 11.50am on Monday July 29, a man armed with a knife attacked children at a venue in Southport.
Jamie Lopez, a reporter for the subscription news service The Lancashire Lead, recalls how the information vaccum was filled with rumour:
“I was born and raised in the town and on Monday spent hours waiting in fear for official news to come through. The WhatsApp groups and Facebook comments were filled with terrifying stories of what may have happened and just how many people were affected.
“Most of those suggestions had lots of details wrong but ultimately the key point remained true – children and adults had been stabbed by a lone attacker who’d embarked on a spree of unimaginable terror.”
The subscription news email The Post also pointed to WhatsApp as being the key channel. It reports the anxiety of a Southport parent as the news spread.
“All of a sudden I was getting all these messages flashing through on my phone, on WhatsApp and things,. No one really knew what was happening or where it was — at first we were worried it might be some of their friends.”
So, misinformation and confusion on WhatsApp and Facebook groups first as the incident played out. It started off as being hyperlocal.
Just over an hour later came the first statement on the Merseyside Police website.
At 1.07pm police confirmed a major incident, casualties and a man arrested with a knife seized. An order to ban drones from the area was made and published at 4.18pm the same day.
Stop speculating?
Far right social media had gone into overdrive. They immediately blamed Islamic terrorism with unfounded allegations the attacker was from Syria and had come to the UK illegally. See here, here and here.
Far right agitator Tommy Robinson was telling his 800,000 X followers this was the fault of illegal immigrants. Andrew Tate falsely claimed the culprit was an undocumented Muslim who had arrived on a boat.
At 7.18pm a more detailed statement was given on the incident by Merseyside Police. Tragically, this was a Taylor Swift-themed event the children had been attending, they say.
By Tuesday, the death toll had risen to three by 12.12pm with an update from Merseyside Police and Sefton Council were forced to combat online rumours it was going to kick off again.
And then the riot
A vigil for the children was held that evening but a crowd then started attacking a mosque in the town. Camera phone footage posted by people in the mob then started to be widely circulated. By 8.35pm a statement outlining arrests was made. Fifty police officers were injured.
On Thursday August 1 the court appearance of the teenager accused of the murders reported by the Liverpool Echo.
By the morning of Wednesday July 31 Nigel Farage MP had got involved. He posted a video questioning what information was being withheld rather than asking the question in Parliament and getting an answer.
Legitimate questions, commentators said, but he could have got answers had he asked his questions in Parliament.
What was being hidden?
In the UK, the law forbids police immediately identifying a 17-year-old but in the world of conspiracy ‘they’ don’t want you to know who it is because ‘they’ are hiding something.
A court order was later made to identify the accused as Axel Rudakubana who was born to Rwandan parents in Cardiff.
So, it wasn’t a Muslim immigrant who came illegally on a boat at all.
Organised disinformation
The News Agent news podcast produced an excellent investigation into the background of misinformation (accidental) and disinformation (deliberate) around the Southport incident.
I strongly urge you to take a few minutes to catch-up on this if you work in the public sector. It sets out the far right conspiracy playbook that if you spend any time online you’ll see.
One of the means of conspiracy, the podcast reports, is ‘they’re not telling you stuff’. They’re hiding it from you.
Who?
‘A shadowy cabal, the Deep State, the woke.’
It sounds crackers but it clearly has traction.
This isn’t unique to Southport. This practice, the programme reports, is well established to encourage division and hate.
Marc Owen Jones, an academic who specialises in disinformation, was interviewed on the programme after posting a thread on X, formerly Twitter, which showed 27 million impressions speculating that the attacker was a Muslim, migrant, refugee or foreigner.
The academic calls the key people who spread disinformation ‘disinfluencers’.
What makes you laugh or makes you angry gets the most clicks, he says. Clicks attract influence, attention and money, he says.
Authoritarian regimes who don’t like the West are often ultimately behind many of these attempts to encourage polarisation, he says. The Daily Mail linked a site with links to Russia as being a key driver of disinformation in the days after the incident.
This may or may not be be the case but this probably won’t help the police, NHS or council communicator faced with an unfolding incident on the ground.
In addition, BBC Verify published an investigation into the online activity that shows an organised at attempts to encourage organised protests. In several places this led to violence.
The ugly side of Facebook groups
I’m a member of hundreds of Facebook groups across the UK. In part, this is a legacy of work I did during COVID to support councils across the West Midlands and from work I’ve done with the public sector across the UK. Occasionally, content from them drifts to the surface.
Fired by revulsion and anger at the Southport murders the misinformation about the identity was being circulated in groups such as the Cannock Chase Discussion Group which has 9,500 members.
The Sunderland Have Your Say Facebook group’s 35,000 members were also alive with misinformation days before violence was to flare there.
Elsewhere, a TikToker from Hartlepool spoke about a Facebook group message organising a ‘protest’ at the town Cenotaph warning her Muslim friends to stay away.
It is striking that misinformation such can gain traction hundreds of miles away from the actual incident.
This is some community groups and not all.
The positive side of Facebook groups
For the more positive side, the Southport community Facebook group with 35,000 members reflected the mood of the town.
Horror then shock then a determination to come together by clearing up the damage.
Heartening.
And also…
But also…
So, the Facebook group can be a compelling part of the recovery just as much as they can be a source of speculation.
Indeed, content created by the public sector was shared into Facebook groups such as this Mersey Care NHS Trust post which captured the mood of remembrance and reflection.
The role of WhatsApp, Nextdoor and Facebook groups
The incident in Southport falls squarely into the findings of the Ofcom Review of Local Media.
It played out on WhatsApp and Facebook first. This is a danger point. Rumour fills the vacuum. Once the official statement has been released the message used to be immediately amplified by traditional media. The only vacuum was word of mouth. Now, that’s not the case.
I’d add the community-based network of Nextdoor into this street-by-street mix.
Emergency planning v3.0 and spreading the message on Facebook and WhatsApp
Emergency planning is the duty on the public to warn and inform in an emergency.
This is something that police, fire and rescue, council, NHS and others have a legal duty to plan for.
If traditional media releases are emergency planning v1.0 and social media then using Twitter has been v2.0 then the evolution of WhatsApp, Facebook groups and Nextdoor would be a v3.0 iteration.
This is the phase the puublic sector must now adapt to.
How to plug into WhatsApp and Facebook groups?
I was working in local government around 2010 when the English Defence League came to Birmingham. The first time they came they spread rumours of a white youth being stabbed by an Asian gang. It was pandemonium. The second time they came the police were ready for them.
The second time, a senior officer active on Twitter was scanning for misinformation and then shooting it down in real time.
If there’s a rumour of a stabbing who are you going to believe? An account you don’t know or a police officer you follow?
This incident was a breakthrough moment for me.
A similar Eureka moment is needed with the latest evolution of Emergency Planning, the v30 which has WhatsApp, Nextdoor and Facebook groups.
Ideas for WhatsApp
In peacetime, the lesson from the first WhatsApp Channels are that images with text are sharable and do best on the platform.
So, would a pre-existing WhatsApp Channel that can share an image with text with a request to share into subscribers groups be an idea?
Absolutely.
Indeed, Liverpool City Council used their WhatsApp Channel to spread a video appealing for calm.
The value of using WhatsApp to send a message to particular community leaders in a specific language also presents itself. The good part of a fractured media landscape is that it’s fractured and you can reach your audience with some research.
Could this work in the first minutes of the incident? Potentially and the recovery phase, too.
Ideas for Facebook groups
The lesson from the General Election in Facebook groups is similar to WhatsApp. That’s sharable images. So what would that look like? Key points from the statement as Sefton Council did when encountering online rumour? Images of community clean-up with text, maybe?
Within 15 hours this post from Sefton Council showing a landmark lit up in pink in memory of the attack wqas shared more than 130 times and 300 engagements. That’s a positive number however you look at it.
A strategy of posting and forgetting probably isn’t the most effective way to use Facebook. Being proactive and sharing to groups is definitely the way to go. I’ve heard of some police forces having an email list of Facebook group admins. I’m not sure that’s the most effectiove way to talk to them but the idea of taking them seriously I absolutely love.
Ideas for Nextdoor
This is harder to review since what a council posts to Nextdoor is invisible if you are not in that particular community.
But the partnership agreement with Nextdoor by a public body allows a message to be sent to EVERY subscriber. This is a hugely helpful step in an emergency. One downside if you go down this path is that you can only see messages which land on your page. You can’t see the discussion that falls outside it. In a situation like Southport that’s probably not helpful.
Report, report, report
If you see misinformation and disinformation hit the report button on social media. I don’t see much hope with doing this on CX, formerly Twitter but I’ve anedcdotally heard of Facebook taking complaints more seriously.
Conclusion
‘All politics is local,’ is a commonly heard phrase that was first heard in the 1930s.
All emergencies are local, too. But as my first news editor once said local can be a very elastic term.
There’s no question that the new landscape that gives a local voice to local issues needs to be one that the public sector needs to understand.
It needs to grasp the hyperlocal landscape of WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups and Nextdoor.
But running alongside is the second challenge that is more insidious and that’s how to challenge misinformation.
Should resource be allocated to monitor and tackle this? I’d say so. But that’s easy for me to say because I don’t work for one of the public bodies that dealt with it. Being several steps removed to see the absolute need to tackle that rumour.
I’d be interested in seeing the debate around these questions.
I remember hearing Carolyne Mitchell, the Scottish communicator, say that it is better to sort things out in peacetime rather than when cars in the street are on fire.
In a week when cars in the street have been set on fire I’m reminded how very true this statement is.