The cycle of violence and right-wing agitation in Britain has become all too frightening and frequent.<\/p>\n
It can start with a stabbing, horrific in nature, that causes fear and anger. Condemnation from political leaders and law enforcement swiftly follows.<\/p>\n
But when the attacker is an immigrant or a person of color, a malign, distorted narrative often explodes onto the internet. Right-wing politicians and commentators seize on it to foment outrage in support of their anti-immigrant agenda, aided by social media algorithms that feed on conflict and division. Within hours, the anger they stoke online has jumped to the real world, setting off protests that become angry riots.<\/p>\n
There are pleas for calm and promises of action by government and law enforcement. But soon afterward, the cycle begins again.<\/p>\n
Twice in the last 10 days, vicious knife attacks in England and Northern Ireland have followed that pattern. On Tuesday and Wednesday, protesters in Belfast who were furious about an attack by a Sudanese refugee<\/a> set fire to cars and property and hurled objects at the police. That followed a night of angry rioting in Southampton last week after new video was released in the murder in December of an 18-year-old college student<\/a> who was falsely accused by his attacker of having perpetrated a racist assault.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a playbook,\u201d said Ciar\u00e1n O\u2019Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which researches extremism, hate and disinformation globally. \u201cAn incident of violence like this is identified and rapidly amplified by not just a domestic but a global, transnational, far-right ecosystem who use such incidents to absorb them into their own kind of international narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the dynamic has become \u201calarmingly familiar and even predictable.\u201d<\/p>\n Britain is not alone. Across Europe and in the United States, ascendant right-wing political groups are amplifying the frustration and anger that people feel in the wake of a scary episode, and funneling it toward hostility to immigrants. Researchers say the pattern is followed by members of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Germany and France\u2019s National Rally Party.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have moved from stoking hatred online to actually bringing it into the streets in a variety of ways,\u201d said Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly seeing a blurring between this online world and what is happening in the real world, and, and part of the problem is that the political class doesn\u2019t quite seem to know how to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Lorimer said Britain is especially vulnerable because it shares the English language with the United States, which she said makes it easier for right-wing groups there to use the American-based social media companies to stoke anger from afar.<\/p>\n That was the case on Tuesday, when Elon Musk, the owner of X, called for people to \u201cREPEATEDLY and LOUDLY\u201d protest<\/a> in Belfast. He highlighted an image that listed protest locations distributed by Tommy Robinson, an anti-Muslim agitator in Britain with multiple criminal convictions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people,\u201d Mr. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, wrote on X.<\/p>\n Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain\u2019s populist, right-wing Reform U.K. Party, has used both of the recent knife attacks to push his anti-immigrant policy agenda. The party has become a major political force in Britain, winning local races across the country last month and consistently topping national election polls. That recent success gives him more political clout than he had a decade ago when his party was on the fringe of British politics.<\/p>\n After video footage emerged showing police handcuffing Henry Nowak, the college student, as he lay dying in December, Mr. Farage posted a video last week urging the public to \u201crespond to this with pure cold rage.\u201d<\/a> He accused the police of a system of \u201ctwo-tier\u201d justice that treats ethnic minorities better than white people in Britain. In that case, Mr. Farage expressed concerns about migrants even though the convicted killer, Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh, was born in Britain.<\/p>\n Speaking on Wednesday, Mr. Farage described the knife attack in Belfast as an attempted \u201cbeheading,\u201d<\/a> adopting language used on the internet despite the fact that no law enforcement or government official has publicly called it that. In that case, the police charged Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese man, with stabbing Stephen Ogilvie in the head, the back and the neck, costing Mr. Ogilvie his eye.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this man should not have been in this country,\u201d Mr. Farage said, even though authorities said Mr. Alodid was in the country legally.<\/p>\n Sundar Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that focuses on issues of identity, said politicians like Mr. Farage are increasingly using what Mr. Katwala called \u201cflashpoint moments\u201d to appeal to the part of his base who want him to embrace more aggressive language.<\/p>\n There were roughly 500 homicides in Britain last year, many of them shocking. But if the victim isn\u2019t white, or the crime doesn\u2019t fit a narrative<\/a> that will demonize immigrants, it is not seized on to stoke angry protests. <\/p>\n Other politicians have urged restraint and calm, while trying to acknowledge the appalling nature of the knife attacks. In Parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned Monday\u2019s attack on Mr. Ogilvie in Belfast and the violence in the streets that followed on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are all sickened by this attack, but the seeds of violence and disorder have no justification,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, said on X<\/a> that \u201cpeople have a right to be angry. And people have the right to expect their politicians to secure our borders.\u201d But she called the scenes of rioting in Belfast \u201cdeeply disturbing\u201d and said that \u201cno one has a right to burn families out of their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n Ofcom, which regulates the communications industry in Britain, has warned online service providers that they have a duty to ensure that they do not spread illegal content that could inflame a crisis \u2014 by inciting violence, for example. In an open letter on Wednesday<\/a>, the agency wrote that \u201cwe are already contacting individual providers where we believe there are specific risks around the presence of illegal content relating to the civil unrest.\u201d<\/p>\n But those efforts have done little to curb the spread of incendiary and often misleading information on the platforms. Mr. O\u2019Connor, of the Strategic Dialogue institute, said his organization found repeated instances this week of Facebook pages with sketchy claims that the Belfast attacker said \u201cpraise be God\u201d in Arabic during the attack.<\/p>\n Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats Party in Britain, denounced what he called a pattern in which a brutal crime \u201cmakes us all feel immense pain and anger, and then extremists who exploit that grief and anger to spread hatred and violence, aided and abetted by social media barons like Elon Musk.\u201d<\/p>\n The push for limits on online behavior is renewing accusations from politicians like Vice President JD Vance that Britain is undermining the free speech rights<\/a> of conservatives. When Liz Kendall, Britain\u2019s secretary for technology, posted this week about tougher new online rules the government is considering imposing, scores of people responded to her by saying Britain wants to shut down legitimate debate.<\/p>\n