What can journalists do when disinformaton prompts riots?

For the past five months, I've been involved in a group made up of journalists and managers from newsrooms around the world who have met once a week to discuss fake news, disinformation and misinformation. We've been chipping away at a huge brief - from provenance (how best to prove our original pictures are real), to detection (how best to defend and identify unreal content with AI making deception ever easier) and also collaboration (whether there is value in newsrooms working together in real-time to debunk falsehoods). We meet every Thursday.

This week, I took the call as I walked past an Immigration Centre in east London that had been named by far right groups as the target for a riot. What had happened in the previous 12 hours outside that building spoke directly to the work I've been involved in - and also of the changing ways that news is being consumed on platforms who long ago fused news with comments, professionals with amateurs and authority with disobedience.

Even in note-form, the past two weeks have been dizzying. It started in the aftermath of a murderous attack in Southport which prompted unfounded suggestions on social media that a failed asylum seeker was to blame. Far right leaders ignored police guidance that the information was wrong and called in their supporters. A violent demonstration close to the scene was followed by others elsewhere in the country. "Enough is enough" trended on X as the original awfulness was twisted into a perverse permission to target mosques, migrant centres and human rights lawyers. 100 miles east of Southport, bins were set alight at the entrance to a hotel know to house asylum seekers alongside holidaymakers.

Communities began to push back. Some formed counter demonstrations, others promised to defend their communities. In places they were tense too. As one crew left a site in Birmingham after filming men in masks and another carrying a bat, an attempt was made to slash a wheel on their van. Elon Musk piled in against the UK government, suggesting civil war was "inevitable." Narratives turned again as Reform MP Richard Tice suggested the police had a "two tiered" approach by reacting more firmly against anti-immigration protestors than counter demonstrators. A week on from Southport attacks, a list of 40 more targets began circulating online, with two days notice served on each. Walthamstow Immigration Centre was on the list. Some workplaces and children's playgroups closed early to stay safe. Shops boarded up their windows and thousands of police were deployed.

The whole series of events was triggered by disinformation. The suspect in Southport isn't an asylum seeker. He isn't Muslim. He isn't on a secret service watch list. The incorrect name that was passed round in the aftermath of the attacks was wrong. That name, that story was also never reported as fact by major news organisations. Yet it landed, hard. It arrived so soon after the event, that for some it filled the gap about the killer. And it grew, in part, because it couldn't be verified. Even when police officers began to knock it down, some suggested they were covering-up the suspect's real identity and doubled down. Identifying him became even more complex because he was just 17 - legally a child - and automatically entitled to anonymity under English law. By the time a judge granted the press permission to name him 5 days later, the riots were already underway.

Back on my weekly disinformation call, one senior manager reflected on role social media plays in it all. For all our attempts as journalists to fact check and verify, too often falsehoods are able to morph and grow. Newsrooms have long since steered their staff away from racing rumours to air in place of the authority that comes with proper sourcing. But, she suggested, shouldn't someone be challenging the anonymous tips, bad actors and people with agendas where they are? Isn't social media the real front line of fakery and disinformation? Isn't that where journalists should be?

Her point reached the soul of who we strive to be: trusted sources who help steer people towards the truth - away from dis-information and lies.

It also spoke to the enormity of the challenge in adjusting to the way social sites enable disinformation to grow. WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, TikTok and more. Elon Musk boasts that X is the number 1 news app in 140 countries. Donald Trump even funded his own - Truth Social - after having his accessed stripped from Facebook. Yes, journalists work across these platforms, but in many cases they are only as prominent as a person peddling lies. All of these organisations argue that free speech matters and almost all will step in to stop terror or obvious abuse. But they are also reluctant to act as arbiters of opinion, even if those views are discredited, extreme or without foundation.

In the past two weeks many of us have worked hard to expose the entanglement between online deceptions and disturbances on the streets. Correspondents did what they could to call out what was happening - but by nature of the way we work, reports landed after the events.

Thankfully, the daily disturbances now appear to be dying down. My walk through Walthamstow wasn't an unpleasant one. The fortunes of the night before had been turned by a mass of peaceful protestors. Thousands lined the streets outside the Immigration centre as a mass movement. It quelled any chance of violence that night - and so far there has been very little since. But the problems aren't over and the challenges of mis- and disinformation urgently need revisiting.

As my group nears the end of its first six months, we're getting a better handle on the scale of our brief. We can say with certainty that it's bigger than all of us. Even getting the best minds from all the best newsrooms across the world won't be enough to fix it. We need help from the firms who enable the online front lines before there are more sorry scenes.