As Belfast Burns, Elites Identify the Problem: Social Media

As Belfast erupted into flames last night amid violent protests over the ISIS-like attempted beheading attack on a local by a Sudanese migrant, politicians south of the Irish border took to television screens to attempt an explanation – and a remedy – to the problems that caused the disorder.

“It sort of beggars belief that a video of that nature was allowed to be circulated for hours and hours”, declared Mary Regan, political editor of the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, the Irish Independent.

The video in question was, of course, mobile phone footage of the attack. In the hours after the incident, the Irish media’s first reaction was to play down the incident, describing it variously as a “stabbing incident” or a “knife attack”. Even as official channels were parroting that line, hundreds of thousands of Irish people, as well as countless millions around the world, were watching the uncensored truth on their phones and on their computer screens. There was no mistaking what they saw.

The Attack

The alleged attacker, first reported to be Somalian and then later Sudanese, is a migrant to the United Kingdom to whom His Majesty’s government had granted a five-year residency visa. The motive for the attack is still unknown, but sources suggest it was random. Local reports say the victim has a severe hearing impairment and has now suffered what are described as grievous injuries to his eyes, one of which might be saved. The assailant was prevented from killing his victim only by the violent intervention of a local man, Maitiu Mág Tighearnán, who struck the attacker with a hurley – a long, baseball-bat-style implement used in the Gaelic game of hurling.

Last night, as many observers had predicted, discontent in Belfast spilled into open revolt. Police responded to 62 separate incidents, and several homes were set ablaze. Unconfirmed reports suggested that in some cases migrants’ homes were specifically targeted. In central Belfast, a bus was torched, while dozens of cars were firebombed.

Politicians Mystified by Riots, But Clear on Who to Blame

On television, the politicians appeared mystified, but had no doubt who was to blame. “This has all moved so quickly in relation to how social media gets into people’s lives now”, said Charles McConalogue, a minister in the Irish government. Government, opposition and media were in agreement: the lesson of the past 24 hours on the island of Ireland was that social media causes disorder, while ISIS-style beheading attacks are merely incidental to the causes of public outrage.

This is not a new theory: Ireland has been at the forefront of the Europe-wide campaign to censor social media and institute strong state controls on reporting. The country’s “media commission” was set up by the government both to directly fund the media with taxpayer subsidies and to regulate its content. As the country plays host to the EU headquarters of many American social media companies, including Meta, Google and X, its politicians have aspired to regulate content not simply at national level, but across the continent.

The objective of this policy is clear and openly stated: to ensure that the public’s access to content that might spark rioting is strictly limited, and that the calming official version of events presented through state-funded channels is what the public are able to access.

This, of course, creates something of a political paradox: politicians at once insist that there is no problem with migrant crime or Islamist-inspired attacks, either in Ireland or in Europe. Yet, at the same time, they argue that videos of such attacks must be suppressed because of the risk of inflaming the public. They insist, in other words, that the thing which is not happening must never be seen.

Meanwhile, they misdiagnose the problem: the proximate cause of last night’s widespread disorder in Belfast was not a video, but an attack.

Echoes of the Recent Past

Three years ago in Dublin, police arrested an Algerian man – who has gone on trial this week – after a stabbing attack on children at a north Dublin primary school. There was no video of the actual incident, but details of it spread widely on social media despite a similar campaign of media suppression in which only the most sanitized details were shared by the major outlets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w_rMCi-Yd8

That night, as in Belfast last evening, widespread public disorder broke out as the public took to the streets to violently express their dissatisfaction with an immigration policy that very often appears to treat the safety of the host population with reckless disregard. Then, as now, politicians deployed the same playbook: the incident was not the problem; the problem was that people found out about the incident.

At the time, this reporter was widely criticized for publishing details about the incident – including the nationality of the attacker – by fellow journalists, on the grounds that telling the public what had happened in their own country was contrary to the ethics of responsible journalism.

Then, as now, the perversity of modern media thinking was exposed: for many journalists in traditional outlets – influenced, one might argue, by taxpayer subsidies – the point of journalism is not to report stories, but to suppress them. As the American satirical blogger Iowahawk once noted: “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

This instinct, which is now openly expressed, is no longer working. Indeed, it is having the reverse effect: it is eating away at the public’s trust in the media so that the average news consumer can simply no longer believe that what he or she is seeing in relation to crime reporting is the full truth. When the nationality of assailants is not reported, therefore, news consumers tend to assume that the alleged perpetrator must be a migrant. When the details are vague, news consumers tend to assume they are worse than advertised.

In Ireland, as across Europe, the media is destroying its own credibility by partaking in a campaign of censorship, one that is not working and is undermining trust between journalist and news consumer.

Meanwhile, the real problems – such as how the UK government gave a five-year visa to a man capable of an act like that perpetrated on Monday night – go unaddressed. This is unlikely to be sustainable for either society or the journalists who cover it.