According to a report carried by Inbox.eu, the fire that tore through a block of flats in Scotland has become something much more than a crime scene; it has become a mirror held up to a society that has allowed hatred to fester online and then spill into the streets. The flames damaged property and endangered lives, but the spark, as investigators quickly realised, was not a gas leak, not a faulty wire, and not a tragic accident. It was, in the words of Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney, a direct consequence of a poisonous climate of disinformation about asylum seekers — a climate breathed into existence by people who deliberately shared lies, mocked the vulnerable, and wrote dehumanising captions without ever stopping to think that words like “they deserve it” might one day come true. Swinney has now insisted that those people will be pursued. Not merely spoken to, not “monitored,” but pursued — through the courts, through police investigations, through the full weight of the law. It is a word with teeth. It tells us something important: in a civilised country, the person who spreads a false rumour that leads to a fire is not an innocent bystander; they are part of the crime. For weeks before the fire, social media had hummed with the same tired lies — that asylum seekers are given preferential housing, that they receive undeserved cash, that they are dangerous or deviant. None of it was true. Yet the lies had a life of their own. They crossed from anonymous accounts to respectable-looking pages, from WhatsApp groups to public Facebook groups, from careless retweets to furious replies. And on the night in question, someone turned the rumour into a weapon. So when Swinney speaks of pursuing the spreaders, he is not chasing ghosts. There are screenshots, timestamps, archived posts, deleted comments, and digital fingerprints of people who, in the heat of their rage, forgot that the internet remembers everything. The report’s language is careful, but its meaning is clear: the fire has changed the conversation.
Who were the people inside those flats? Put aside the political slogans and the angry comments for a moment, because the answer is both ordinary and devastating. They were someone’s son, someone’s mother, someone’s best friend. They were people who had once woken up in a place they called home, with the same ability to feel safe that you might feel in your own kitchen tonight. But war, persecution, hunger and terror broke that world apart, and they made a choice that no person ever wants to make: they left everything they knew and walked, hitchhiked, sailed, crossed mountains, hid in trucks, whispered prayers in the dark, towards the faint hope of a safer life. They did not come to Scotland to steal, to threaten, or to connive. They came because they had heard, correctly, that this is a country where a stranger might offer directions and mean it, where the rain washes the streets clean, where fairness is more than a slogan. Then they were placed in a block of flats on an ordinary street, and for a little while they might have let themselves believe that the worst was behind them. And then the fire came. Imagine, if you can, the sound of someone shouting in the corridor, the smell of smoke curling under the door, the terrible sudden question of whether running into the arms of rescue is safer than staying hidden in the arms of your family. Imagine doing all of that while knowing that somewhere, in the shadows of the internet, people are celebrating. Here is the dehumanising trick of disinformation: it makes the innocent look guilty by stripping away their story. It never shows the son who sends money home, the grandmother who hums old songs while she washes dishes, the young woman who wants nothing more than to study nursing. It shows only an anonymous threat. That is why the fire is not just a physical crime; it is a spiritual one. It violates people who have already been violated — people who survived the very things that angry commenters have never witnessed and cannot imagine.
When a First Minister uses a word like “pursued,” it is a carefully chosen signal. Swinney, who has been in Scottish politics for decades and whose voice often carries the steady, reasoned tone of someone who has seen too many follies to be surprised by them, appeared visibly angry in the reported statements. He did not simply condemn the fire; he named the cause. He pointed to the deliberate, malicious spread of false information about asylum seekers and said those responsible for that spread will face legal consequences. The Inbox.eu report notes that his words were met by a mixed response: some applauded, some cried, and some accused him of overreach. But he did not back down. He reminded the country that police and prosecutors already have tools for dealing with incitement, hate crime, harassment, and the reckless publication of falsehoods, and that the time to use those tools has come. “This is not about silencing people who disagree with government policy,” he reportedly said. “This is about protecting people from violence. If your words are written in the same language as a firebomb, do not be surprised when the question of intent is asked.” The report also suggests that dozens of posts are being examined, and that the investigation will look beyond the obvious street actors to the people who gave them permission to act — the influencers, the anonymous commentators, and the neighbourhood whisperers who talked about “cleaning up the area” while outside, real humans were sleeping. Perhaps most importantly, Swinney’s statement announced a clear shift in official attitude: from tolerance of online garbage as a matter of free expression to a willingness to treat dangerous falsehoods as evidence of a crime. That shift matters because it changes the calculation of the person who might, in a moment of boredom or anger, share a made-up story about their asylum-seeker neighbours. “Pursued” is not a word for the undecided. It is a word for the already guilty and the about-to-be-guilty, and it arrives like a warning in the night.
Disinformation is the fire before the fire. Historically, people spread malicious rumours with whispers in market squares, printed pamphlets, or late-night phone-ins. Today, the process is industrialised. A gross claim about asylum seekers is typed into a WhatsApp group, shared to a private community page, screenshotted into a post with an inflammatory caption, then picked up by a slightly larger account. Within two hours, thousands of people have seen it. Within twenty-four hours, it has become a “fact” in the minds of people who have never once poked their heads inside the flats in question. The dangerous word is “fact.” The lie is not “I do not like them”; the lie is “they did a terrible thing,” “they have been given special privileges that you are paying for,” “the authorities are hiding something from you.” And by the time the truth arrives — slow, boring, guilt-edged, requiring a calm explanation of who exactly lives where, and that their housing was found by an overstretched asylum accommodation system, and that they are legally entitled to support while their claims are assessed — it is drowned out by the very volume of smoke. In this case, the disinformation was not abstract. It pointed directly at a building. It described the people inside as a threat, as animals, as “not like us.” It pre-sold the idea that action was justified. And then someone acted. None of this is inevitable. The report highlights that social media platforms have the technology to reduce the algorithmic amplification of hate, but they choose profit over people until their hands are forced by regulation. Swinney’s promise of legal pursuit is a compromise that survives the tired debate about free speech: it does not ban opinion, it punishes harm. It asks, at minimum, for citizens to be a little less willing to pass along a dark rumour, and for platforms to be a little less eager to make it go viral. The truth may be slower than a lie, but at least it has a chance if we stop feeding the falsehoods.
Here is where the story turns, because the fire was not the final chapter. In the hours after the flames were extinguished, something else caught fire — but this time in the hearts of ordinary people. Neighbours who woke to sirens did not run away; they ran toward the building. They knocked on doors, sheltered people in their living rooms, brought blankets, made tea, called translators, attempted to comfort crying children in a language they did not share but with a tenderness that every language understands. Local businesses offered food and clothes. A mosque and a church, side by side, opened their doors overnight. The vandalism of hate was answered by a vigil of humanity. The Inbox.eu account is careful to note that these are not the images that travel well — a neighbour holding an elderly man’s hand while fire crews move rubble is less dramatic than a burning building — but they are the images that matter. Humanising this story means remembering both sides: the people who spread lies, and the people who refused to believe them. There are asylum seekers whose first real impression of Scotland was not a mob but a host family with a warm room; there are Scottish residents whose first real conversation with an asylum seeker happened in a night of crisis and ended with the realisation that “them” and “us” were always an illusion. The report does not pretend that this was easy or that suspicion vanished in a single night. What it says is that the good within a community is just as contagious as fear, if it is given the chance. A fire can destroy a home, but it can also reveal a foundation of kindness that was already there, waiting underneath the noise. That is the story that the spreaders of disinformation did not plan for, because they forgot to account for the stubborn decency of ordinary people.
At the end of the night, after the sirens have fallen silent and the hot takes have grown cold, a simple question remains: what kind of country do we want to be? We can be a country that shrugs and tells itself that “it was only words,” even as the words turn into violence. Or we can be a country that takes the radical, old-fashioned position that language has consequence; that the person who knowingly spreads a lie about asylum seekers is as accountable as the person who throws the firebomb; that the vulnerable among us deserve not just legal protection, but the unglamorous daily protection of being believed. John Swinney’s promise to pursue the spreaders of disinformation is not a cure-all. It will not bring back what was burned, and it will not erase the sleepless nights of the women and children who now flinch at every flicker of light. But it is a start. It names the wrong. It assigns responsibility. It tells the asylum seeker sleeping in temporary accommodation that the government sees them; it tells the troll with a keyboard that anonymity is not a shield; and it tells the ordinary citizen that you do not have to be a hero to stop a fire — you just have to refuse to pass on the match. The flames were an act of violence. The pursuit of the liars is an act of justice. And in the space between the two, in the smoke and the ashes, a community discovered that the only thing more contagious than fear is courage. We repeat that truth often enough, and we may start to believe it. And if we believe it, we might finally build a world where nobody has to wonder whether their children will live or die because someone decided to play with the truth.