On a warm summer’s day in Southport, before the grief had even settled, the misinformation machine had already started churning. Hours after a fatal attack on a children’s dance class, the country was raw, frightened, and desperate for answers. But instead of facts filling that vacuum, social media filled it with venom. An account calling itself “Europe Invasion” posted that the suspect was a Muslim immigrant. The claim was false; police had already confirmed the suspect was born in Cardiff. But that did not matter. The post had been seen by nearly four million people before most people had even heard of the Southport attack. More posts followed, inventing a fake name for the suspect and claiming he was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK by boat the previous year. None of it was true. Yet all of it travelled further, faster, and with greater reach than any correction ever could. This is not a technical glitch or an unfortunate accident. It is a reflection of how news is now consumed and, more importantly, of how vulnerable our information ecosystem has become. The people spreading these lies know exactly what they are doing. They exploit fear, anger, and tragedy to seed divisions, and the algorithm dutifully amplifies their work.
Even the people at the very top of the platform are part of the problem. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has personally helped spread misinformation. In one particularly shameful episode, he reposted a fake headline styled to look like a genuine article from The Telegraph. The story claimed that Keir Starmer was considering building detainment camps on the Falkland Islands to free up prison space. It was nonsense, and it had originated from the co-leader of Britain First, a far-right group. Musk deleted the post after about thirty minutes, but by then it had already been viewed nearly two million times. Two million people had seen a lie before the truth could even put its shoes on. And this is the broader issue: false claims are not just appearing in dark corners of the internet. They are being given oxygen by the very people who control the platforms where these lies live. When the owner of a major social media network shares a fake story, it normalises the behaviour. It tells users that misinformation is acceptable, that truth is just another opinion, that whatever confirms your worldview is worth believing. That is a deeply dangerous message, especially when society is already struggling to agree on basic facts.
Let’s put some numbers on just how widespread this problem has become. According to a recent Ofcom report, almost 96% of UK adults consume news in some form. That sounds reassuring until you realise that 51% of them get their news from social media. Facebook is the most popular platform, with 30% of people relying on it. But it is young people who are most dependent on these untrustworthy sources. Eight in ten 16-to-24-year-olds use online platforms to get their news, and three-quarters of them say social media is their main source. Perhaps most concerning of all, X has become the leading platform for 12-to-15-year-olds when it comes to heavyweight topics like politics and current affairs. Think about that for a moment. Children are going through the most formative years of their lives, trying to understand a complicated and frightening world, and the information they are getting is coming from a platform where falsehoods run rampant. They are not being informed; they are being manipulated. And the manipulation is not accidental. The very design of these platforms encourages it. Algorithms do not care about truth. They care about engagement. Content that shocks, angers, and frightens people keeps them scrolling, and misinformation is perfectly engineered to do all three.
The scale of the problem goes far beyond individual posts. The Social Market Foundation, with support from the BBC, analysed over 125,000 posts across local Facebook groups, X searches, and Nextdoor communities. The findings were alarming. Two in five local Facebook groups contained at least one piece of misinformation in their last thousand posts, while on X, that number was more than four in five. If you focus specifically on news-related content, the picture gets even worse: around 4% of news posts on Facebook were misinformation, but on X that figure was over one in four. This is not just a national issue either. During a recent by-election in Gorton and Denton, analysis of just four local Facebook groups found that 7.3% of news-related posts were false. And across the UK in May, in areas holding local elections, the share of news-related misinformation jumped from 8.2% to 12.9% in the weeks before polling day. That is a 56% increase. In other words, at the exact moment when people need reliable information to make important decisions, misinformation becomes more common, not less. It is a coordinated assault on democracy itself, and it often happens in the spaces where people are least likely to expect it, and therefore most likely to believe it.
Misinformation is no longer just text and screenshots either. Artificial intelligence has opened an entirely new front. Take the case of Wakefield councillor Armaan Khan. He and his colleagues were digitally edited into a photograph showing them standing next to a housing estate. The original image showed the group standing beside open fields. The fake image made it look as though they were proudly supporting something they had actually opposed. This is the new reality. It is no longer enough to question whether a story is true; now we have to question whether a photograph was ever taken, whether a voice recording is genuine, whether a video is real. But the deeper issue behind all of this is structural. X’s algorithm is designed to recommend content based on what you have engaged with before. As the company’s own help centre explains, “The choices you make when using X, such as the accounts and topics you follow and the lists you create or join, help determine the content you see.” That sounds harmless in theory. But if someone starts following political accounts, or clicks on one concerning story, the algorithm assumes they want more of the same. It feeds them a steady diet of increasingly extreme content. For a young person who is curious, anxious, or simply trying to make sense of a complicated world, that is a very dangerous rabbit hole to fall down.
The wider risk goes beyond any single post or platform. We are living in an age of rising populism, xenophobia, and racist rhetoric, and misinformation is the fuel that keeps those fires burning. When young people are constantly exposed to lies about immigrants, asylum seekers, and minority communities, those lies start to feel true. They shape opinions, harden prejudices, and normalise ideologies that have no place in a decent society. It is true that the platforms are not solely to blame. Our education system has failed to prepare young people for the world they now live in. Very few schools teach critical media literacy. Very few young people are taught how to fact-check a source, how to verify an image, or how to recognise the hallmarks of a manipulated story. That is a generational failure. But it is not an excuse for the tech giants to wash their hands of responsibility. We cannot simply tell children to be more careful when they are being bombarded with sophisticated, algorithmically targeted falsehoods at every turn. Moderation has to move faster than a repost. Safeguards have to be built directly into the architecture of these platforms, especially in a world where political divisions are widening by the day. The truth is not always exciting enough to go viral. It is not designed to trigger outrage or exploit our fears. But if we do not find a way to make it spread further than the lies, then the liars will keep winning. And in the end, we will all be left living in a world where reality itself is up for debate.