The racist tweet shared on the evening of October 16 takes a video from a Mawlid (Milad un Nabi) celebration in Rotherham’s town centre in 2010 out of context to push harmful and racialised falsehoods that risk real-world violence to Muslims in Rotherham and beyond.

Circled is the old Alliance & Leicester bank which ceased to exist from 2011 onwards. The former Santander building has been vacant since 2014 in this part of Rotherham.

Another way to verify this falsehood is in its background – namely, the old Alliance & Leicester, which ceased to exist in 2011 after merging with Santander – the storefront has been vacant since 2014.

As of writing, the video accrued over forty-five thousand views, as some tweets in reply called for violence – including statements calling for the army to shoot them, racist conspiracies about ‘trojan horses’, to calls for mass deportations.

The investigation also unearthed a second racialised falsehood posted in reply to the above video and falsely claims to show the “changing face of Rotherham” over forty years, with the second image showing Muslims praying on the street in front of various police officers.

The origin of the historical photo is partly explained once again by YouTube. We traced its origins to a video montage of Rotherham in the 1950s and 1960s, first uploaded in 2014, where the image itself appears at the 2:58 timestamp.

Credit: YouTube/Billy244.

The image would later appear in a 2018 Rotherham Advertiser article about local history from Melvyn Jones and Michael Bentley.

Regarding the second image, that photo, taken on September 5, 2015, by local photographer Luis Arroyo, had captioned it, “Prayer time during the Rotherham Unite Against Fascism’s demo today.” As with 2021, in 2015 also, the image removed from its context became a lightning rod for anti-Muslim and Islamophobic agitators. Arroyo wrote on September 10, 2015, “It is a real shame all those negative comments flying about too.”

The men photographed were part of a broader anti-fascist protest in the town, one month after the racist murder of Muslim pensioner Mushin Ahmed.

That same day, Britain First, the far-right street defence movement arrived in the town, resulting in 800 police officers from forces nationwide attending.

The events of that day also drew attention to injustice and the subsequent acquittal of the Rotherham 12 – Asian men cleared of violent disorder charges for protecting their communities from the far-right in 2016 and 2018, with articles providing further context appearing that year, addressing issues with policing and communities mobilising to support the twelve men.

Its false caption, “College Street, Rotherham, 40 years apart,” appeared on Twitter on the afternoon of October 17, before a day later, appearing with identical language on the social media channels of the far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson).

Tell MAMA has debunked various falsehoods that gained traction on Twitter, notably during the first national lockdown last year.

Update (19/10/2021): Following our investigation, Twitter has since suspended the far-right account holder who published the disinformation and removed a tweet that called on the army to shoot Muslims. It further demonstrates the importance of reporting such violent and harmful content, and we thank those who did.

We will continue to provide updates to this investigation where possible.

The post Debunked: far-right Twitter falsehoods about Muslims in Rotherham appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The video, which claims to show the police ‘ignoring’ long queues outside of a cash & carry store on Romford Road, in North-East London on April 17, first appeared online a month earlier, on March 17 – six days before the prime minister Boris Johnson announced strict lockdown measures.

Others have attempted to use footage filmed on April 14 at the same location to stoke racial tensions.

The March 17 video appeared on Twitter at 4:51 pm GMT, and was captioned, “Panic buy in very famous Asian departmental store, The Mina store in Manor park, London E12.”

We compared both videos, revealing that the tweet on the left, was taken on March 17, six days before the lockdown was introduced. On the right, is from a far-right user, using the same video to claim that it was filmed on April 17.

On the evening of April 17, the re-purposed content shared from the Twitter and Telegram accounts of a far-right activist which had gained over five-thousand views on both platforms, dwarfing the 202 views of the original video, which had reflected a moment in time when panic buying made headlines nationally.

On Twitter, the far-right @DawkinsReturns account, shared the re-purposed video with the caption ‘Social Distancing?’ but on Telegram, however, used racialised language to describe the minority ethnic groups featured as the ‘new British’. This user has previously shared anti-Muslim and far-right conspiracies on Twitter, including accusing a Muslim woman of ‘taqiyya‘ and sharing a video discussing demographic change captioned “Britain first live talk on demographics and the great replacement theory.”

The latter far-right conspiracy inspired the white supremacist terror attacks in New Zealand which left 51 Muslims dead last March (and inspired further acts of racist terror in various countries).

Other Twitter accounts would copy the text of this Telegram post, and when combined, had gained almost two-thousand retweets, as the video gained over 50,000 views from both posts.

Tell MAMA continues to urge Twitter to revise its policies and allow users to report tweets designed to mislead and stoke racial and religious hatred. Academics have made similar arguments and warnings.

This problem has intensified during the lockdown, as Tell MAMA has highlighted other examples in recent weeks. Nor is the issue isolated to the UK, as viral falsehoods have gained traction in the United States and India.

The post Far-right fakery: video of panic buyers queuing filmed 6 days before coronavirus lockdown began appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The tweet, which appeared on the platform at 9:43 am on March 25 from a far-right account (which also promotes antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracies, including the far-right obsessive interest in the obscure concept of taqiyya) has gained over sixteen-hundred retweets as of writing.

The tweet tried to claim that the Muslims were ‘arrogantly’ ignoring medical advice. But after researching the origins of the video, after several members of the public reported the tweet to our service, Tell MAMA can confirm, with a high degree of confidence, that the video is several weeks old, a version of which appeared on Facebook on March 3. Photographs, however, uploaded to the platform on February 28, shared in a negative review of Wembley Central Masjid, from a Muslim man, had lamented how the mosque had been closed for six weeks (over an internal dispute), adding that Friday (Jummah) prayers had to take place on a pavement in the rain.

Six days before the viral anti-Muslim and Islamophobic tweet from the @FormerWorshiper account, the mosque had announced on Facebook that it had suspended all congregational services and activities, reflecting the updated governmental advice regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

Credit:Facebook/WembleyCentralMasjidOfficial

Tell MAMA urged users to report the inflammatory tweet yesterday afternoon.

We encourage people to report this misleading tweet, the video, from our initial research, is several weeks old (if not older) and was filmed *before* the advice on social gatherings changed. This is not a new video. And is generating anti-Muslim and Islamophobic responses. pic.twitter.com/DMesZlLLHO

— TellMAMAUK (@TellMamaUK) March 25, 2020

Others have done the same, writing, “FAKE. It hasn’t rained in London in days. Also, look at this racist’s timeline and report it.”

Various Twitter users also highlighted the lack of rain in London (as the video was filmed during in rainy conditions), and condemned its deliberate stoking of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic tensions.

Some were taken in or emboldened by the propaganda, writing, “How about they are arrested & deported for breaking the curfew!!! Remind me, who rules Britain?!!!”. Others called for the police to disperse an event which had occurred weeks prior, as one user even responded that the army should intervene. More ideologically motivated accounts added that Islam should be banned.

Several far-right channels on the encrypted messaging app Telegram would share a GIF of the video, including Britain First, hours later, gaining several thousand views.

We have urged Twitter to revise its policies and allow users to report tweets designed to mislead that stoke racial and religious hatred. And make that request again.

In an effort to promote social media and internet research skills, we have released an educational video for communities.

We've developed some practical tips in spotting and countering #fakenews, especially related to #COVID19.

Watch. Share. Educate. pic.twitter.com/pAcdTclUAP

— TellMAMAUK (@TellMamaUK) March 25, 2020

The post No, the Muslims praying in this video aren’t ignoring the coronavirus lockdown. It’s far-right fake news appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Hopkins, was, for a brief time, suspended from Twitter for breaching its hateful conduct policies, but the ban was temporary.

The tweet, posted at 9:31 pm on February 23, begins, “Beautiful Indian lady punched in the face by Muslim man in racist attack in Birmingham.”

Credit: Twitter.

Hopkins then offers a partial unattributed quote from Meera Solanki (the woman assaulted), who described how the man, described as Asian in police reports, approached them during dinner, as he “seemed to have a problem with me being an Indian girl with a multi-racial group of friends”.

Ms Solanki was punched and briefly knocked unconscious after attempting to stop the same man from directing his anti-Chinese racism towards her friend Mandy Huang. This individual had followed the women after they had left the restaurant and made comments towards Ms Huang like “take your f****** Coronavirus and take it back home“ and referred to her as a “dirty c***k”.

Katie Hopkins, of course, provides no evidence to show this perpetrator is Muslim, but her use of the hashtag ‘#LittePakistan’ serves two distinct and revealing functions: it racialises and stereotypes that Muslims in Birmingham are Pakistani (despite 8,681 British-Indians in Birmingham self-identifying as Muslim in the 2011 Census); and, from an ideological position, seeks to foster divisions between Indian and Pakistani communities, given her pro-Modi posturings last year regarding Kashmir. She appeared outside of the United Nations in Geneva with David Vance according to an interview with ANI News last September. Some, however, have questioned the veracity of Hopkins claim of speaking inside of the UN building.

Academics have documented, more broadly, how at around the same time, the European far-right had made solidarity visits to Kashmir, even after foreign journalists and politicians had been denied entry, following the scrapping of Article 370, which stripped the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its relative political autonomy, forcing it to abide by the Indian constitution.

This example of racialising Muslims, functions through the deliberate blurring of Asian and Pakistani communities, despite not all Pakistanis identifying as Muslim. In Birmingham alone, just over 6 per cent of British-Pakistanis self-identified with other religions (as 7,177 chose not to state their religion), including 597 Christians, 441 Sikhs, and 213 Hindus in the 2011 Census.

Credit: Nomis.

Racialisation, for other academics, concerns the process of identifying and stereotyping groups through cultural identifiers like religion and comes with spatial and geographic significance for discriminated groups. The idea of racialisation also “relies upon asserted inherentisms, and it reinforces cultural hierarchies and privilege.” Others argue that racialisation impacts Muslim men and women in gendered ways, as “Men are more likely to be viewed as if they are disloyal and a threat to national security.” Whereas for Muslim women, they argue, the hijab is ‘othered’ as a cultural oddity or threat, raising questions about national identity and loyalty. Discrimination in housing in education creates the racialisation of geographical space

Other examples of anti-Chinese and anti-East Asian racism following the coronavirus outbreak have included physical acts of violence, racial bullying in schools, discrimination (on public transport and in places of work), and microaggressions where individuals have moved away from them on public transport. Several universities have issued press releases condemning racism against their students.

A spokesperson for the Birmingham Chinese society has stated that abuse has always existed but some were using the virus as a pretext for racial harassment, abuse, and violence.

She explained: “We wear masks to protect others from our coughs and sneezes. Some wear them as protection against pollution. Some women wear them because they don’t want to be seen without make-up. We do it to protect others, not ourselves.”

Anyone with information about this ssault is urged to contact West Midlands Police by quoting the crime reference number 20BW/39330Q/20 if you have information about the assault by calling 101 anytime, or by using their Live Chat function (8 am to midnight).

The post Katie Hopkins: the viral power of an anti-Muslim falsehood on Twitter appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The company has taken welcome steps to counter electoral misinformation but falls short of other platforms in allowing users to flag and report false news stories.

Credit:Twitter.

The tweet was posted at 4:36 pm GMT on February 4, by the user @jjsmith1245, claimed that: “The ‘North London MUSLIM Housing Association‘ is building homes for, well, Muslims.  Supported by the Muslim Mayor of London, it looks like an entire little ghetto estate of brand new Muslim-only households is being created.”

Credit: North London Muslim Housing Association (NLMHA)

None of which is true, of course, as the North London Muslim Housing Association, welcomes applicants irrespective of background.

The Canadian far-right website Rebel Media made similar false claims about the North London Muslim Housing Association in July 2017, weeks earlier, the blog post cited by @jjsmith1245 first appeared online.

And the @jjsmith1245 account often shares far-right talking points on Twitter, including perverse anti-Muslim conspiracies such as the obscure concept of Taqiyya, which has also found mainstream credibility in the writings of the Times columnist and author Melanie Phillips.

It gained further traction when it was shared by the former Daily Express columnist and MEP Patrick O’Flynn, who tweeted that, “I’ve never got why ethnically and now religiously exclusive housing associations are permitted,” but was challenged in the replies, including from high-profile figures, including the journalist Fatima Manji and Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics at King’s College.

The erroneous tweet, from O’Flynn however, was not deleted as instead, a further tweet acknowledged the error, confirming that the housing association does indeed accept all applicants.

I'm told by @jdportes and others that such HAs in fact are signed up to accepting tenancy applications on an equal basis from all-comers. In which case only the names are exclusive (which I don't think is a great idea but that's a separate point). https://t.co/8uqg3N8wHg

— Patrick O'Flynn (@oflynnsocial) February 5, 2020

This clarification gained little traction when compared to O’Flynn’s original, erroneous tweet, which, as of writing, stands at over 230 retweets.

The original link shared by @jjsmith1245 and others directs users to a blog site called “England’s England” or “Christopher’s England”. For its obscurity, the website has published a plethora of articles steeped in conspiracist, racialised, and hateful content about Muslim and Jewish communities.

The blog cited by @jjsmith1245 first appeared online in June 2017, and, in that same month, another blog piece claimed that Muslim and Jewish communities control ‘most’ of the food chain in the UK, as both faith groups “brought with them the mentality of a return to the Stone Age”.

Years earlier, a blog post described how the notorious Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist David Irving had spent time in prison for “daring to speak freely and express himself and his views about the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust”. Other blog posts recycle the antisemitic canard about Jewish people and the media.

It claims that Islam is a “totalitarian political cult-like ideology” and speaks of “warring religion viruses, born of the inbred desert tribes of the Middle East thousands of years ago”.

One notable invective propagates ideas of resentment and victimhood politics, as it laments perceived examples of individual and social disadvantage, including, that it was legitimate, in their eyes, unfair of others to refer to him as a Brit as shorthand for British, but not to refer to someone of Pakistani background as a “P*ki”. As the previous Tell MAMA report highlighted: “A sense of victimhood underscores this intensification of emotion fuses with the power of myth-making to a broader cultural pessimism which is a feature of mainstream and more obscure far-right and radical right ideologies, and therefore, identifying the digital pathways which connect disparate far-right groups”.

In broader political terms, some academics have argued that a defining feature of the Trump campaign in 2016 was its reliance on ‘white victimised toxic masculinity’ – where segments of his supporters overlooked or disavowed their societal privileges by centring their belief of being ‘disrespected or violated by the political establishment,’ as proof of their apparent exclusion from politics.

The “Christopher England” page has its own Twitter account (@christopher_eng) where anti-Muslim and Islamophobic views are easy to find.

Nor is this the only recent example of old falsehoods gaining traction online.

Where appropriate, Tell MAMA has flagged tweets from the accounts of @christopher_eng and @jjsmith1245 for what it considers breaches of its hateful conduct policies.

The post How far-right fake news continues to go viral on Twitter appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Despite numerous debunkings in recent years, the story found a new life following a tweet from David Vance (@DVTAW), which boasts 145,000 followers, and benefits from a verified badge.

Credit: Twitter.

Vance linked to an obscure pro-Trump website which headlined their fake story, “Swedish child beaten by muslim immigrant for having blue eyes”.

This version of events, however, is as wilfully misleading as the previous iterations, hollowing out the facts of the Swedish-language news article, to further an anti-Muslim and Islamophobic agenda.

The @DVTAW tweet has gained just over 7,000 retweets, as journalists and others countering the falsehood, gaining prominence in the replies, as some responded with the discriminatory, hateful, and violent language such propaganda seeks to elicit.

Credit: Twitter.

Twitter reserves the right to remove the privilege of verified status to users who promote hatred against groups based on ethnicity, religious identity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Such conduct also breaches the company’s broader hateful conduct policies.

The implementation of such a policy, however, for a variety of far-right personalities and groups is, at best, inconsistent.

The enduring appeal of such conspiracist thinking is attached more broadly to what academics contend is a form of ‘group polarisation’, often a banal daily occurrence can in extreme cases, morph into behavioural changes: from adopting maximalist thinking of their previous beliefs, practising self-segregation, developing a mistrust of others, or increasing their potential for violence.

Conspiracy theories endure because they “reduce highly complex phenomena to simple causes”, creating false hierarchies of knowledge, where information deemed ‘stigmatised’, by ‘untrustworthy’ mainstream institutions, finds validation elsewhere, according to Professor Michael Barkun.

Following a failed political career in 2010, gaining a mere 1,856 votes for the Traditional Unionist Voice, and having his blog A Tangled Web removed from Squarespace for repeated breaches of its hateful conduct policies that same year, Vance has gained a much bigger audience on social media, which includes indulging the grotesque anti-Muslim conspiracy of taqiyya, and ideologically-driven conspiracies about the slow ‘Islamisation’ of the UK, as other tweets routinely link Islam to violence and terrorism. This racialised lens is extended to Muslims, who are painted more broadly as antisemitic, violent, or as sexual predators.

Vance has used his Twitter account to promote anti-Soros conspiracies, invoking the language of ‘globalists’. The Anti-Defamation League does not consider the term to be intrinsically antisemitic but it will adopt such connotations when applied to Jewish people, groups of Jewish people, or areas where Jewish communities live. On April 29, 2017, Vance tweeted that the then French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was “an open borders globalist Soros stooge”. Soros, born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1930, was 11-years-old when the pro-fascist government had begun deporting thousands of Jewish people to Nazi-occupied territories, and when the war ended, Soros was just 14. But it has not stopped years of rabid conspiracies about his alleged Nazi collaboration, none of which are true.

Other conspiracies placing Soros at the centre of political events and funding have become decidedly mainstream in recent years.

Nor is Vance’s blog site without its continued controversies, as a post by Peter Moore, uploaded on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2018, read: “Today is, of course, the day that many people tweet about something which happened long ago, far far away. “But we must remember”, they say. It’s pretty difficult to forget, since some people never stop banging on about the Holocaust, but lets remember”.

Other notable tweets from Vance include depoliticising the far-right, terroristic murder of Jo Cox MP, and pro-Assad and pro-Putin soundbites.

The popular transphobic slur “tranny” has appeared in multiple tweets from Vance.

He has posted flagrant falsehoods about the violent nature of the transatlantic slave trade, and the role of Britain, adding that “(UK) Africans should view this history with gratitude”, despite the vast financial sums, totalling £17 billion, given to slave owners in the UK as compensation.

On January 2, 2020, Vance liked a tweet in praise of a book he authored from a user with the logo of the neo-fascist British National Party, who boasted the username @destroylefties despite Vance tweeting years earlier of his disdain for the party.

Away from Twitter, Vance spent parts of last year speaking at the conference of the far-right For Britain Party and speaking alongside Katie Hopkins in Geneva, siding with the Modi government on Kashmir.

All the inflammatory and misleading content highlighted in this article remain on Twitter as of publication.

The post How a debunked anti-Muslim falsehood continues to endure appeared first on TELL MAMA.

What is clear is that Trump’s future is based on being a President for all communities and he cannot be seen to be partisan and divisive, which is easy to say, giving his penchant for 140 characters on Twitter and statements that have reduced trust in him from some minority groups, whilst lambasting mainstream press agencies in the US. His recent outburst at CNN for promoting ‘fake news’ left many aghast and showed a combative approach that does not instil and build confidence on a wider level. The more Trump is seen to be aggressive on camera, the greater the polarisation of opinions about him, not only in the US, but across the globe. This is not good for national stability and instability means that community tensions will come out to the foreground.

Nor can we simply write off Trump as someone who simply tapped into disaffection to win the Presidency. His ability to ‘speak to’ and play on the fears of marginalised white (and other) communities in the US, means that he has a base and an audience which he can rally when he wants and particularly when Trump can’t get his own way.

The next four years will certainly be turbulent, yet they will also be exciting. There is, however, one thing we can be certain of. America will continue to be divided along lines of race, economic deprivation and social exclusion. If Trump can reduce the impacts of the last two, he can start to try and address the deep racial divides that coarse within rural America. These are fault-lines that seem intractable, but with vision, energy, a willingness to listen and reaching out to communities, anything can be overcome.

So its “goodbye Obama” and “hello Trump”.

The post Trump’s Presidency Must be a Presidency for All appeared first on TELL MAMA.