As a rule, I don’t react immediately to large scale mass casualty incidents. Not because I don’t care – but because I know what I am: a social media commentator, miles away from the scene, with no more access to facts than anyone else scrolling through fragments and guesswork. In those first chaotic hours – when even the police don’t have the full picture – who exactly am I to claim certainty?
Populist far-right agitators don’t seem to share that restraint though. They don’t need facts. They have fantasies. And fantasies travel much faster.
Of course, it’s inevitable someone will point out that I’m writing about the incident in Liverpool too. Aren’t I part of the problem?
And to this I’ll clarify that I’m not looking to add to the noise – I’m attempting to articulate the pattern. The far-right creates the spectacle. I’m simply holding up a mirror to it. Because every major incident now comes with a second act: the online frenzy. This one followed the script with near-mathematical precision.
The playbook in real time
Monday night was the perfect illustration.
A car drove into a crowd celebrating Liverpool FC’s title win. Forty-seven people were injured. Four of them were children. Within minutes, X was flooded with posts from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers heavily implying it was Islamic terrorism, or that this was a migrant who had launched an attack. Multiple accounts immediately demanded deportations. No evidence. No details. Just projection.
A few hours later, Merseyside Police confirmed the suspect was a 53-year-old white British man from Liverpool. Acting alone. No ideological motive. No terrorism.
Almost immediately, many of the same accounts that had been so loud in their certainty pivoted. Hard. Not to correct. Not to apologise. But to accuse the police of a cover-up.
In a single evening, they managed to convict an imaginary asylum seeker, sentence him, deport him – and then declare the real scandal was that the white British suspect was named too quickly.
That’s not concern, that’s content creation.
They accused the police of “protecting the narrative” and essentially moved from demanding answers, to demanding silence the moment those answers didn’t fit the script. But Merseyside Police had learned the lesson of Southport, when false rumours about a refugee suspect led to riots, mosque attacks, and real harm. This time, they tried to prevent a repeat by getting the facts out fast.
And for that perfectly reasonable decision, they were immediately accused of bias.
The point of this all is that the far-right agitators don’t want transparency, they want control: control of the story, the outrage, the emotional temperature of the nation. And when reality refuses to cooperate, they rewrite the script.
Liverpool was just the latest example
This pattern isn’t unique to Liverpool – it’s part of a much larger, more cynical strategy. Here’s what the far-right figured out that the rest of us missed: they don’t need to create problems to exploit them. They can just harvest them.
Take real systemic failures – decades of underinvestment, privatisation, and deregulation – and reframe them into something simpler, more weaponisable: it’s the fault of them.
Your children can’t afford homes? Not because we stopped building social housing (or houses in general), but because immigrants took them.
Can’t get a GP appointment? Not because of decades-long, real-terms cuts to NHS funding, but because immigrants are “overwhelming the system.”
Struggling to make ends meet? Not because of corporate hoarding or wage suppression, but because foreigners undercut you.
It’s brilliant, in a sociopathic way. They’ve made themselves the only ones allowed to “care” about working-class pain while pushing policies that would make it worse. They’ve also poisoned the well. Once they’ve planted a flag in a problem like housing or safety, anyone else trying to discuss real solutions gets dismissed as “woke” or “out of touch.”
The tell is always in the solutions. If housing is really the issue, why aren’t they demanding more building? If women’s safety really matters, why does it only surface when the accused is a Muslim man?
Because it was never about the problem and always about the scapegoat.
And the tragedy is that while they’re performing outrage for clicks, the actual issues get worse. Because solving them would kill the content stream.
What we’re actually choosing
So let’s return to Liverpool.
The populist right talk endlessly about “British values.” But apparently, those values don’t extend to the 47 people lying in hospital, and a vague feeling of disappointment that the attacker wasn’t foreign is now treated as some kind of moral stance.
And when the threat comes from inside the community, it’s framed as mental illness. A lone tragedy. Something unfortunate and personal. When it doesn’t, it’s terrorism, cultural rot, a national emergency.
This isn’t politics. It’s the industrialisation of resentment. Clickbait dressed up as patriotism.
We’re handing our public discourse over to those whose business model relies on keeping us angry, polarised and too distracted to ask harder questions. Like why a 53-year-old man drove into a crowd in the first place. We’re teaching the next generation that a victim’s worth depends on the attacker’s passport.
If your worldview only works when tragedy fits your prejudice, you’re not building a movement. You’re running a grievance factory. Every scroll, every share, every moment spent amplifying their manufactured outrage is another small victory for the algorithm that profits from our division. The 47 people in hospital didn’t choose to become content. We can choose not to consume them as such.
What you can actually do
We’ve identified the problem. So here’s what we can actually do about it – because wringing our hands while scrolling past isn’t a strategy. And before you ask: yes, I’m guilty of many of these things myself. I’ve quote-tweeted outrageous statements for the dopamine hit. I’ve shared speculation in those frantic first hours. I’m trying to do better, which is precisely why I know how hard it is.
Resist the algorithm
Don’t be the amplifier. Every outraged quote-tweet gives them what they want: reach. In those chaotic first hours, resist sharing speculation. Screenshot if you must respond, but don’t give them the metric. Police statements are slow for a reason.
Challenge your own circles
That uncle sharing Britain First memes? Your mate forwarding WhatsApp conspiracies? These aren’t strangers – they’re your people. Gentle correction from someone they trust works better than public shaming from strangers. “I saw this too, but turns out it’s not quite right – here’s what actually happened.”
Ask better questions
When someone shares outrage bait, don’t attack the source – question the logic. “If this is really about housing, what would actually fix it?” Force them to engage with solutions instead of just venting.
Support actual solutions
Channel that energy into something constructive. Volunteer with local housing groups. Support organisations doing real community work. Join campaigns for NHS funding. Make your concern for problems translate into action on problems.
Model better discourse
Share nuanced takes. Embrace complexity. Know when to walk away from bad-faith arguments. Show people what responsible commentary looks like by actually doing it.
The choice
Far-right agitators win when we’re all shouting past each other. They lose when we’re having actual conversations about actual solutions.
But it requires us to be better than the algorithm wants us to be.
Because while we’re debating their manufactured outrage, 47 people are still recovering in Liverpool hospitals. Children are still learning that some victims matter more than others. And real problems – housing, healthcare, community safety – still need fixing.
The choice is simple: we can keep consuming their content, or we can start creating something better. The people in Liverpool who are recovering from their injuries deserve more than becoming someone’s engagement metric.
They deserve us getting this right.
