Peter Menzies: Blaming social media won't stop the next riot

Excluding people from society and blaming TikTok for their thoughts isn’t going to enhance anyone's sense of belonging.

By: Peter Menzies

Social media is a problem but social media is almost always not the problem. 

Britain has of late fallen into a very un-British state of rioting and civil disorder accelerated by false rumours passed along on social media. (The rioting, and its direct cause and historical roots, was discussed at length by Andrew MacDougall in The Line last week). British political leaders think cracking down on what people can say on Facebook and TikTok — the modern public square — will help end the strife, alongside a massive police response across the whole of the U.K. In today’s Canada, which is far from the one many of us grew up in, politicians are also hoping new legislation will help society be more cohesive.  

We should avoid the temptation to recoil from the chaos in Britain and rush into more regulation of social media. The reality is that while Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok and others can magnify and accelerate both the good and bad in our cultures, mobs of enraged people have been hitting the streets armed with torches and pitchforks to fight monsters — real and imagined — since the dawn of time. 

The sooner media commentators and politicians get that through their heads and start addressing people’s feelings of cultural disconnection, the sooner social order will be restored in Britain. And the less chance there will be that Canadian cities will be similarly engulfed in scenes of street fighting between groups incapable of reconciling their differences. 

As recounted by McDougall last week, the direct cause of the disorder was a brutal murder of three young girls at a dance studio. Social media widely circulated false rumours that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who’d arrived in the country illegally — in fact, he was born British to Rwandan parents, and from a church-going Christian family. The attack on the little girls — and there are few acts more likely to inflame passions in any culture — was the match that lit the fire. But, as U.K. commentator Konstantin Kisin (himself an immigrant) put it, the gas was already in the air. 

“Britain has a stagnant economy that relies on cheap foreign labour and a population that is utterly fed up of (sic) mass immigration,” he wrote on X. “When I came to Britain in 1996, net *legal* immigration was around 55k a year. That's the number of people who come here *illegally* every year now.  

“We have a Muslim population, which like any large group is made up of all sorts of people. Most of them are decent and law abiding. But as a population the Muslim community has not integrated: more British Muslims joined ISIS and Al Nusra than the British army, per the Guardian and the New York Times. Google it.” 

“The white British population is in demographic decline. They are not having enough children, while immigrants and ethnic minorities have lots of children. Combined with mass immigration of 600,000-700,000 a year, most British cities now look unrecognizable. White Britons are already a minority in London and other major cities and will become a minority in the country itself within our lifetimes.” 

Some readers will see parallels in that description to Canada’s current state of social transition in which the institutional left has joined forces with aspects of the Muslim community in a series of blatantly antisemitic, pro-jihad demonstrations. Kisin’s words will make others among us uncomfortable, which is why — sooner rather than later — the nation needs to have a conversation about its demographic trends and future plans as a culture. Trite, intellectually vapid phrases such as “Diversity is our Strength” are simply failing to address the sense of cultural and social dislocation being felt by both newcomers and native-born Canadians. Refusing to air issues will make things worse. 

So far, the response from Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, and many in the U.K. establishment, has consisted of “tough on crime” messages denouncing protestors as “far-right” pseudo Nazis and racists. Starmer and others have avoided calls for calm while pointing at social media as the cause of all their problems — a debate further inflamed when X owner Elon Musk, ever so much the Bond villain these days, suggested civil war in Britain is inevitable. 

No doubt some of the protestors are properly described. But for many others, the causes are more complicated. If social media activity is anything to go by, excluding the politically and socially alienated from polite society and blaming TikTok for their thoughts isn’t going to enhance the sense of belonging necessary to actually run a functional and cohesive society.  

Such tactics didn’t work in the run up to Brexit. Nor did calling people in the U.S. racists for expressing legitimate concerns about illegal immigration calm waters there. Hillary Clinton’s characterization of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign only helped elect The Donald and confirm working-people’s suspicions of an indifferent and remote elite. Our own PM had his own version of that with his “fringe minority with unacceptable views” comments near the end of the pandemic.

Endlessly explaining to people that they misunderstand the reality of their own existence does not work. That ought to be clear by now. People in power don’t have to agree with them, of course, but they must at some point, to put it in modern terms, listen carefully and let them speak “their truth.” 

Social media companies absolutely need to be vigilant and aware of their power to allow mistruths to accelerate and become “truths.” But in the case of the recent violence, even if Facebook or Twitter did not exist, someone would have run into a local pub — the way emotionally-elevated people always have and always will — shouting his outrage over the murders and the nature of the accused killer. Ill-informed mobs, as they have throughout human history, would still have gathered. Word still would have spread by phone and email. Stones still would have been thrown, windows smashed and shops looted. Police would have been called upon to restore order and civic and spiritual leaders enlisted to assure calm. 

Britain’s Online Safety Act will soon come into force, as will Canada’s Online Harms Act. No doubt Meta and X will comply in the U.K. and suppress the speech that no one in authority wants spoken. Britons will continue to be arrested for writing things on Facebook that offend and are called hateful. In Canada, people will file thousands of complaints with the Human Rights Commission, seeking to have those who speak words with which they disagree punished financially and shamed socially. 

A cloak will be thrown over their, and our, problems. And everyone will pretend everything is OK. But it won’t be. It’ll just look that way. 

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