Musk's Riot Tweets Spur UK to Seek Tougher Online Rules | Hacker News Reader

Musk's Riot Tweets Spur UK to Seek Tougher Online Rules

bloomberg.com

14 pointsintunderflow8 comments

The protests were specifically organized by right wing groups using Telegram, not X. And the attendance at all of them has been relatively small to non-existent. The vast majority of the criminal activity has been on the "counter-protesters" who actually showed up.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-riots-london-...

Musk being an asshole and provocateur is nothing new. But it really seems outside of the shrinking influence of his platform and really not worth much time blaming him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

> The vast majority of the criminal activity has been on the "counter-protesters" who actually showed up.

Your source supports the notion that the counter-protests were better attended, but I can't see how it supports your assertion that they outdid the protests for criminal activity.

The point is that once you have a protest and a counter-protest, at that point it's pretty hard to tell who is who anyway.

> “We’ve got criminal damage, violence, weapons offences, football banning orders. These are criminal thugs. Any suggestion that they’re patriots, or they’ve got a cause that they’re protesting about is nonsense, and frankly, most of them are going to be charged with violent disorder and most of them are going to prison for a few years.”

The police interviewed in the article heavily imply that the vast majority of crime is being done apolitically by opportunists - how much they hate or love immigrants is fairly irrelevant - people are showing up just because there is a protest to smash and burn things.

The protests and counter protests basically happened independently on separate days. I haven't seen any reports of violence or disorder on the days of counter protests.

I think you have misread the situation. The police officer is noting that the instigators of the far right protest violence are probably motivated by simply wanting to cause chaos. That doesn't imply people who instigated or attended the peaceful counterprotests did. Indeed they seemed more motivated by wanting to prevent more chaos and violence.

Your link doesn’t support your claim that the criminal activity has largely been by counter-protesters. The major criminal activity has been assault on the police (over a hundred injured, much of it by identifiable people) and arson and attempted arson of hotels being used to accommodate asylum seekers, minority owned businesses, and mosques. Certainly, it’s hard to credit the idea that the arson is by counter-protesters.

In recent days, the counterprotesters have been a larger presence, but this was very much not the case in the early days, when most of the violence was.

Naughty Old Mr Car promoted a false and incendiary claim by the leader of one of the major far-right groups. This is clearly dangerous behaviour and likely to fan the flames; the most charitable view you could take is that he’s incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed address a large audience without adult supervision.

It is true that most of the serious organising by the terrorist groups involved was on the likes of telegram, but most of the mass-propagandising, like Musk’s retweet, has been on conventional social media.

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