After Dublin in November 2023, Southport and other English cities in August 2024, Belfast has now become the latest flashpoint of far right unrest and street violence. The pattern is by now familiar: following a horrific crime in which the alleged perpetrator is a person of colour, social media channels associated with the far right quickly amplify the story. In doing so, they often employ incendiary rhetoric and, at times, circulate distorted or outright false claims about the suspect’s identity, frequently portraying them as an undocumented migrant or a Muslim, even when that is not the case. Calls for protests follow, crowds gather, and what begins as demonstrations against immigration or “crime” frequently descends into vandalism, rioting, and indiscriminate attacks on ethnic and religious minorities. In the process, the wishes of victims’ families – who often call for restraint and an end to further violence – are largely ignored.

Those involved in these outbreaks are often convinced they are defending their country from “ethnic replacement”, Islamic extremism, or a perceived migrant “invasion”, driven by a belief that society has already crossed a point of no return. The belief that “civil war” in the UK, as Elon Musk wrote in a post on X after the facts of Southport, “is inevitable” is widely shared online. Yet the data paints a far less apocalyptic picture. Over the same period in which the share of foreign-born residents in the United Kingdom has increased significantly since the mid-1990s, crimes have generally declined. Correlation is not causation, of course, but there is no clear evidence of an increase in violent crime as a consequence of rising immigration.

The question, then, is why these eruptions of violence occur at all. There is no single, definitive answer. The reality is complex and multi-layered. Still, it is difficult to ignore the role of social media platforms in shaping perceptions of reality, amplifying emotionally charged, violent and polarising content through engagement-driven algorithms, often with limited safeguards against misinformation or manipulation.

In this already highly charged environment, a range of actors (driven by ideology, political strategy, or profit) pour fuel on volatility. Elements of the domestic far right, like Tommy Robinson, Conor McGregor and Nigel Farage, are often stoking grievances to mobilise support. Parts of the wider MAGA ecosystem in the United States also intervene in UK and Irish political debates, both because a shared language makes cross-border influence easier and because domestic polarisation can be exported as part of a broader ideological struggle. Elon Musk and his online following have likewise played a visible role in amplifying disinformation, narratives and disputes relating to the UK and Ireland, at times using them to escalate wider ideological confrontations over online regulation and free speech.

Foreign interference further complicates the picture. The US administration, which under Donald Trump has a difficult relationship with London about foreign policy issues – like the Greenland crisis, the Israel-US war against Iran and the war in Ukraine – has frequently engaged in commentary on British domestic politics with strong and questionable statements. Russian disinformation, meanwhile, has long been exploiting and amplifying internal divisions within Western democracies to weaken them, often finding willing or unwitting amplifiers in local political actors (notably, Tommy Robinson travelled to Moscow in June and has repeatedly expressed admiration for Russia).

To this cascade of fuel being poured onto the fire for ideological reasons, there is a further layer added for economic gain: polarising, often hateful and frequently misleading content is rewarded by platform algorithms through higher engagement, and a large number of “influencers” are willing to exploit this dynamic without scruples. One of the most well-known cases – but definitely not the only one – is that of Geeth Sooriyapura, a citizen of Sri Lanka, who describes himself as the “king of Facebook advertising”, and who has built an extensive network of English-language Facebook groups that reach millions of followers in Great Britain with xenophobic and racist content, and not infrequently outright false information, all for the purpose of generating and monetising engagement.

A solid democracy such as the British one thus appears to be the victim of a multiplicity of toxic phenomena. And, even worse, it seems surrounded by arsonists whose names, out of convenience or fear, are often not even spoken out loud.