Creating false narratives is one of the scourges of our age. One trait of perpetrators is to attack those who call them out or warn of the dangers.
When the venerable London-based professor Fawaz Gerges warned that an attack on kids by a Syrian in Annecy, France, would become a rallying point for the anti-migrant lobby, there was a backlash from the right itself.
Prof Gerges was condemned by the former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney for his intervention. The professor was using his academic expertise to say that while little was known at the time, it was unlikely that this tragic incident was the product of extremism and should not, therefore, be harnessed to smear a whole class of people.
“The fact is that the suspect is a Syrian refugee and an asylum seeker will likely be used a great deal by the far right in France given the cultural wars and the questions of refugees,” he told a news channel.
Mr Daubney had minutes earlier himself tweeted a question about the same sort incident happening in the UK, where “at least 29 known terror suspects” have allegedly been drawn from the ranks of British asylum seekers.
The events in Annecy were easy to distil while little hard information was known. A video showed an assailant with a knife wearing a head covering and striding maniacally across a neat French park with some onlookers in pursuit. The French knee-jerk reaction could be recited by anyone who cared to speculate.
The vulnerable position of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers in France who are frequently the object of political hostility was thus made worse in a single afternoon. Whatever motivated the attacker, the aftermath of the stabbings is a salutary lesson in how close to the surface hostility to refugees now lurks.
It is not just limited to France, where the official opposition is the Rassemblement National (National Rally) party. In Germany the far-right AfD, which has just moved into second place in the polls, was also quick to tweet after the stabbings. It drew a link with a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg for an important decision on migration policies across the bloc.
The AfD is, of course, hostile to anything other than excluding all newcomers. Even the EU's embrace of rapid deportation agreed by its ministers has been seen by the far right as just a drop in the bucket.
The AfD message was that the ministers were discussing asylum without consequences, while a “Syrian asylum seeker stabs four small children”.
These are not stray comments. Some come from the right, and most flourish on the far right. As such, there is a society-wide issue exposed here at a time of crisis. At this point, more details are emerging about the suspect, who is said to be a Christian from Syria who spent years in Sweden, gaining refugee status there and then moving for an apparently unhappy period in France.
Tackling the social impact of distortion is a clear duty of governments. One positive example is the British government’s operation of a counter-disinformation unit. Its remit is to lead “the UK government’s operational response to disinformation threats online, and ensure the government takes necessary steps to identify and respond to acute misinformation (i.e. incorrect or misleading information) and disinformation (i.e. information which is deliberately created to cause harm) in areas of public interest,” according to the Cabinet Office website.
The unit traces its origins back to 2019, when efforts were made to ensure the European elections were not skewed by influence operations. The Brexit referendum in the UK three years earlier, and the cross-over fallout of the presidential election in the US that brought Donald Trump to power, is the context that originally defined the need for such an effort.
Its focus includes socially divisive issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic that saw the rise of anti-vaxxer movements and myriad conspiracies about lockdowns. What it does is to ensure fast tracking for allegedly dangerous content for moderation or deletion by social media firms, including Facebook and Twitter. A supplementary toolkit titled “Resist”is for tackling misinformation. The guidelines seek to set out the ground rules for operating in what the UK refers to as a “crowded information space” and is available online.
In other words, the expanding exposure to misinformation is a shared battle for governments, platforms and the public. The events in Annecy show how high the stakes are in getting it right.
