Website accused of helping to fuel riots with Southport misinformation denies being affiliated to Russia

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A website accused of helping to fuel racist riots in the UK by publishing false information about the identity of the Southport knife attack suspect has denied being affiliated with Russia.

Anger over the attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, in which three young girls were killed last week, quickly boiled over into mob violence after false claims that the 17-year-old suspect was a newly arrived asylum-seeker on an MI6 watchlist were seen widely on social media.

Despite Merseyside Police warning that claims about the suspect’s identity being rapidly proliferated by far-right accounts with large followings were false, and that the suspect had been born in Britain, riots later broke out in Southport on Tuesday before spreading to other towns and cities in subsequent days.

According to Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation researcher associate professor at Doha’s Hamid bin Khalifa University, there were at least 27 million impressions on social media posts as of last Tuesday stating or speculating that Monday’s attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner.

One such website which falsely named the suspect and claimed he was an asylum-seeker who arrived across the Channel in 2023 and was known to MI6 and local mental health services, was an outlet named Channel3 Now.

The channel’s post at 5:51pm on Monday featured an article on the attack racked up close to two million views on social media site X before being deleted.

Journalist Katharine Denkinson reported that the website purported to be based in the United States but appeared to have started out 12 years ago sharing Russian-language videos of men in cars before pivoting to US news five years ago.

An individual now claiming to be “management” at the website, and who replied to its official email address, has now told BBC News that the publication of the false name “shouldn’t have happened, but it was an error, not intentional”.

The individual, who gave their name as Kevin and said they were based in Texas at the site’s “main office” in the United States, reportedly refused give a surname or to reveal the identity of the site’s owner, who they claimed was worried “not only about himself but also about everyone working for him”.

Kevin claimed to BBC Verify that there were “more than 30” people in the US, UK, Pakistan and India who work for the site, and blamed “our UK-based team” for the article which has since been deleted.

They confirmed that the site previously purchased a Russian-language YouTube channel which focused on car rallies “many years ago” and later changed its name.

“Just because we purchased a YouTube channel from a Russian seller doesn’t mean we have any affiliations,” Kevin told the BBC. “We are an independent digital news media website covering news from around the world.”

It is not uncommon for YouTube accounts to be purchased by others seeking to quickly capitalise upon their existing following and then repurposed.

The Independent has approached Channel3 Now for additional comment.

Warning against diverting the focus from “key players in this disinformation campaign”, strategic communications consultant, Stephanie Lamy, warned last week that “there really is no solid evidence to date that Russia is behind Channel 3 Now.

Suggesting the website appeared to be an “automated traffic farm”, Ms Lamy added: “Blaming Russia, without any solid evidence is counterproductive. It shields local players from scrutiny and accountability. It discredits expertise and credits a foreign power with an OP it [at the moment] seems to not have instigated.”

Meanwhile, the violent disorder which erupted in Southport – believed by police to have been driven by non-residents – continued to spread to other towns and cities last weekend, with mobs chanting racist slogans and attempting to set fire to hotels housing asylum-seekers in Rotherham and Tamworth.

However, reports that far-right mobs were planning to target dozens of locations on Wednesday evening largely failed to materialise as anti-fascist demonstrators turned out in their thousands to oppose them.