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Title: UK Laws Are Not 'Fit For Social Media Age'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1937...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws
restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the
social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government
committee said in a report released Monday in Britain that highlighted how
unchecked misinformation stoked riots last summer. Violent disorder, fueled
by the far right, affected several towns and cities for days after a teenager
killed three girls on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in
Southport, England. In the hours after the stabbings, false claims that the
attacker was an undocumented Muslim immigrant spread rapidly online. In a
report looking into the riots, a parliamentary committee said a lack of
information from the authorities after the attack "created a vacuum where
misinformation was able to grow." The report blamed decades-old British laws,
aimed at preventing jury bias, that stopped the police from correcting false
claims. By the time the police announced the suspect was British-born, those
false claims had reached millions. The Home Affairs Committee, which brings
together lawmakers from across the political spectrum, published its report
after questioning police chiefs, government officials and emergency workers
over four months of hearings. Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to life in
prison for the attack, was born and raised in Britain by a Christian family
from Rwanda. A judge later found there was no evidence he was driven by a
single political or religious ideology, but was obsessed with violence. [...]
The committee's report acknowledged that it was impossible to determine
"whether the disorder could have been prevented had more information been
published." But it concluded that the lack of information after the stabbing
"created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow, further undermining
public confidence," and that the law on contempt was not "fit for the social
media age."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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