The chilling arrest of Bernadette Spofforth

‘Ali Al-Shakati.’ That was the name that began to swirl around social media in the wake of the Southport stabbings on 29 July – when three young girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, and a horrified nation was starved of answers.

He was a small-boats migrant. He was on an MI6 watchlist. He was known to have mental-health problems. We now know none of this is true. A mixture of conspiratorial influencers, hard-right activists and trigger-happy tweeters shared what turned out to be lurid untruths, the provenance of which are still unclear.

One of those accounts was @Artemisfornow, bearing the name Bernie. It belongs to Bernadette Spofforth, a businesswoman from Cheshire who in recent years has made a name for herself as an anti-lockdown, anti-Covid-vaccine, anti-Net Zero influencer. @Artemisfornow has just shy of 60,000 followers on X. She lost a previous, far larger account in the Covid wars.

‘If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose’, Spofforth tweeted, on 29 July at 4.49pm, sharing all the aforementioned details about ‘Shakati’, the fictional killer. For this, she was arrested at her home on 8 August, on suspicion of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ and sending ‘false communications’. In Spofforth’s telling, she was held by police for 36 hours.

Thankfully, common sense has prevailed. Yesterday, we learned that no further action will be taken against Spofforth on account of ‘insufficient evidence’. But we’d do well to work out how we ever got into this position in the first place – in which an untrue, thoughtless, inflammatory tweet lands someone in a cell.

Make no mistake, her tweet was all of those things. I have zero time for crank and crank-adjacent accounts like Spofforth’s, which will happily share any old bollocks without any corroboration, purely because it fits a certain narrative. I’m often struck by the credulity of so many prominent ‘sceptics’ and ‘free-thinkers’. They are giving actual sceptics and free-thinkers a bad name.

Had Spofforth done a bit of Googling she might have discovered that MI5, not MI6, deals with domestic terrorism and that ‘Shakati’ roughly translates as ‘my apartment’ in Arabic. (She insists she was not the original source of the claims, but at the very least she appears to have been central to spreading them.)

Spofforth deleted her tweet an hour later, offering up a series of conflicting accounts as to where she got the information from. On X, she said she was told by someone on the ground in Southport. She later told The Times she stumbled across it on X. In short, she’s hardly a trustworthy source of news.

But that’s not the issue here. The issue here is freedom of speech, and the simple, hitherto uncontroversial position that the police should not be going after people for talking bollocks on the internet. If we were to pursue all such cases with as much vigour, the criminal-justice system would grind to a halt, even more so than it already has. We’d certainly need a lot more prisons.

When we invite the state to punish statements that it deems to be false we empower it to be an arbiter of truth. We also chill public discussion. We encourage not just big conspiratorial accounts, but also everyday citizens to ‘Think before you post’, as the government’s X account infamously warned during the recent riots.

Those riots, sparked by the Southport killings, are being held up as justification for clamping down on the misinfo merchants. Claims the alleged killer was a Muslim migrant – he is actually a young Brit of Rwandan heritage – undoubtedly fanned the flames of the vile, racist violence we saw explode in Southport, across England and in Northern Ireland, where mosques, immigrant areas and asylum hotels were attacked.

But the notion that Spofforth – or that Pakistan-based ‘news’ website, Channel3Now, which later picked up the claim and gave it a sheen of journalistic credibility – is somehow responsible for the violence of others is ludicrous. It also sets us on the slipperiest of slippery slopes, whereby speech can be criminalised because of its potential to stir up trouble.

There’s a reductionism to it, too. As if rumours didn’t exist before the rise of social media and outbreaks of racial violence, fuelled by fear, loathing and untruths, have never happened before. (Reportedly, the claim the killer was a Muslim migrant was already circulating on the ground in Southport when Spofforth waded in.)

In truth, it is the attempts by the authorities and social-media firms in recent years to control the flow of information that have created a more receptive audience for wild claims made by questionable characters. The deplatforming of lockdown sceptics during the Covid era. The tendency after terror attacks to withhold information for fear of the public reaction. All of it has fuelled mistrust, shut down legitimate debate and boosted the profile of assorted grifters and cranks.

The riots are being used as a slam-dunk argument for the necessity of censorship. But this is perverse. Even with the best of intentions, censorship always ends up suppressing the truth and emboldening those who spread obvious nonsense. If we want reason to flourish in the social-media age, we need more free speech, more trust in the wisdom of ordinary people, not less.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater