“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.” These were the words of the satirist and social commentator Jonathan Swift more than three centuries ago, and rarely have we had more cause to reflect on his sentiment than this past weekend.
The killing of six people in a shopping mall in Sydney was awful enough, evoking the distressing imagery of unspeakable horror visiting an everyday scene. The period thereafter should be a time for reflection and empathy, but that’s not the way of the world today. We need to ascribe motives, draw parallels, and apportion blame, and social media now gives anyone with a smartphone and a following the means to rush to judgement, and the platform to disseminate misinformation and prejudice. Falsehood flies as never before.
Two people who are employed by mainstream media in the UK, the Talk Radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer and the Channel 4 presenter Rachel Riley, were especially quick to share their views on the Sydney killings. Hartley-Brewer saying it was “another terror attack by another Islamist terrorist” while Riley posted the assertion that this was part of a “Global Intifada”.
As we now know, this attack was instead a random and unfathomable act of violence, and both have retracted their posts. Although Hartley-Brewer’s climbdown – she didn’t delete her post sooner, she said, because she was “out and busy all day yesterday enjoying the sunshine with my lovely family” – will have struck many as less than gracious, and of course you might say the damage had already been done in terms of stoking anti-Islam sentiment.
Riley has 700,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and Hartley-Brewer has almost half a million, so these are not the posts of ignorant people with nothing better to do than sow division. Their posts have a mass circulation, and that is why it’s important to draw attention to their erroneous and potentially dangerous contributions to the public discourse. Yes, there were all manner of even more speculative and incendiary theses that did the rounds on X over the weekend – the suggestion that the perpetrator was a Jewish man called Benjamin Cohen was another which gained traction – but Hartley-Brewer and Riley are experienced enough to recognise that freedom of speech, a fundament of a civilised society, bestows a responsibility on all of us. The fomenting of racial tension is not a price worth paying for the right to say whatever you think.
For example, no newspaper with a similar reach to Riley or Hartley-Brewer would dream of publishing inflammatory statements without proper investigation, or to present conjecture as fact. I know that a call for reason and calm reflection on X is naive, because that, in Elon Musk’s universe, is not its purpose.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square,” Musk said, “where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.” No one would gainsay that, or dispute that a forum such as this should play a vital role in an era of instant and global communication.
But free speech has always had a limit, and we saw where it lies this weekend. The world will become an even more perilous and divisive place if there are no checks and balances or, seemingly, justice for those maligned on social networks. That’s why I make no apology for highlighting these two individuals when there were many, many more on social media equally guilty.
The fact is that Julia Hartley-Brewer and Rachel Riley, both experienced in the ways of the world, should know better. I don’t know what motivated them to respond so instantly – and incorrectly – to events in Sydney, but they should now take a pause to reflect that, in Swift’s words, their “tale hath had its effect”.
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