Connect with us

Published

on

The narrow medieval streets and canals of Strasbourg in France, on the border with Germany, have little in common with Southport in the UK. Yet the stabbing of three little girls there resonated for one man here. And his subsequent posts on social media resonated around the world – and back to the UK

In a business park on the edge of town, Silvano Trotta runs a successful telecoms business. But from his large private office, filled with miniature cars and pictures of his family, he spends much of his time posting online.

He came to prominence during COVID, publishing anti-vax posts, and getting banned from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, before subsequently being reinstated on Elon Musk’s rebranded X, where he posts mainly about immigration.

Silvano Trotta in Strasbourg, France. Pic: Sky News
Image:
Silvano Trotta in Strasbourg, France. Pic: Sky News

Trotta is bespectacled, genial, and unafraid of controversial views.

When the Southport stabbings happened on 29 July, he posted false information to the messaging app Telegram that they were carried out by an immigrant who had arrived on a small boat and gave the false name Ali Al Shakati. Our investigation shows that his post was one of the most influential of any of those making similar misleading claims on Telegram.

Silvano Trotta's post spread misinformation about the Southport suspect's name.
Image:
Silvano Trotta’s post spread misinformation about the Southport suspect’s name.

Trotta shrugs it off when I point out that this was entirely false.

“Who doesn’t make mistakes? But whatever happened, he is still a migrant, even if he was born in Wales.”

I’ve come to Strasbourg because what happened here is crucial to understanding what happened in the UK riots.

Strasbourg, France. Pic: Sky News
Image:
Strasbourg, France

We’ve worked with Prose, an open-source intelligence start-up, to understand the online conversation around Southport on Telegram, the app where the stabbings were discussed, the narrative was developed, and the riots were organised.

Previous reporting has highlighted specific pieces of misinformation that fuelled the riots: the fake name from news publisher Channel 3 Now, which they subsequently retracted and apologised for, and the individual bad actors in Telegram groups abroad.

But now Sky News can reveal the full story.

Far right cheshire prose
Image:
Sky’s Tom Cheshire examines the data with Prose boss Al Baker

Prose monitors more than 10,000 extremist and conspiracist groups on Telegram, every day collecting and archiving everything they post. Together, we looked at how active those groups were around Southport, starting on the day of the stabbings and for two weeks afterwards, looking at 11,051 total messages from 1,496 different chats and channels.

And what we found belies the idea that this was just a British reaction to a British issue. Out of the top 20 most influential accounts, in terms of reach, views and interaction, only six were from the UK. The rest were based abroad.

Out of the top 20 most influential accounts, in terms of reach, views and interaction, only six were from the UK.
Image:
Out of the top 20 most influential accounts, in terms of reach, views and interaction, only six were from the UK.

“While all the action is happening on the ground and people in Britain are dealing with the consequences of this misinformation,” says Al Baker, managing director of Prose, “the people stoking the violence, the people flooding Telegram and other platforms of misinformation are largely based outside the UK.”

What it shows is the nature of the new far-right – not a tightly organised hierarchy based in a specific location, but an international network of influencers and followers, working together almost like a swarm to stir up trouble.

And it is extremely worrying for the security services. The head of MI5 Ken McCallum last week told Sky News that, compared to traditional radicalisation, the extreme right instead relies on a “pick and mix ideology” where people pull on hatred and misinformation from mostly online sources.

Rather than specific organisations, it is, he said, a “crowd-sourced model”.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum. Pic: PA
Image:
MI5 Director General Ken McCallum. Pic: PA

Bristol, Saturday, 3 August and the streets were seething. A confrontation between protesters and counter-protestors turned into a running battle, first at Castle Park, and then down to the bridge below. Police horses repeatedly charged the rioters. They threw bottles back: I got one in the head while I was reporting.

Protesters face police during a riot on 3 Aug that took place in Bristol after the Southport incident. Pic: AP
Image:
Protesters face police during a riot on 3 August that took place in Bristol after the Southport incident. Pic: AP

The skirmishes continued outside the centre, up towards a hill and a hotel which houses asylum seekers. Eventually, it died away.

Those who took part though were left with the consequences: several were sentenced to years in prison. But they were not far-right extremists, as is traditionally understood.

“The unrest has been fuelled by disinformation that has been circulating, particularly on social media,” the judge said in his remarks.

One of those convicted for violent disorder was Dominic Capaldi, 34. He handed himself into the police.

Capaldi’s neighbour David Lomax told us that he “is just a caring bloke and a very quiet chap”.

“He got dragged into it somehow, and he didn’t realise what he was getting dragged into.

“And a lot of these people that do all these things, they don’t come from Bristol.”

Inciting those on the ground was a specific goal of the online far-right, according to Mr Baker, at Prose.

“These are communities which are expressly specifically and in a very dedicated and organised fashion devoted to exploiting racial divisions internationally,” Baker says.

“Any incident which could plausibly involve an immigrant, a Muslim, someone who isn’t white, regardless of whether in fact they did it or not, these communities are going to kick into action and try and stoke up division and racial hatred.”

This network map shows how those groups interact.

The points in the red cluster are UK-based, English-speaking accounts on Telegram, during the two weeks after the Southport murders. And they’re dwarfed by other groups. The purple is non-UK-based English-speaking accounts. Orange shows German, for example. Dark blue is pro-Russian accounts. Below them, in yellow, are Russian-speaking accounts.

And although the online far-right may be more shapeless, less structured, than the traditional version, it still contains the hardcore element.

“There are very extreme groups who routinely funnel information into these broader networks who were clearly, specifically, indirectly trying to incite a race war on the back of the Southport murders,” Mr Baker from Prose says.

Al Baker, the managing director at open-source intelligence firm Prose. Pic: Sky News
Image:
Al Baker, the managing director at open-source intelligence firm Prose. Pic: Sky News

“The core of these communities are very serious people, including members of proscribed terrorist organisations, extreme neo-Nazi groups. The word ‘Nazis’ and the word ‘fascist’ is overused.

“But when I describe the groups that were influencing the tactics and the targets of the rioters, these are fully paid-up neo-Nazis who want to see the extermination of non-white people.”

Along with Telegram, X was also used to fuel the riots.

Here, research shared exclusively with Sky News by Ned Mendez, director of consultancy Clash Digital, found a similar emphasis on non-UK accounts. The most widely shared and retweeted content on Twitter/X during the initial three days of the unrest was primarily authored by non-domestic accounts from the USA and Europe, which repurposed local incidents to push inflammatory and divisive content into the UK discourse.

Jacqui McDonald, a freelance journalist who filmed the vigil after the Southport stabbing.
Image:
Jacqui McDonald, a freelance journalist who filmed the vigil after the Southport stabbing

Jacqui McDonald knows exactly how that works. She’s a freelance journalist who was covering a vigil in Southport the day after the attack and posted a video of the crowd that gathered to mourn together.

Amy Mek, an online influencer based in the US and known for promoting anti-immigration views, ripped Ms McDonald’s video and reposted it with her own comments, in which she said the Islamic community usually “swarm the streets” and “seize control of public spaces”.

This was the single most widely shared piece of content on X during the unrest. The original video earned 11,000 views; the repurposed content got 5.5million views in a few days.

I meet Jacqui in the square where she filmed the vigil. Tributes to the girls still stand – dolls tied to lampposts, handwritten cards in the flowerbeds. I show her Amy Mek’s post on X.

“It wasn’t true at all to what was happening in her language, the inflammatory use of what she was saying and the way she framed that video wasn’t what we were seeing in front of us,” she says.

“We were seeing a respectful, peaceful, quiet vigil for those children who had died that day.”

That is one of the tragedies of the riots, that they eclipsed the grief the town felt – and still feels.

A scene from the vigil filmed by Jacqui McDonald
Image:
A scene from the vigil filmed by Jacqui McDonald

Read more from Sky’s Data and Forensics team
How the far right hijacked Southport protests

Far-right outnumbers anti-racist movement on engagement

We asked several accounts for comment, including Amy Mek. She told us she rejected the labels far-right, hard-right and conspiracist, saying these were based on “biased generalisations” and added: “I unequivocally reject any form of violence that took place during the riots.”

She said Jacqui McDonald’s video had been sent to her as a tip and had assumed that the person who sent it had taken the footage. She said she was upset to hear it had originated from a freelance journalist and would ensure they received proper credit, along with a public statement.

“Just as I had no control over how the tipster’s video came to me without proper attribution, I also had no control over how others used or interpreted my content,” Mek said.

We also approached X but received no reply, while Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughan told us: “Telegram is not a place to spread violent content. Moderators removed UK groups and channels calling for violence when they were discovered in August…

“To dissuade criminal misuse of Telegram, IP Addresses and phone numbers of criminals who violate our rules can be disclosed to the authorities in response to valid legal requests. We are ready to cooperate with the UK government through the appropriate channels.”

The concern is that it may all happen again, that the online far-right remains active – as the head of MI5 warned – and that this wasn’t a one-off but a playbook, one that will be more effective next time.

“Large swathes of the online far-right see Southport as a missed opportunity,” Mr Baker says. “There is a huge amount of recrimination, people blaming one another for how quickly the riots fizzled out.”

“And I think we should be very concerned that they’re not going to make the same mistake twice.”

Southport is a memorial – and it is a warning.

Southport tribute

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Continue Reading

World

Iran’s response to Israeli strikes a ‘matter of principle’, ambassador to UK says

Published

on

By

Iran's response to Israeli strikes a 'matter of principle', ambassador to UK says

Iran’s response to Israeli attacks on its nuclear facilities is “self-defence” and a “matter of principle”, the Iranian ambassador to the UK has told Sky News.

Speaking exclusively to The World With Yalda Hakim, Seyed Ali Mousavi said the “barbaric Israeli regime” is “violating international law” – describing Israel’s actions in recent days as “an act of aggression against the Iranian people”.

The conflict between Israel and Iran – once played out in a series of proxy wars – has escalated in the past three days.

Follow Israel-Iran conflict live

Sky's Yalda Hakim spoke to Iran's ambassador to the UK, Seyed Ali Mousavi.
Image:
Sky’s Yalda Hakim spoke to Iran’s ambassador to the UK, Seyed Ali Mousavi

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Israel-Iran: How the conflict escalated

On Friday morning, explosions hit Tehran as Israel carried out a major attack on its top army leaders, nuclear sites, and nuclear scientists.

Iran threatened “severe punishment” and quickly retaliated with a wave of missiles.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Missile aftermath in Israel

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Israeli missile hits warehouse in Iranian city

When questioned about whether Iran could continue fighting Israel, the Iranian ambassador told Yalda Hakim that “it is a matter of principle”.

He said: “This is about self-defence, there is no doubt about it.

“We are a responsible member state of the UN and we do all activities according to our international obligations.

“Any activities are only in the framework of self-defence.”

Damage from an Iranian missile attack to a building in Bat Yam, Israel. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Damage from an Iranian missile attack to a building in Bat Yam, Israel. Pic: Reuters

Explosions over Jerusalem
Image:
Explosions over Jerusalem on Sunday

He added that his country would “do our best to preserve our territorial integrity”, and that “with the help of God”, Iran will “materialise endeavours concretely against our enemy – the Israeli regime”.

Mr Mousavi also told Hakim that Iran’s nuclear activities are “monitored”, and that recent comments by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were “politically motivated”.

Read more here:
How conflict between Israel and Iran unfolded
UK advises against all travel to Israel
Explosions over Jerusalem as missiles ‘detected’ by IDF

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Missiles have also been seen over Tel Aviv

The UN nuclear watchdog’s board of governors found Iran was not complying with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years.

Iran said it has “always adhered” to the safeguarding obligations laid down by the watchdog.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Iranian ambassador reacts to strikes – full interview

Announcing Operation Rising Lion on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Iran had recently taken steps to weaponise enriched uranium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons.

But Mr Mousavi stressed that Iran’s “peaceful activities” at its “nuclear fields” were only for the “generation of electricity, and other peaceful” things.

Iran was due to continue its round of negotiations with the US in Muscat – however, this was cancelled, given recent tensions.

Continue Reading

World

UK government advises against all travel to Israel

Published

on

By

UK government advises against all travel to Israel

The government is warning people not to travel to Israel under any circumstances, as the country’s missile exchange with Iran shows no sign of abating.

On Friday, the Foreign Office warned against “all but essential travel” to most of Israel.

The areas around Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights were already classed as red zones, with warnings to avoid travel to these areas.

But the government has now updated the warning for the remainder of the country to red.

Follow live: Tehran and Israel exchange strikes

This puts Israel on the same level as Iran, and the change of advice is also likely to impact travel insurance.

However, with Israel’s airspace closed, it is unlikely many people will be attempting the journey, and Israel’s national airline El Al has announced it is cancelling flights to and from many European cities, as well as Tokyo and Moscow, until 23 June.

The change in travel advice comes after a second night of ballistic missile barrages from Iran following Israel’s attack in the early hours of Friday morning.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

An eight-storey residential building in Tel Aviv was hit by a missile last night.

On Sunday morning, Israel’s health ministry said 12 people had been killed over the past day, taking the total since Friday to 15. It also said 385 people had arrived at hospital with injuries overnight.

Iran has not provided a total number of deaths or overall casualties, but has claimed dozens have been killed.

Iran’s health minister has said most of those injured and killed in Israeli strikes were civilians. According to comments carried by news agency IRNA, he said the majority were women and children.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

The chancellor said UK forces could “potentially” be used to help defend Israel.

Read more:
UK military could ‘potentially’ be used to defend Israel
Nuclear threat wasn’t the only reason Israel attacked Iran
What are Iran’s military capabilities

What is the UK doing?

The UK government is sending military assets, including fighter jets, to the Middle East.

While the prime minister would not confirm to reporters that UK forces could be used to defend Israel from future Iranian attacks, the chancellor told Sky News earlier that the government is “not ruling anything out”.

Speaking to Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, Rachel Reeves said sending military assets to the Middle East “does not mean that we are at war”, and emphasised that “we have not been involved in these strikes or this conflict”.

“But we do have important assets in the region,” she continued. “And it is right that we send jets to protect them. And that’s what we’ve done. It’s a precautionary move, and at the same time, we are urging de-escalation.”

Pushed on the question of what the UK would do if Israel asked for support with its operations, the chancellor replied: “I’m not going to rule anything out at this stage. It’s a fast-moving situation, a very volatile situation. But we don’t want to see escalation.”

Continue Reading

World

Helicopter carrying Hindu pilgrims crashes in India, killing seven people

Published

on

By

Helicopter carrying Hindu pilgrims crashes in India, killing seven people

A helicopter carrying Hindu pilgrims has crashed in India, killing seven people on board.

The accident happened within minutes of the helicopter taking off, officials said, on what should have been a 10-minute flight.

The helicopter was flying to Guptkashi, a prominent Hindu pilgrimage site in the Himalayas, from Kedarnath temple town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

It comes three days after an Air India flight crashed less than a minute after taking off from Ahmedabad airport in northwestern India, killing at least 270 people.

The helicopter, which was operated by private helicopter service Aryan Aviation, went down in a forested area several miles from the Kedarnath pilgrimage route at around 5.30am local time.

Officials said the crash was believed to have been caused by poor weather conditions.

Authorities say they have launched a search and rescue operation and are expected to review operational protocols for flights in the region.

More on India

The dead include the pilot and pilgrims from the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh and western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, according to officials. The bodies were badly burned in a fire that followed the crash, they said.

Smoke and debris at the crash site. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Smoke and debris at the site. Pic: Reuters

Tens of thousands of pilgrims visit Kedarnath, which is home to one of the four most sacred Hindu temple shrines, each summer. Many use helicopter services due to the difficult mountainous terrain.

Helicopter mishaps are not uncommon in the region, where sudden weather changes and high-altitude flying conditions can pose risks.

Earlier this month, a helicopter operating in the Kedarnath Valley made an emergency landing shortly after taking off on a highway due to a technical fault. The pilot was injured but all five passengers on board were unharmed.

In May, a helicopter crashed in Uttarkashi district, killing six people, including the pilot. One person survived.

Continue Reading

Trending