I have a bit of a reputation of having fingers in lots of pies on West and South Dorset’s Facebook parallel reality. One observation: In the last few weeks there have been a rash of posts on community groups suggesting that “my teenage daughter” “was followed/stalked/made uncomfortable” and “the man doing it was black/had brown skin/hair”.
Read on to see just two of many others I know to be floating around. Watching the far right, they know that the biggest way they can stoke fear and hatred of those on the immigrant barge is to make the community fearful of people who might wish to harm their children.
This has been done before – in Knowsley, Liverpool where they managed to start a riot outside a hotel hosting asylum seekers. A video was made of a man of foreign origin propositioning a young woman, and falsely attributed Knowsley and therefore one of the immigrants in the hotel. Needless to say, fitting in with the Daily Mail’s agenda, said ‘newspaper’ reported it as fact.
Some journalists check their sources and are worthy of the job. As the Independent newspaper reported, “Police said they still have not identified the teenage girl in the footage and said that, although a man in his 20s was arrested on 9 February, he was “in another part of the country” and was not living at the Suites Hotel.”
The images that follow may indeed have truth in them. My own observation as one who trawls (and trolls!) an awful lot of community pages, is that there has been a spate of them in recent weeks. It would have been highly unusual before the start of July this year, with a maximum of 1-2 even a year. This happens to coincide with the loading of the immigrant barge on Portland with immigrants.
Not everything you read in social media is true, especially when there is a reason for the far right to stoke hatred and fear in the community towards asylum seekers.
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