They were arrested for posting during the riots – will it change anything?

At the time of the riots, I had wondered whether this could be the moment that finally changed the online landscape.

Now, though, I’m not so sure.

To make sense of the role of the social media giants in all this, it’s useful to start by looking at the cases of a dad in Pakistan and a businesswoman from Chester.

On X (formerly known as Twitter) a pseudo-news website called Channel3Now posted a false name of the 17-year-old charged over the murders of three girls in Southport. This false name was then widely quoted by others.

Another poster who shared the false name on X was Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old from Chester with more than 50,000 followers. She had previously shared posts raising questions about lockdown and net-zero climate change measures.

The posts from Channel3Now and Ms Spofforth also wrongly suggested the 17-year-old was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK by boat.

All this, combined with further untrue claims from other sources that the attacker was a Muslim, was widely blamed for contributing to the riots - some of which targeted mosques and asylum seekers.

I found that Channel3Now was connected to a man named Farhan Asif in Pakistan, as well as a hockey player in Nova Scotia and someone who claimed to be called Kevin. The site appeared to be a commercial operation looking to increase views and sell adverts.

At the time, a person claiming to be from Channel3Now’s management told me that the publication of the false name “was an error, not intentional” and denied being the origin of that name.

And Ms Spofforth told me she deleted her untrue post about the suspect as soon as she realised it was false. She also strongly denied she had made the name up.

So, what happened next?

Farhan Asif and Bernadette Spofforth were both arrested over these posts not long after I spoke to them.

Charges, however, were dropped. Authorities in Pakistan said they could not find evidence that Mr Asif was the originator of the fake name. Cheshire police also decided not to charge Ms Spofforth due to “insufficient evidence”.

Mr Farhan seems to have gone to ground. The Channel3Now site and several connected social media pages have been removed.

Bernadette Spofforth, however, is now back posting regularly on X. This week alone she’s had more than one million views across her posts.

She says she has become an advocate for freedom of expression since her arrest. She says: "As has now been shown, the idea that one single tweet could be the catalyst for the riots which followed the atrocities in Southport is simply not true."

Focusing on these individual cases can offer a valuable insight into who shares this kind of content and why.

But to get to the heart of the problem, it’s necessary to take a further step back.

While people are responsible for their own posts, I’ve found time and time again this is fundamentally about how different social media sites work.

Decisions made under the tenure of Elon Musk, the owner of X, are also part of the story. These decisions include the ability to purchase blue ticks, which afford your posts greater prominence, and a new approach to moderation that favours freedom of expression above all else.

The UK’s head of counter-terror policing, Assistant Commissioner Matt Jukes, told me for the BBC’s Newscast that “X was an enormous driver” of posts that contributed to the summer’s disorder.