What happened was not just the spread of a lie. What happened in Southport was the activation of a perceptual environment already prepared to receive that lie.
The falsehood about the Southport attacker did not land in an empty space. It landed in an online world already saturated with images of invasion, replacement, contamination, endangered women, and righteous defenders.
The lie mattered, but it mattered because it plugged into a larger story people had already been trained to see.
That is where the concepts of percepticide and perspecticide become useful.
Percepticide is the destruction of perception. It is what happens when reality is not merely hidden but drowned, displaced, or overwritten by a more emotionally compelling substitute.
Perspecticide goes further. It is the destruction of independent interpretation. It narrows the field of possible meanings until one moral script dominates.
Some people are invaders. Some people are victims. Some people are defenders. Once that script is in place, events stop being read openly. They are absorbed into a ready-made drama.
A recent article by Beatriz Lopes Buarque and Nick Lewis helps explain how this worked in the lead-up to the 2024 riots in the United Kingdom. Their argument is not simply that X hosted harmful content.
It is that X’s recommendation systems likely amplified visual posts tied to racist conspiracy theories, especially the “great replacement” and “White genocide” narratives, and that these posts helped give the riots their emotional and moral shape.
In their analysis, the platform did not just circulate claims. It rewarded a particular visual grammar of threat.
That distinction is important to anyone looking at information warfare.
The false story about the Southport attacker was the immediate trigger, but it was not the deeper engine. The engine was a wider stream of content portraying Britain and Europe as places under siege from migrants, especially Muslims.
In that visual world, demographic change is not ordinary social reality. It becomes invasion. Diversity is not complexity. It becomes replacement. Public presence by racialised minorities is not citizenship or coexistence. It becomes occupation.
This is what makes the issue larger than misinformation in the narrow sense.
The problem is not only that something false was said. The problem is that an entire interpretive environment had already been built around racial fear, civilisational panic, and fantasies of threatened purity.
When the falsehood appeared, it entered a symbolic landscape where its meaning had already been prepared in advance.
The paper’s most important contribution to our understanding is that it tries to show mechanism, not just outcome.
The authors manually collected 622 posts from two X accounts active during the run-up to the riots, one linked to Britain First and another account operating under the name “Europe Invasion.”
They then compared conspiracy-themed posts to other content and found that posts visually representing racist conspiracy theories showed a stronger engagement-to-visibility relationship than other posts.
In plain English, that means the platform’s dynamics appear to have given this material extra lift.
That is not a small point. It suggests that the platform environment was not neutral with respect to the content moving through it. The most emotionally charged and shareable visual material appears to have been better rewarded than other forms of content.
This is exactly the kind of setting in which percepticide thrives. Reality becomes harder to perceive not because information disappears completely, but because emotionally loaded falsehoods and conspiratorial imagery become structurally advantaged over slower, duller, more reality-based accounts.
The paper also shows something else that should concern anyone paying attention to the future of information warfare. AI-generated images, though only a small share of the sample, drew disproportionately high attention.
This is important because synthetic imagery can do something text often cannot. It can compress a worldview into a single frame.
A crying White girl surrounded by racialised men. A burning city behind a White male figure positioned as defender. These are not just images. They are emotional instructions. They tell the viewer what is happening, who is guilty, who is innocent, and what kind of response feels morally justified.
That is where perspecticide enters fully.
The paper shows that much of this content cast racialised Muslim, Black, or Brown men as threats to White women and girls. At the same time, it repeatedly cast White British or European men as protectors, defenders, or last-resort actors forced to step in where institutions had supposedly failed.
The result is not merely a false interpretation of isolated events. It is a narrowing of interpretation itself. The viewer is no longer invited to think. The viewer is invited to occupy a role.
This is why riots of this kind cannot be understood as simple outbreaks of anger. By the time people arrive in the street, a large part of the moral labour has already been done for them.
The categories are in place. The enemies have been selected. The sense of urgency has been installed. Violence, in that framework, does not present itself as aggression. It presents itself as defence.
That is the real danger of algorithmically amplified conspiracy imagery.
It does not simply spread error. It reorganises the moral field. It constructs a world in which some people appear as permanent threat and others as permanent victims, while a third group is flattered into seeing itself as historically necessary.
Once that happens, we are no longer dealing with information alone. We are dealing with the construction of a political sensorium.
And that is why the language of free speech on its own is not enough. The issue here is not whether people are allowed to speak.
The issue is whether platforms built to maximise engagement are industrially scaling narratives that degrade shared reality and close down independent judgment.
If a system repeatedly rewards the most inflammatory visual expressions of racial panic, then it is not just hosting speech or even hate-speech. It is shaping perception.
Southport should be understood in that light.
Not as a one-off eruption of online rumour, but as a case study in how modern platforms can turn conspiracy imagery into a moral script for violence. The lie spread quickly, yes. But what made it combustible was the visual world waiting to receive it.
That is what percepticide looks like. Reality is displaced by a more emotionally satisfying fiction.
That is what perspecticide looks like. The space of interpretation contracts until only one script remains.
And once that happens, the road from screen to street becomes much shorter than people like to admit.
And now, you know.
Sources
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481251391636
https://nafoforum.org/magazine/percepticide-perspecticide-in-disinformation-a-crime-not-free-speech
https://nafoforum.org/magazine/codifying-percepticide-and-perspecticide-a-legal-framework-against-disinformation
