Not long after police finished their shifts after a weekend of violence, in the early hours of Monday morning anonymous members of the far-Right were already posting a hit list of new targets.
At 1.59am subscribers to a Telegram group – named Southport Wake Up – created by members of the far Right received a message flashing up on their phone with 11 fire emojis which said, “Wednesday night lads” in capitals.
“They won’t stop coming until you tell them,” it read. “No more immigration […] 8pm/mask up /spread this as far and wide as you can.”
What followed was a list of 39 locations, mainly immigration lawyers and centres, around the country ranging from Middlesbrough and Hull where there had already been violence to cities like Brighton and Oxford.
The list later appeared on other platforms such as Facebook and X, and some posts were viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
New “targets” were circulated in various far-Right Telegram groups before being made public elsewhere, sometimes through counter-protesters who had become aware of the plans and wanted to defend their communities.
Telegram has more than 550 million users worldwide and as well as communicating one-to-one, they can join groups of up to 200,000 people and “channels” with unlimited subscriber numbers.
The Dubai-based network was founded in 2013 by Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire, and his brother Nikolai.
Although the Southport Telegram group has now disappeared, the “hit list” prompted panic, with police warning of up to 100 far-Right demonstrations, following a week of violence outside mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.
MPs were advised to work from home, GP surgeries closed and shops were boarded up on Wednesday as almost 4,000 specially trained public order officers were deployed on the streets and 2,000 were placed on standby.
Police sources said intelligence suggested there were more than 100 far-Right gatherings planned and another 30 counter-protests expected across 41 of the 43 force areas in England and Wales.
In the end, the far Right was humiliated as most protests failed to materialise or only a handful of extremist sympathisers turned up. Instead, the majority of people standing outside immigration centres and lawyers offices were anti-fascist counter-protesters with around 5,000 alone turning out in Walthamstow, north-east London.
It came after over a week of disorder sparked by the killings of six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event in Southport on July 29.
In the hours after the tragedy, a community’s grief was hijacked by the far Right, with a fake name for the killer spreading online where a false rumour he was Muslim and had arrived in a small boat, had also been shared.
The Southport Wake Up Telegram group was created around the same time and spiralled from a few dozen followers to more than 14,000 members by the time it went private on Monday night.
As well as lists of potential targets, the group included an arson manual and tips on making petrol bombs. Describing a “co*cktail for pigs”, they listed specific measures of acetone, foam and petrol to fill up glass bottles to light and hurl at police.
Follow-up posts included a message from someone calling themselves “Tracey”, with 20 more offices listed of immigration solicitors and advisors to attack, followed by someone writing on behalf of the group “Above are your targets lads”, alongside more fire emojis.
While the lists prompted panic, some were poorly researched, with the small number of far-Right demonstrators who turned out in Blackburn finding the office no longer existed.
There were eight admins of the group at one point going by nicknames ranging from “Stimpy”, “Bing”, “Hazza” and “Panda”. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one admin claimed to be based in Finland.
Campaigners have claimed that those involved were the “instigators” of the Southport riot which saw thugs attempt to burn down a mosque and where more than 40 police officers injured.
Nick Lowles, the director of Hope Not Hate, said a person behind the list in the Telegram group was the same person who called for the protest in Southport and a later event in Liverpool which also turned violent.
“It’s clear that the person who compiled the list of demos was clearly hoping that people would turn up, but also saw an upside to creating fear and panic,” he tweeted.
“It’s the same man who called the initial protest in Southport and Liverpool.”
He said it was wrong to describe the list as a “hoax” and added that the organisation had handed “a dossier to the police which we believe identifies the main instigator of the riots in Merseyside, who compiled the list of far-Right protests and called for the assassination of myself and the Home Secretary”.
Disinformation has continued online over the fallout from the Southport killings with Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter, sharing a fake article purporting to be from The Telegraph website.
The screenshot of a fake story claiming Sir Keir Starmer was building “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands for rioters is believed to have originated from an American activist and was later shared byAshlea Simon, the co-leader of the far-Right party, Britain First.
After it was shared by Mr Musk, The Telegraph quickly confirmed the story was not real, saying: “No such article has ever been published by The Telegraph”.
Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, said Telegram had been central to the organisation of violence that had taken place over the last ten days.
“In the immediate aftermath of the stabbing attack Telegram, along with other platforms, become a central online space for posting and sharing anti-Muslim and anti-migrant misinformation related to the attack, inciting hatred, hostility and violence against these communities and organising and promoting related protests across the UK,” he said.
Mr O’Connor said that the Southport Wake Up group was the main account on Telegram sharing lists of places for protests.
“This continued into this week where lengthy lists of locations linked to immigration and refugee services across the UK were distributed, calling for further protests and action on the evening of Aug 7,” he continued.
“While the original author of that list is unknown, one notably early version of it, shared on Telegram late Sunday Aug 4, early Monday Aug 5, was posted by a now-deleted Southport Wake Up Telegram account.
“While Telegram is just one part of the far-Right digital ecosystem, it plays a significant role in fuelling misinformation, disseminating riot tactics, and encouraging violence in the UK.”
A spokesman for Telegram said: “Telegram’s moderators are actively monitoring the situation and are removing channels and posts containing calls to violence. Calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service.
“Moderators use a combination of proactive monitoring of public parts of the platform, sophisticated AI tools and user reports to ensure content that breaches Telegram’s terms is removed.”
