A Pakistani man has appeared in court to face charges of cyber-terrorism after allegedly spreading disinformation on his clickbait website thought to have fuelled anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom.

Farhan Asif was accused of publishing an article on his Channel3Now website falsely claiming that a Muslim asylum seeker was suspected of a deadly knife attack which killed three girls – aged six, seven and nine – at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga session for children in Southport.

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UK authorities have blamed online misinformation for setting off days of riots that targeted mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers, as well as police officers and other properties.

“He is a 31-year-old software engineer with no journalism credentials, apart from running the Channel3Now website, which served as a source of income for him,” a senior official at Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity.

“Initial investigations indicate that his sole intent was to make money through clickbait content.”

Asif appeared at a Lahore district court on Wednesday and was charged with cyber-terrorism. He was remanded to custody for one day, the official added.

The article with the false information was published on Channel3Now hours after the attack and was widely cited in viral social media posts.

Misinformation campaigns

More than a dozen English towns and cities saw unrest and riots after the July 29 knife attack, with officials blaming far-right elements for helping to stir up the disorder.

The man charged with murder and attempted murder over the stabbing spree, Axel Rudakubana, was born in the UK to parents who hail from Rwanda, an overwhelmingly Christian country.

False claims about the suspect’s origins named the suspect as “Ali al-Shakati” with no official source for the name.

Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Doha’s Hamad bin Khalifa University, said on X that only a day after the stabbing, he had tracked “at least 27 million impressions [on social media] for posts stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner”.

There were also false claims that the suspect had arrived in the UK on a small boat in 2023 with influencer Andrew Tate claiming in a video on X that an “undocumented migrant” who had “arrived on a boat” had attacked the girls in Southport.