Anti-immigration protesters gather outside hotel housing asylum seekers in Hull

Three police officers were injured on 3 August 2024, when anti-immigration protesters gathered outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in central Hull.

Protests also gripped Manchester, Liverpool , Stoke , and Belfast, which is thought to have been partly triggered by misinformation about the alleged knife attacker in Southport , Merseyside , which resulted in the deaths of three children.

According to Marc Owen Jones, a disinformation professor at Doha’s Hamid bin Khalifa University, there were 27 million impressions on social media posts stating or speculating, without evidence, that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner.