UK riots spurred by racist posts on social media. Experts warn US. | The Excerpt

On Friday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless discusses recent violent outbursts in Britain , and whether they could move stateside. The Gaza death toll passes 40,000 . USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer puts the hack of former President Donald Trump's campaign in context . The vice presidential debate is set . Five people have been charged in Matthew Perry's death. Discounts are coming in 2026 on 10 prescription drugs for older Americans on Medicare.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson and today is Friday, August 16th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today we take a closer look at violence in Britain and whether similar tensions could spill over stateside. Plus, a grim milestone is reached in Gaza, and how foreign players are getting involved in the 2024 election cycle.

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Recent riots in the UK were spurred by racist posts on social media and experts warn of a repeat in the US. I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent, Will Carless, for more. Will, thanks for making the time.

Will Carless:

Thanks for having me on, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

So Will, let's just start with some of the basics here for folks who may not have been following this story. What happened at this Taylor Swift dance class earlier this summer outside Liverpool?

Will Carless:

So on the 29th of July, in a small town called Southport on the north-western coast of England, there was a large group of girls attending a Taylor Swift themed dance class. And a young man, a 17-year-old, kind of burst into the class and essentially just started stabbing children, started stabbing people with a knife. By the time the attack had ended, he had killed three little girls and injured another eight children and two adults. A really horrendous event in a country that doesn't see a whole lot of mass violent attacks like this. And then, of course, there was some pretty bad fallout from it as well.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So Will, what have we seen in the weeks since, with these violent outbursts around Britain?

Will Carless:

In the hours and days after the attack, a bunch of misinformation and lies started spreading across social media, particularly on X, but also on TikTok and Instagram. These lies essentially centered around the rumor that the man, who had done this attack, was a recently arrived Muslim illegal immigrant who had crossed the Channel.

Much as in the US, immigration is a huge hot-button topic in the UK. There is a certain amount of illegal immigration, though probably not to the same extent as in this country, but it's an issue that really divides people and gets people hot under the collar. There was no truth whatsoever to these rumors. They were basically just lies that were being spread by some disinformation artists, and hucksters essentially, to get themselves attention. And actually a few days later, it was revealed that the young man, the 17-year-old who had committed this horrendous attack, was actually a British citizen who had been born in Cardiff, in Wales. So no basis to that whatsoever.

Now that then led to a series of riots and attacks, across the UK, aimed at Muslim communities, aimed at immigration centres and immigration hotels where recently arrived migrants were staying. There was a big white supremacist faction in these attacks, but then also the traditional football hooligans that we see that cause a lot of violence in the UK. They at one point surrounded a mosque, at another point they surrounded an immigration center. They set fire to cars, overturned police cars. It was really bad for a few days there.

Taylor Wilson:

So Will, you touched on this, but how did the internet and social media really play a massive role here in terms of stoking these flames?

Will Carless:

After the sort of dust had settled on these riots, there was a lot of post-mortem done on them by research groups and experts who study disinformation and how social movements evolve, and the role that the internet has to play in that. And what they essentially discovered was that these rumors, and the rumors that came after them, were really instrumental in driving people to get out onto the streets and to cause disruption. There were calls to action on the internet and those calls to action were carried out on the streets. So there's a very clear through-line between lies and disinformation spread through social media networks, and then real-life action and real-life violence on the streets of the UK.

Taylor Wilson:

So we know tensions are high around immigration and some of these same issues stateside, Will. Could we see similar tensions spill over to the US, a similar breaking point?

Will Carless:

Well, that's the concern. And so a big part of our story looks at the role of social media companies, and particularly the role of Elon Musk, not just as the owner and operator of X, formerly Twitter, but also as somebody with an enormous reach, and someone who is increasingly parroting and engaging far right sort of disinformation and conspiracy theories and propaganda. The worry is that what we've seen play out in the UK, that everything is primed for a similar thing to happen in the US in the run-up to the election. The controls that were brought in briefly by social media companies, the deplatforming that was done to try and stop mis- and disinformation from spreading, have really just largely fallen by the wayside, particularly on X, which has actually rolled back almost all of the security measures and protections that it brought in after the 2020 election.

So the worry is that if we see a similar incident like the horrendous stabbing, whether it's a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or something like that, that that will then lead to mass amounts of disinformation and misinformation across social media, and that that could then lead to political violence in the same way it did in the UK, but also as we've seen happen elsewhere, in Europe and elsewhere across the world, in recent years. That's the big worry.

Taylor Wilson:

Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. Thank you, Will.

Will Carless:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 40,000, according to health officials there. The grim milestone comes as US officials say Israel has achieved most of its battlefield aims against Hamas and Gaza, but is unlikely to eliminate the militant movement by continuing combat operations. They gave that assessment as a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks started in Doha yesterday, with CIA director, William Burns, joining Israeli and Egyptian spy chiefs for closed-door negotiations. Hamas representatives did not take part.

The talks are also happening under the shadow of the looming threat of Iranian retaliation for the bombing death last month of a top Hamas leader in Tehran. Iranian officials have said a Gaza ceasefire would temper their promised response to the assassination, which they blame on Israel.

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We're learning more about the hack of former President Donald Trump's campaign earlier this week. I caught up with USA TODAY domestic security correspondent, Josh Meyer, to discuss Iran, Russia and more. Josh, thanks for hopping on.

Josh Meyer:

My pleasure, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

So Josh, a few days have passed. What do we know about this Trump campaign hack at this point?

Josh Meyer:

What we know right now is that Iran clearly was trying to hack and dump, as they call it, information from the Trump campaign to journalists, to try to get them to use it, just like Russia did in 2016 with the Hillary Clinton campaign. That includes internal correspondence, emails and documents, including the vetting profile of vice president candidate, JD Vance.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So Josh, what is Iran really trying to achieve here?

Josh Meyer:

Taylor, they've been pretty clear about this. They don't want Trump to get reelected. Iran thinks that Trump has taken a very hard line against them, has killed some of their senior leadership, including Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020. He's killed the Iran nuclear deal, which the Obama administration had negotiated. So they don't want him to return to office. National security officials also say that, just like Russia and China and some other countries, they are hacking the election to just sow chaos, amplify divisions within Americans, and basically just undermine confidence in the democratic system of government.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So you mentioned Russia, Josh, how does this kind of fundamentally differ though with Russia's hacking that we've seen in past elections?

Josh Meyer:

It's very similar. I mean, Russia basically hacked the election in 2016, the same way they used spear phishing attempts, very sophisticated efforts to get into people's email accounts. From there, they move laterally to other accounts, into people's computer systems and networks, and then steal documents and then leak them to people. In Russia's case, they posted them on WikiLeaks so everybody could take a look at them. In this current case with Iran, they've leaked them to journalists at Politico, at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and perhaps other news organizations, which so far have not done anything to publish the information. That doesn't mean that they're not looking at it for reporting potential.

Russia's aims, back in 2016, were very clear. Initially, they started hacking the Clinton campaign because they didn't want her to win the White House, and she had been very aggressive against Russia as Secretary of State under President Obama. And then, when Trump became first a dark horse candidate and then the GOP nominee, they were pretty active in trying to help him. But at the initial stages of it, it was clearly to make sure that somebody that they did not like didn't win the White House, which is sort of similar to what Iran's doing here.

Taylor Wilson:

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign said it was the victim of a failed hacking attack in recent days. Have we learned anything else about this incident, Josh?

Josh Meyer:

They haven't said much about this. Neither have the FBI or the intelligence community agencies that are involved. So we don't know much about it. I think you can just chalk it up to the various foreign hostile nations just hacking whoever they can in the election. Back in 2016 when I wrote about this, the Russians weren't just hacking the Clinton campaign, they were also hacking the Trump campaign and other candidates in the primaries, and then in the general election because they want to get information, including compromising information, on whoever they can. They just believe that information is power and that they may someday be able to use it.

Taylor Wilson:

And in terms of what's next here, Josh, can we expect other foreign players to get involved in this US election? And what's being done to try and prevent further hacks and meddling?

Josh Meyer:

I think everybody assumes that China is already involved in one way or another. The intelligence community has had a few briefings with reporters at undisclosed locations that I've attended, and they've said that they still don't really know exactly what, if anything, China is specifically trying to achieve here, besides undermining confidence in the American system of government and democracy. There's other countries too, potentially, European Union countries might be trying more sophisticated and less obvious ways of influencing the election to make sure that Trump, who is very anti-NATO, doesn't get elected. Israel has been said to be influencing the election because they want to make sure that their interests are covered when it comes to US support for Israel, especially with regard to the war in Gaza.

The intelligence community, which includes the FBI, the National Security Agency, the CIA are working very hard to try to counter this. The Department of Homeland Security has CISA, this information security protection agency, which is also very, very aggressively trying to work to protect not only the election infrastructure, but also efforts to meddle in this and distribute propaganda across all social media. The intelligence community has a Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is dedicated to trying to prevent these foreign efforts to influence the election. And they are very, very busy, I can tell you, from being briefed on what they're doing.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Josh Meyer covers domestic security for USA TODAY. Thank you, Josh.

Josh Meyer:

My pleasure. Thanks, Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

The vice presidential debate is set. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance, will take the stage in New York on October 1st, after both accepted an invitation from CBS News. The decision comes after Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump accepted an invite from ABC News for a September 10th debate. And a second presidential debate might be coming in October.

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Five people have been charged in connection with actor Matthew Perry's death from the acute effects of ketamine last October. Physician Salvador Plasencia and Jasveen Sangha, whom the DOJ's press release referred to as the Ketamine Queen of North Hollywood, face 18 criminal counts for allegedly distributing ketamine to Perry during the final weeks of his life. Martin Estrada, the US Attorney for the Central District of California, said that ketamine must be administered by medical professionals and the patient must be monitored closely, things Estrada said did not happen. Other co-conspirators named in the case are Perry's live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, Dr. Mark Chavez and Eric Fleming.

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Older Americans on Medicare who take 10 widely prescribed drugs, including Xarelto or Eliquis, will get a break on the medication's list prices beginning in 2026. The Biden administration yesterday announced that Medicare had negotiated discounts with pharmaceutical companies on 10 drugs prescribed to treat blood clots, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Discounts will range from 38 to 79%. And you can find a full list of the drugs included with a link in today's show notes.

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And today is National Roller Coaster Day, marking the first vertical loop coaster, which was patented by Edwin Prescott on this day in 1898.

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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UK riots spurred by racist posts on social media. Experts warn US. | The Excerpt