By Dr Shane Horgan
Lecturer in criminology, Edinburgh Napier University
At approximately 7.25pm on Saturday, November 2, a fatal road traffic accident occurred on Edinburgh’s Cowgate.
Police stated a bus collided with a pedestrian causing catastrophic injury, and confirmed a man had tragically died the following afternoon.
The accident took place on an Edinburgh street which is well known for its dangerous concentration of pubs, clubs, congested footways, narrow roadways, and poor lighting.
The BBC reported that local charity Living Streets Edinburgh, which campaigns for better walking and wheeling infrastructure across the city, had highlighted several core issues in a review it conducted in 2016.
In a recent post on its website the organisation said that, despite the council policy that minimum pavement width should be 200cm, the footway is less than 90cm at several points.
The City of Edinburgh Council has introduced various measures to improve safety for pedestrians across the city (20mph speed limits, a Low Emission Zone, banning pavement parking). A traffic curfew is in operation in the Cowgate from 10pm, which Police Scotland has now called to come into operation earlier.
Arguably, this combination of factors should have led to public outcry and debate about the avoidability of casualties on Scottish road networks, which after falling for decades have begun to rise again.
This could have been a story about investment in the city’s walking infrastructure, and the urgent need to avoid further casualties.
Instead, this was a story about the ugly side of social media.
“This could have been a story about investment in the city’s walking infrastructure, and the urgent need to avoid further casualties. Instead, this was a story about the ugly side of social media”
Much of the reporting on the story had little to do with infrastructure or road safety, and was preoccupied with the graphic images and videos of the victim’s remains, and the unknowing public onlookers who by an accident of timing believed the remains to be a Halloween prank.
Initially and expectedly, few details were released to the public about the incident while the area was closed to allow inquiries to proceed.
At the same time, images and video rapidly circulated on social media networks like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, which were quickly followed by speculation and rumour about the cause of the man’s injuries, and whether there was a wider threat to public safety.
Social media presents some powerful opportunities and challenges for contemporary policing.
For several years now, police social media accounts have provided a way for local and chief officers to communicate important information to the public about specific events, to raise awareness of crime problems, and make public appeals for information to support ongoing inquiries.
There is a growing evidence base on the utility of social media to enhance missing persons inquiries, and both academic and police-led research exploring the use of targeted advertising campaigns on social media as a means of deterring offending, countering radicalisation, preventing violence through behavioural and cultural change, and enhancing police-community relationships.
As the National Police Chiefs’ Council points out, while social media affords police inquiries a means of instant public engagement to both share progress and appeal for additional information, it is also challenging – if not impossible – to exert control of the scope and scale of sharing activity beyond target communities but throughout and at an investigation’s conclusion.
Frequent appeals can lead to ‘empathy fatigue’ and undermine the tools’ utility for policing more generally.
Where wording isn’t sufficiently sensitive, or where racial and gender-based discrimination isn’t considered, posting can undermine public trust and confidence in the service, and harm rather than benefit an inquiry.
“The very advantages social media offers to police inquiries, also present significant opportunities to actors who may wish to instigate public disorder and cast suspicion on state institutions”
Academics have also questioned whether policing can ever really achieve meaningful authentic interactions or relationships with communities with monological social media accounts.
Social media posts from influential individuals or organisations also create space for and frame public commentary (and comments sections).
As we have seen recently in the wake of the knife attack in Southport, the very advantages social media offers to police inquiries, also present significant opportunities to actors who may wish to instigate public disorder and cast suspicion on state institutions.
These issues will only intensify as disinformation campaigns are increasingly adopted by groups and states to sow public disorder and undermine trust in public institutions.
‘Disinformation’, the intentional design and spread of false or misleading information to cause harm or deceive, is now widely recognised globally as a threat to public health, the democratic process, and societal cohesion.
While its prevalence is debated, its potential for impact is evidenced by the riots witnessed across the UK this summer.
That is not to suggest that disinformation alone was the cause. As with the riots of 2011, a complex amalgam of social and political factors and public sensibilities and grievances always underpins large-scale social unrest.
Social media of various forms affords foreign states, political agents, corporations and individuals who wish to incite violence and disorder or further political agendas the ability to do so at a distance.
A recent report to the UK parliament has highlighted that public susceptibility to ‘dis’ and ‘misinformation’ is a function of their trust in the sharers, repeated exposure, distrust of particular institutions, and pre-existing beliefs and values.
These risks have only been elevated with advances in generative AI and its capacity to create and manipulate images.
The report also points out that there is very little we can do to combat the production and spread of disinformation.
Promoting media literacy, fact-checking, and critical analytical skills reflect one means of disruption, however this may be undermined in a public whose trust in government institutions is already shaken.
“The harm caused to the public and family of the victim of the road traffic collision on November 2 by the sharing and resharing of those images is ongoing”
Technology regulation represents another option by placing responsibilities on social media platforms to manage and remove harmful content produced and shared on their infrastructures.
However, as debates about the Online Safety Act 2023 continue, the enforceability of those very obligations remain unclear.
A cursory review of social media posts on various platforms illustrates that the tragic events in Edinburgh last month also triggered the spread of misinformation, but that spread was limited on this occasion.
The risk posed by disinformation to public order is ongoing, and will continue to increase alongside the wider social and political ‘wedge issues’ that divide populations; increasing inequalities and deprivation, the climate crisis, political polarisation, and geopolitical tensions.
It follows that to successfully disrupt disinformation, rebuilding and consolidating public trust and legitimacy across all areas of government is a necessary first step, alongside addressing those very issues of social injustice, fairness, and equality that divide societies and fuel targeted disinformation campaigns.
The harm caused to the public and family of the victim of the road traffic collision on November 2 by the sharing and resharing of those images is ongoing.
Social media posting and misinformation has distracted from the road and footway infrastructure which should be the focal point of discussions aiming to prevent future casualties.
The incident also highlights that online actors will seek to exploit incidents in local Scottish communities to incite unrest and sow mistrust in policing and public institutions.
Undoubtedly, police and criminal justice in Scotland must plan carefully to disrupt disinformation and its knock-on effects.
But without the amelioration of the wider social issues Scotland faces, those efforts will likely be in vain.