00:04Hello and welcome to The Cube, Euronews' fact-checking show.
00:08Misinformation has erupted on social media channels across Europe
00:11following the sentencing of Vikram Digwa on 1 June
00:14for killing 18-year-old university student Henry Novak
00:17in Southampton back in December.
00:19The killing has sparked an intense public debate in the UK
00:22and other European countries, alongside violent protests
00:26and scrutiny of the police response at the time.
00:28Digwa, who is a practicing Sikh, falsely claimed he had been the victim
00:32of a racist assault by Novak when he called the police to the scene.
00:36But the spread of misleading online claims about the case,
00:38including in many European languages,
00:40has had devastating consequences on people who had nothing to do with it.
00:44Posts viewed hundreds of thousands of times on social media
00:47wrongly named officers allegedly involved in the investigation.
00:51For instance, Officer Christy Hill was named in X posts.
00:54Grok, X's AI chatbot, also named her when users asked about the identity of officers
01:00who feature in body cam footage of the crime scene.
01:03Hill, who was no longer a serving officer when Novak was killed,
01:06later said in a public post that her wrongful identification
01:10had led her to receive a torrent of abuse and threats.
01:13She was also connected to a widely shared image,
01:16appearing to show an arresting officer with a claw-like hand,
01:19shared in multiple languages, such as German and Polish,
01:22across blogs and mainstream social media platforms.
01:25But the original body cam footage,
01:27released by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary,
01:29tells a different story.
01:30The officer's hand does not appear claw-like,
01:32and in fact the fingers are largely hidden from view.
01:35Another police officer has been forced to relocate his home
01:38after being falsely identified online.
01:40A police spokesperson told us that the force condemned
01:43widespread misinformation online
01:45by those intent on causing further division.
01:49Henry Novak's murder has also provoked an onslaught of online abuse
01:52directed towards Britain's Sikh community.
Commentaires