One would’ve had to have been living in a cave not to have been aware of the recent street violence in the United Kingdom. For those of us who lived through the riots here in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020, there was an extreme feeling of déjà vu as we watched attacks on police, smashed storefronts, looting and general mayhem across the UK. To be fair, the Hong Kong riots did not feature either mounted policemen or police dogs, one is unsure if this was good or bad.
And as the violence escalated rapidly in the UK the whole subject of social media and fake news featured prominently in pronouncements from the authorities and in newspaper headlines: “Fake news sparks riots”, “How disinformation spread to start a riot”, “Protests sparked by misinformation” and on and on. This, too, is eerily similar to the experiences here in Hong Kong not so many years ago as social media was weaponised to generate all sorts of amazing falsehoods starting with the wild claims about the potential impact of the extradition bill which was at the start of the whole sorry saga, and then morphing into all sorts of wild claims about actions of the security forces and particularly the police.
One of the more outrageous of these claims was that a number of protesters had been killed by the police in Prince Edward station, whisked away on a special (ghost) train and hidden forever. Despite the fact that nobody ever put their hand up to claim they were a friend, relative, or colleague of these so-called victims the myth ran on and on for months fuelled by social media. Another claimed, again without any basis, that a detained woman had been raped by a member of the police force while under detention. And many of us will remember the case of the woman who, again without any basis, claimed to have been blinded in one eye by a police rubber bullet.
Lord Alton, a member of the UK House of Lords, saw no problem with re-broadcasting these falsehoods through his media channels, exactly the sort of activity that is now subject to prosecution in the UK.
The next interesting similarity is the role of Elon Musk who weighed in to the UK conversation claiming that the country was “on the brink of civil war”, triggering an outcry across the chattering class, including calls for the banning of “X” in the UK.
Hong Kong has its own equivalent of Musk, our very own Jimmy Lai, ex-proprietor of Apple Daily. Jimmy, now serving as sentence for a commercial crime while also being on trial for offences under the National Security Law, used his print and online platforms to spread endless untruths and commentary as he tried to bring Hong Kong to its knees.
So much for the similarities, now for the differences:
As the Hong Kong authorities struggled with both the street violence and a weaponised social media, the response of Western governments and media then could not have been in greater contrast to their recent actions in the UK. Here in Hong Kong the rioters were applauded by the folks in Washington, London, Canberra, Ottawa and Brussels, including the notorious CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy, whose accounts actually show money being sent to Hong Kong to support the weaponisation of social media.
The West handed out promises of residency in the countries to those wishing to flee Hong Kong, the UK being the largest contributor to this activity while at the same time offering asylum to not a few of the most prominent HK trouble makers. Imagine the outcry should China or Hong Kong offer asylum to any of those arrested in the recent UK riots…but then I forgot, in the UK they are held on remand while in Hong Kong we are very generously give them the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty and all that and let them out on bail.
And while there are howls of protest in the UK about Musk’s intervention, with even calls to ban his platform “X”, here in Hong Kong we still see governments calling for the release of Jimmy Lai portraying him to be an innocent victim who was just practising journalism. The UK Government even goes so far, at the tax payers’ expense, of having a UK consular employee attend the multi-month long Jimmy Lai trial, I met her while waiting in the admission queue!
And as the actual street violence seems to die down in the UK, the rhetoric continues to ramp up. It is possible to even see public claims that it should be possible to extradite to the UK any foreign operator of a social media platform found to be in the fake news business. This is particularly ironic given the almost global condemnation of Hong Kong’s far less draconian proposed extradition law that sparked the riots.
Then there is the remarkable sight in the UK of some of the hundreds arrested for rioting to be brought into court and sentenced to significant prison sentences in a matter of days. Maybe they did plead guilty, but one can only imagine the outrage from the West had Hong Kong taken such a speedy judicial course of action, even the US took months to try offenders for their insurrection.
But then what else can one expect in a country (the UK) which handed down sentences of four to five years to a group of Just Stop Oil members for discussing blocking traffic on a Zoom call?
We should not be surprised at any of this when the UK director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson is quoted as saying, “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false.” Scary talk.
There is, however, an upside to this, as here in HK we are now able to sit on the sidelines and watch Western governments and media spin their authoritarian approach to the problem of weaponised social media, promising new legislation that is far more draconian than anything ever put in place in Hong Kong, and giving the lie to the claims that Hong Kong is some kind of dystopian state and we are all mind-controlled zombies.
Fortunately free speech continues to thrive in Hong Kong and there is no shortage of pundits able to freely publish materials highlighting the hypocrisy exhibited by promoters of the Western rule-based order.
Hong Kong today is well along the path of rebuilding. It’s a safe, law-abiding, hard-working and efficient society, but one wonders if the same would apply in the UK once the dust settles.
Bob Rogers first set foot in Hong Kong in late 1974 and has remained there, working in the marine and aviation industries. Neither a politician nor a journalist he finds there is much to write about when it comes to recent events in Hong Kong.
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