A national police unit will monitor social media for signs of anti-migrant disorder amid fears of a repeat of last summer’s riots across England.
Detectives from across the country will flag up the early signs of civil unrest under a beefed-up National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster.
The new intelligence team is a response to the anti-migrant disorder across England and Northern Ireland after the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport last July.
A fresh wave of demonstrations spread this weekend to Leeds, Norwich and Nottinghamshire after violent scenes last week outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping, Essex.
The plan for a new police unit to track signs of such disorder were revealed on Sunday in a letter to MPs by the policing minister, Diana Johnson.
Johnson said the Home Office was “carefully considering” building a “national internet intelligence investigations team” as part of the NPoCC, which shares briefings on “nationally significant” demonstrations with police forces across England and Wales.
She said: “This team will provide a national capability to monitor social media intelligence and advise on its use to inform local operational decision-making.
“This will be a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence to help local forces manage public safety threats and risks.
“Funding for this capability beyond 2025-26 will need to be considered in line with future funding priorities, but I am confident that as a first step, this new central team will help build capability across forces to maximise social media intelligence.”
Critics claimed the unit was an attempt to “police opinions” that would turn Britain into a “surveillance state”.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, told the Sunday Telegraph: “This is the beginning of the state controlling free speech. It is sinister, dangerous and must be fought.”
The Home Office strongly denied police would be monitoring social media for anti-migrant sentiment.
“These claims are completely untrue,” a Home Office spokesperson said. “This new capability is not about monitoring what people say on their social media feeds – it is about equipping our police forces to respond more rapidly to the needs of the communities they serve, and enabling them to react in an agile way to real-time information about incidents and emergencies affecting those communities.”
Inspectors said police forces were overwhelmed by the volume of social media content as unrest spread last summer from Southport to London, Sunderland, Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Belfast and other areas in the most serious nationwide disorder since 2011.
A report by the police inspectorate earlier this year concluded the approach to online intelligence was “disjointed and fragmented” and must be urgently overhauled.
The disorder last summer started when misinformation spread about the identity of the 17-year-old who murdered three young girls – six-year-old, Bebe King; Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine; and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven – and stabbed several others in Southport on 29 July.
Within hours of the atrocity, false claims circulated widely that the attack was terror-related and perpetrated by an asylum seeker who had arrived recently in the UK on a small boat.
A judge took the unprecedented step of attempting to quell the unrest by lifting an anonymity order allowing the attacker, Axel Rudakubana, to be named, while Merseyside police took the unusual decision of confirming he was born in Cardiff, contrary to online claims.
However, rioters targeted a mosque in Southport barely 24 hours after the murders before violent clashes, organised largely on apps such as Telegram, spread to other parts of England and Belfast.
The small policing unit NPoCC took over responsibility for monitoring anti-migrant disorder from counter-terror policing in 2020, yet inspectors found it incorrectly assessed the threat of unrest last summer as “low”.
One intelligence officer said: “We need to keep an eye on this [serious disorder] all the time. When we stop, we get bitten.”