Researching the riots: An evaluation of the efficacy of Community Notes during the 2024 Southport riots

In July 2024, the Southport riots shocked the UK with their speed and intensity, revealing deep social fractures and highlighting the powerful role of misinformation in fuelling violence. This report, produced in partnership with The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, offers the first in-depth analysis of how Community Notes – a community-driven moderation tool used by social media platforms – performed during this crisis.

By examining hundreds of posts and notes created during the riots, the report uncovers critical evidence about the tool’s limitations in fast-moving, high-stakes environments. It shows that while Community Notes may help in everyday misinformation contexts, they failed to contain harmful narratives and prevent escalation when it mattered most. These findings reveal an urgent need for stronger, faster, and more reliable content moderation methods to protect the UK’s epistemic security.

Read the associated policy briefing which sets out recommendations, co-developed with Full Fact, for the government, Ofcom, and social media platforms, aimed at strengthening the performance of content moderation systems during information emergencies.

This research paper is a contribution to Demos’s Epistemic Security programme. This programme aims to secure healthy and robust information supply chains within the UK and build resilience to adverse influence on our democratic processes. In the context of democratic backsliding and rising extreme populism, we are making the case this should be a central mission of this government.