Watch Nidhi Razdan Riots take place across the UK

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00:00The recent riots that spread across several cities in the UK were completely started and

00:07fuelled by misinformation on social media platforms.

00:11It began with the stabbing of children in the city of Southport, which was falsely blamed

00:16on a migrant who was seeking asylum in the UK.

00:20By the time the facts actually came out, it was too late because several posts shared

00:25on Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram had gone viral, suggesting the complete opposite.

00:30Some of these posts had been shared millions of times before the actual news was corrected.

00:35Now what this entire story has reignited is a debate on how to make social media platforms

00:40more accountable.

00:41We've seen a very unseemly spat between Elon Musk, the billionaire who owns Twitter or

00:46what is now known as X, and the British government which asked him to behave more responsibly

00:51through his own personal tweets as well as what was happening on the platform itself.

00:55Now, Musk's own tweets, if you look at them, solve them, have been quite inflammatory.

01:01And he's somebody who thrives on controversies like this.

01:04But platforms like his do need to be far more accountable than they are today because we

01:09are no longer living in a world where only a small fraction of people have access to

01:13social media and the rest of the world lives in some separate compartment from that.

01:18The fact is, it is an increasingly digital world and it's not something that's affecting

01:22the UK alone.

01:23You have social media, you have algorithms that spew hateful content and churn it out

01:29in a way that makes it far more viral and far more visible.

01:32The UK already has a law in place which will be fully implemented by the end of next year

01:37to deal with these issues much more strictly, but the rest of the world needs to follow.

01:42But to do it in a way that's not a knee-jerk reaction, but something that also protects

01:47free speech.

01:48Hate speech, however, is different and must be dealt with strongly.