The stabbing attacks in Southampton and Belfast had little in common except that the attackers were non-White men. Nevertheless, both attacks were rapidly reframed to support claims that immigration (especially from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East) makes the UK less safe.  Discussions online moved beyond specific details of the events themselves, becoming vehicles to promote targeted anti-migrant hate.

Online, networks united by a shared anti-migrant hate exploited these two distinct tragedies to promote broader narratives of demographic change, cultural decline and the alleged preferential treatment of minority constituencies. This analysis examines an increasingly common and effective playbook: domestic and international actors use individual incidents to target and tar whole communities, spurring offline violence and normalising anti-migrant sentiment.

Key findings

• Far-right actors exploited the attacks in both Southampton and Belfast to deploy the same playbook. This involves claiming that non-White populations bear collective responsibility for individual attacks to engender violence, framing clashes with police as patriotic rebellion andusing law enforcement responses to promote further anti-migrant hate.
• In the first two weeks of June 2026, there were 87k posts on X calling for the UK to implement remigration, a far-right term for forced deportations targeting non-White populations, compared to 58k for the entirety of May. There were 76k mentions of remigration in 2024 and 435k mentions in 2025, with the total for the year-to-date 2026 the highest on record.
• Posts which used the attacks to promote claims of anti-White/pro-migrant policing (often framed as “two-tier policing”) surged to more than 200k in the first two weeks of June compared to 104k in the whole of May 2026. The growth in this narrative threatens to undermine trust in law enforcement and the government, and to legitimise violence targeting both institutions and migrants as retribution.
• Anti-migrant narratives are transnational. Actors from the US and Europe alongside domestic far-right accounts sought to promote violence and unrest with the aim of a broader ethnonationalist agenda. Five of the 10 most popular posts linking remigration to the Southampton and Belfast attacks came from outside the UK.
• Generative AI (genAI) has become a core tool for anti-migrant mobilisation. AI generated content was used to support mobilisation at scale (for example, through creating eye-catching posters supporting protests which turned into riots in Belfast) and to fuel unrest (including a viral, AI edited image of the police officer who arrested Southampton victim Henry Nowak which gave her ‘demonic’ claws)

Methodology

This analysis focuses on the catalysts and drivers of anti-migrant hate, narratives that target individuals as a threat based on their perceived status as immigrants to the UK and seek to demonise, dehumanise, harass or incite violence against them. Increasingly, this overlaps with a White nationalist belief that non-White individuals with origins in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East are inherently alien and dangerous to Western countries, dehumanising and demonising them. We use two distinct events in June 2026 (disorder in Southampton after the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa for murdering Henry Nowak in December 2025, and riots in Belfast following an attack perpetrated by Hadi Alodid against Stephen Ogilvie) to show how this playbook is deployed.

Anti-migrant hate does not care about the citizenship status of non-White individuals: it frames them as inherently foreign and migrants regardless of factors such as country of origin, cultural upbringing or self-identity. This form of ethno-nationalist hate is distinct from a general opposition to the level of migration which should be seen as inherently hateful.

Our analysis combines two approaches to better demonstrate the scale and nature of anti-migrant mobilisation:

• Qualitative insights based on analysts’ research across platforms including Facebook, X, Telegram and YouTube (livestreams) to understand common narratives and tactics,
• And quantitative analysis based on X, using data about anti-migrant hate gathered through social media monitoring tool Brandwatch between 16 April and 15 June. This allowed ISD to examine the scale and speed at which anti-migrant hate spread following attacks.

Different stories, similar narratives

One key point of overlap across these two cases was rhetoric focused on calls for remigration. Originally associated with European identitarian movements and White nationalist circles, remigration has increasingly become a shared concept across anti-migrant networks in Europe and North America. While interpretations vary, the term generally refers to the large-scale deportation of migrant and minority populations from Western countries and is closely associated with ethnonationalist political projects. ISD has tracked the far-right use of the term remigration over the past ten years as it emerged in Continental Europe, aligned to other extremist beliefs such as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, before becoming increasingly popularised by anti-migrant actors in the UK. In the first six months of 2025, X posts calling for remigration in the UK reached 76k, almost the same as the total recorded in 2024.

Posts calling for remigration in the UK rose from 58,384 over the course of May to 87,429 in just the first two weeks of June. There were two major spikes on 9 June (14,095 posts) and 13 June (15,860); comments related to Belfast accounted for 82% and 69% of the daily totals respectively. There was a smaller though significant number of posts which used remigration rhetoric in relation to Henry Nowak’s murder in Southampton (totalling 5,794 across the two months).

Remigration was not confined to online spaces. The term was repeatedly used at protests associated with both incidents, often alongside calls for deportation, demonstrating the extent to which a concept once largely associated with fringe identitarian communities has become increasingly mainstream. On 20 June, far-right political party Britain First held a “march for remigration” in Birmingham; party leader Paul Golding mentioned “the slaughter of Henry Nowak” and “an African immigrant pinning one of our own to the ground in Belfast” at the start of his speech.

Discourse surrounding the two incidents also frequently extended beyond migration itself to incorporate claims of ‘two-tier policing’, anti-establishment grievances, allegations that public institutions favour minority groups over the majority population, and wider concerns about cultural and demographic change. Although these narratives address different issues, they increasingly reinforce a common worldview in which political institutions, the police and the justice system are portrayed as discriminating against White people while protecting migrants and minority communities. This shared interpretive framework enables local incidents to be understood not as isolated events but as evidence of broader systemic failure and political betrayal.

Allegations of ‘two-tier’ policing also featured prominently across discussions of both incidents; 87,429 posts drew this connection in the first two weeks of June, compared to 58,384 over the course of May 2026.  Originally popularised by anti-migrant actors following the Southport riots, the phrase has become a recurring frame through which a wide range of incidents are interpreted. Its prominence in discussions surrounding both Belfast and Southampton illustrates how established narratives can be rapidly redeployed following new triggering events, irrespective of the specific circumstances of each case.

Posts mentioning the term in relation to the attacks first surged on 21 May (20,081), alleging that the police decision to believe Vickrum Digwa’s claim that Henry Nowak had racially abused him and to ignore Nowak’s plea that he had been stabbed and to instead arrest him was evidence of anti-White policing. The most popular tweet that day came from a US conservative media account, receiving 34k likes. Posts about two-tier policing peaked on 4 June (35,713) following arrests of some involved in rioting in Southampton. The most popular tweet that day was posted by the far-right actor, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known by his alias Tommy Robinson, (with almost 130k likes); the second most popular post, from a pseudonymous account based in the UK, alleged that the Crown Prosecution Service decision to prosecute Southampton rioters but not to seek a retrial against two brothers who assaulted police officers in Manchester Airport was due to race.

Another spike on 9 June (21,316) was largely driven by claims about Belfast. The most liked post, by a US-based account with less than 2k followers, alleged that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) failed to release details about the attacker as symbolic of “Two-Tier Policing”.

These responses demonstrate how online activity is used to drive offline responses (notably protests or riots). When law enforcement responds, this is then used to allege a conspiracy to protect migrants, building an effective flywheel.

Networks in the UK and beyond

Another part of the playbook is the role of a range of domestic and international actors who amplify incidents to their audiences. Discussions surrounding the two events featured many of the same individuals who have previously mobilised around anti-migrant violence in Southport, Coolock and Ballymena, illustrating how a relatively stable network of high-profile activists repeatedly reappears around local incidents. Robinson, his associate Danny Tommo and former BNP leader Nick Griffin were among those commenting on, amplifying or engaging with discussions surrounding these events. On X, a post by Robinson received almost 130k tweets, the highest number in the overall dataset.

Another longstanding tactic which appeared during this analysis was the cross-platform spread of anti-migrant hate. For example, Robinson’s first post about the Belfast attack on X (one of the first posts overall) was made at 23:39 on 8 June; at 23:40, an identical post was made on Telegram. Although the post on X reached a much larger audience (7m views compared to 20k on Telegram), it likely reached a different group of accounts: while X is a large, open platform, Telegram’s encryption has made it a key space for violent extremism and offline mobilisation (as seen following the Southport stabbing in 2024). For example, White nationalist Active Clubs and Youth Clubs were identified using both the attack and subsequent riots in Belfast to try and galvanise support on Discord.

Robinson attended and spoke at the Southampton protest in person, but during the Belfast unrest he amplified developments remotely via X while associates and aligned activists travelled to Northern Ireland. Physical presence is no longer a prerequisite for influence; through social media, a relatively small number of highly visible activists can shape narratives, direct attention and encourage mobilisation among audiences hundreds of miles away from the events themselves.

The transnational nature of discourse is also reflected in the accounts driving online engagement. Six of the top 10 most liked posts which called for remigration and explicitly referenced the attacks in Southampton or Belfast were from international actors; of these, three were from the US, two from Europe and one from Australia. These posts sought to universalise the attacks as evidence of a threat posed by non-White people in Western countries, making local incidents into a part of a global cause.

ISD has previously documented the transnational nature of anti-migrant hate in relation to protests across the island of Ireland in 2025 and riots after the Southport stabbings in 2024. As in those cases, international and domestic actors can exploit large followings to spread the news of the incidents. This allows them to support offline mobilisation without being physically present, while creating international narratives of the threat posed by migrants.

The role of AI

The fallout from both Southampton and Belfast illustrates how genAI content is increasingly being utilised by far-right accounts, public figures and online communities when reacting to crisis events. To provoke outrage, they disseminate false claims and encourage protests or potentially violent responses using AI-generated visual- and text-based outputs.

In Southampton, after the release of bodycam footage that showed police officers putting Nowak in handcuffs as he lay dying, this footage became raw material for a litany of false claims. Online users used screenshots from the footage to speculate on the identity of the police officers who detained Nowak: this resulted in a former police officer who left Hampshire Constabulary more than a year before the incident involving Nowak in December 2025 being wrongly identified by AI chatbot Grok. The officer told the BBC she was forced into hiding and was subjected to “threats of violence” because of the false identification.

Separately, Euronews reported how a screenshot from the footage, showing a police officer’s hand with sharpened nails, was digitally manipulated. This ‘claw’ hand image was subsequently shared widely across social media by far-right politicians and influencers within the UK and US, alongside threats to police officers and calls for protests. Some used the image to claim it showed the “demonic hands of the British authorities restraining” Nowak.

In Belfast, footage showing the stabbing attack was similarly repurposed as raw material in genAI content. Memes were created that showed a cartoon version of the attacker and called on Northern Ireland’s nationalist and Loyalist “clans” to unite against migrants.

AI models were used to exploit an information vacuum in Belfast. Hours after the attack footage first surfaced online, one far-right group in Northern Ireland published screenshots of a conversation with Google’s Gemini, suggesting they fed the model audio from the footage and asked it to identify what the attacker was shouting. It should be noted that the quality of the audio is very poor. However, their screenshots alleged the chatbot responded with confidence, its output shared as evidence that served to justify calls for action against Belfast’s Muslim community.

Both episodes illustrate how genAI now forms a core component of the playbook of far-right amplification and mobilisation. Advancements with AI models have lowered the barrier to entry requiring no graphic design skills or technical expertise to produce persuasive visual content with expediency. For companies behind these tools, this episode raises further urgent questions about their tools. AI models being used to create content that not only hallucinates but serves to justify potential violence highlights multiple failures of responsibility.

Conclusion: the new normal of anti-migrant mobilisation

In 2024, the riots which followed the Southport stabbing appeared to be the high-water mark for anti-migrant mobilisation. What is increasingly evident is that they instead laid the groundwork for transnational far-right actors to exploit individual tragedies as part of a worldview that imagines governments, police forces and other institutions are working with non-White migrants against White Britons. This belief system validates, legitimises and minimises violence targeting both law enforcement and non-White communities, framing it as self-defence and retribution, or claiming that the state is being unfair to “patriots”.

ISD’s upcoming series on the mainstreaming of anti-migrant hate demonstrates how the seeds for an increasingly strident ethno-nationalist movement (both on- and offline) have emerged over more than a decade. This rhetoric is only likely to increase as far-right actors in the UK and abroad promote targeted hate and violence through euphemisms of civilisational defence. This is a challenge that requires work from stakeholders including law enforcement, local authorities, civil society and the government.