One of the most helpful and interesting features of X since Elon Musk took over Twitter and transformed it is Community Notes. Most of the time, the feature serves as a way to hold users and media outlets accountable for what they say on the platform, often with a nice dose of snark. Granted, it doesn’t work sometimes, but Community Notes has been useful and often fun.
The latest example of Community Notes coming to the rescue involves the UK’s far-left news outlet The Guardian. The Guardian makes no secret that it’s of the left, often relying on radical dog-whistle language in its fundraising appeals at the end of articles. One recent fundraising pitch self-righteously declared, “And we avoid the trap that befalls much U.S. media: the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality.”
Community Notes called it out on a recent X post about the current unrest in the UK. For some context about what’s going on, riots are breaking out all over Britain. At issue is what some are calling the UK’s “two-tier policing,” in which Muslim offenders, often immigrants, get a kid-glove treatment from cops compared to native Britons, particularly conservatives.
The Guardian published an article on Tuesday and posted a link to it on X. The article claims that the idea of “two-tier policing” is a “far-right myth.”
England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread? https://t.co/foSX9epFLd
— The Guardian (@guardian) August 6, 2024
“Amid escalating far-right violence across England and in Belfast over the past week, instigators and apologists for the rioting have sought to spread a pernicious myth: the idea that white far-right ‘protesters’ are the victims of a ‘two-tier policing’ system that treats them more harshly because of their race and political views,” report Archie Bland and Vikram Dodd. The reporters quote Nigel Farage, who said, “ever since the soft policing of the Black Lives Matter protests, the impression of two-tier policing has become widespread.”
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Enter Community Notes. A user added a note with links to other articles from The Guardian; the note states, “The Guardian have [sic] been telling people about two-tier policing based on race and sexuality for decades.”
Let’s explore what The Guardian has had to say about “two-tier policing." One article from last year included a video that explored a recent report decrying the “institutional misogyny, racism, and homophobia [that] persists within the Met, Britain’s biggest police force.”
Another link took readers to an article from December 2023 that again claimed that UK police officers were inherently bigoted. “Police are far more likely to use a Taser electrical weapon against black people due to structural and institutional racism rather than the views of individual officers,” read the report, which added, “Communities see its use as humiliating and traumatic and the report, which was funded by the police, says radical reforms are needed to training.”
Finally, a report from January features Gavin Stephens, the head of Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, who also stated that police departments in the UK were “institutionally racist” and said that “black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge.” Dodd added in his report that the challenge of “institutional racism” has been rearing its head for 30 years among British police forces.
What we’ve seen is that The Guardian is totally fine with promoting the concept of “two-tier policing” when doing so benefits a left-wing narrative. If conservatives bring up the idea, it’s a “myth.” Thanks to Community Notes, we can see The Guardian’s hypocrisy on full display.
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