Michael Shaw

I find it astonishing the BBC will tear itself up over a moment in a montage - not a scene critical to the documentary's (balanced) argument.

Meanwhile another channel can broadcast a fabricated claim that stirs up hatred against a vulnerable group with zero censure.

bsky.app/profile/mrmi...

In case anyone thinks I'm imagining this.

the angry bird from inside out is sitting on a chair with his mouth open . ALT: the angry bird from inside out is sitting on a chair with his mouth open .

After years of being told that Microsoft software works better on PCs than a Mac I'm finding baffling how many things are actually much worse on PCs.

Like if you're a working parent with a family calendar in Google, Outlook on PC insists on blocking out your whole working day for no reason.

Indeed. You have to be really down the far-right rabbit hole of blaming asylum-seekers for everything to be unable to pause and say “Wait - that makes no logical sense given what a tiny proportion of Dorset’s population are asylum-seekers.”

If you report on things that are true your organisation gets decapitated, but if you let people invent racist drivel on air you're fine. Every single aspect of our information ecosystem is so, so broken.

Yeah - and Grok continues to double down on it.

I wondered if the correction notes had sunk in, so just checked again.

No, the AI for X continues to promote a hate-mongering falsehood as fact.

I’ve done that but am, sadly, not holding my breath.

I’ve reported it.

But whether @ofcom.bsky.social will respond or take action is another matter.

Nothing specific in this FOI - the only Dorset police one referencing asylum-seekers specifically looks at Bibby Stockholm and highlighted just ONE person.

(Weirdly, Grok is still pretending that FOI supports the 44% claim)

Yeah - I also remember having positive feelings about her writing for some stuff she did back then. Allison’s swing to the hard right is even more extreme than the transformation of Melanie Phillips. On a par with Matt Goodwin’s, in fact.

A fabulous debunking, as always.

This was the false story on GB News / X that made me furious this week, by the way.

bsky.app/profile/mrmi...

Also: everyone should stand AT LEAST ONE METRE back from luggage carousels until they are getting their own suitcases as this obviously improves everyone’s lines of sight you selfish, spatially-unaware wankers.

I think the most appalling thing GB News did this week was to broadcast this false and hatemongering claim about asylum-seekers committing sex attacks in Dorset.

Ofcom needs to act.

bsky.app/profile/mrmi...

If you’re going to attack other news channels for accuracy is @gbnewsonline.bsky.social going to apologise for broadcasting patently false and hatemongering claims about asylum-seekers this week?

bsky.app/profile/mrmi...

Anyway if we lived in a rational world the Telegraph would sack Allison Pearson for persistently promoting hatemongering claims like this and Ofcom would be clamping down on GB News.

/ rant ends

If someone was stupid enough to read the 51 asylum-seekers as the cases *by* asylum seekers and the 116 as the total sexual offences in Dorset they'd get a % that was...

44%.

So I'd bet that's what happened.

They had a relevant finding for Dorset.

In Bournemouth 51 asylum seekers (or people who gave hotels where they stayed as addresses) were responsible for *116* offences.

Remember that these offences were not just sexual assaults.

The Mail got figures for

- a 3 year period

- of all crimes (so not just sex offences but also theft & drug offences)

- by people who gave their addresses as hotels used for accommodating asylum-seekers

So where did the "116 cases" and the "44%" come from?

My theory is a different FOI done several months before by The Daily Mail - which doesn't support the claim but looks like the source of some embarrassingly bad maths.

Even in this smaller 8.2% figure only a fraction of that could possibly have been by asylum-seekers.

It was a figure for all foreign nationals and the nationalities included many who do not apply to be refugees (including people from Poland and New Zealand).

Sexual offences by nationality FOI Sexual offences by nationality Request Number 25/3692 Date of release 02/10/2025

One of the reasons why this claim is clearly untrue is that Dorset police HAD actually replied to an FOI only last month on the nationalities of those convicted of sex offences.

This showed only 8.2% of the cases (186 out of 2261) were by foreign nationals.

www.dorset.police.uk/foi-ai/dorse...

This claim went viral on right-wing Twitter being shared by prominent accounts including Tommy Robinson's to millions of followers.

Grok treated it as a news story (and true) while it was repeated by multiple accounts

The person who made the claim was The Telegraph's Alison Pearson, appearing on Patrick Christys GB News show on Thursday night.

Here's a transcript of what they said.

A national newspaper journalist went on a British TV channel to claim police stats showed asylum-seekers committed 44% of sex crimes in Dorset.

This shocking claim was treated as fact by the channel which promoted the clip on social media where it was amplified by AI.

Except... it's bollocks.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a big piece of Mamdani’s campaign was simply “cities are cool and lots of people enjoy living in them” which in and of itself dismantles alot of rightwing talking points

Niche post, but as someone switching to a heavily Microsoft environment it is baffling how poorly Loop compares to @notion.com. Not just the absence of simple relational databases (Notions' USP) but basic stuff around subpages, page covers, etc.

Makes me glad for the Notion team, I guess.

I was thinking about exactly this the other day, in relation to a story about a car being set alight.

Back in the late 90s when I was a local reporter in Bristol it was normal for there to be several of car fires each night so they would just be a single news in brief item.

Yes - there were various school shootings and child-on-child murders in the 1950s that would be hidden, midway through the newspaper, as a news in brief below something about a hospital opening.

(Also the justice system was surprisingly lenient to young killers).

I think the UK MSM news coverage was and is good - especially when social media and AI was running wild with tales of Islamic terrorism by illegal migrants.

My criticism is of the commentators responding saying “This kind of thing never happened before!” to push a far-right agenda.