A 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker named Hadi Alodid allegedly gouged out a man's eye and tried to behead him on a Belfast street — and the UK government's first instinct was to blame social media. Not the attacker. Not the immigration policy that let him in. The algorithm.

Because nothing says "we've got this under control" like pointing the finger at Elon Musk while a city burns.

The victim, Stephen Ogilvy, is a partially deaf Scottish man who was subjected to what can only be described as medieval savagery on the streets of Belfast on June 9. One eye gouged out. The other severely damaged. Facial lacerations. An attempted beheading. Alodid, who entered the UK in 2023 and was handed a five-year asylum pass, has been charged with attempted murder.

Belfast erupted. Riots broke out across Northern Ireland. Migrant housing complexes were set on fire. People were furious — not because Twitter told them to be, but because a man nearly lost his head in broad daylight at the hands of someone the government invited in.

But here's where it gets truly British. Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey released a statement that could have been written by a content moderation bot: "I am horrified by the disorder and racist violence in Belfast last night. Far too often now, we see extremists exploiting people's anger and grief to spread hatred and violence — with the help of divisive algorithms on social media. This has to stop."

Read that again. A man's eye was gouged out, and Ed Davey is horrified by... the tweets about it.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government has followed the same playbook. The official response has zeroed in on social media platform X as the accelerant, not the immigration policies that handed a five-year pass to a man now charged with attempted murder. The villain isn't the guy with the knife. It's the app on your phone.

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked Online nailed it: "Yes, only the blood-stained degenerate bears responsibility for the horrors inflicted on that innocent man. But we now know the piece of scum had an army of witless aiders and abetters." He wasn't talking about Twitter users. He was talking about the bureaucrats who let Alodid in and the politicians who now want to make the story about retweets.

This is the playbook, folks. Import the problem. Ignore the consequences. Then when the public gets angry, call them racists and blame the internet. It happened after the murder of Henry Nowak. It's happening again now.

The riots aren't spreading because of algorithms. They're spreading because people can see what's happening with their own eyes — assuming they still have them.

ZeroHedge first reported on the UK officials' obsession with blaming X rather than addressing the root cause. And that root cause isn't a social media platform. It's a government that thinks censorship is a substitute for border policy.

Here's a radical idea for the UK government: maybe if you stop importing people who gouge out eyeballs, you won't have to worry about what people are posting about it.