Is Social Media Fueling Far-Right Riots?

Paris Marx: Hussein, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Hussein Kesvani: Thank you for having me on again. PM: Absolutely. It's always great to chat. More often it's on one of your shows, but it's always great to have you back on this one too. HK: No, it's great. It's great to sort of cross pollinate at least a little bit. PM: Absolutely. I wish that we were talking about a more uplifting topic, but usually it seems like when we talk about tech, it's always a downer. HK: It's bad stuff. It's bad stuff. It's never about why the new iPhone is good or something like that. PM: What? You're not all into these new AI features? HK: Yeah \[laughs\]. PM: Hussein Kesvani, the number one advocate for Apple Intelligence. HK: We are. I was talking to someone the other day just about how nobody, you know those things where whenever a new phone was released, people would sort of clap you out of like the Apple store and stuff. I don't know whether that still happens, but it feels like it's less of a sort of pronounced thing now. It was always loser behavior, but I feel like If you're doing that now for the new iPad, the new thinner iPad or whatever, even the sort of tech guys are sort of like: You're a bit of a loser. PM: I can't imagine anyone lining up overnight at the Apple Store now to get the iPhone 16 or whatever we're on. HK: I see more people get mad. So I had to get my MacBook fixed the other month and I'm pretty sure I got swindled. Well, I definitely got swindled, but in a way where I didn't really know what to say to them. The reason I brought this up was because I see more people getting mad at the Apple store now than I used to. There's the big Apple store in like Covent Garden in central London. And it's the place where, if you were to launch a new product, they would hold a big party. It used to be a thing where media people would get invites to be like: Oh, come to the Apple store in Covent Garden, and you can sort of get exclusive, drinks party because we're launching the new MacBook Air or whatever. Last time I went to go get my MacBook replaced because it had got some water damage because of rain of which they just did nothing about other than like, yeah. We can either repair this for you or for like £300 pounds cheaper, you can buy a new MacBook because economies of scale are great. But when I was waiting in the top floor where people get their stuff repaired, everyone is yelling at or getting mad at the Apple Genius people for being like: What do you mean, you can't fix this very basic function? I can't afford to spend £800 pounds to buy a new whatever, right? But basically, what used to be a place where it's like: Okay, we're coming to fix your stuff is the solution for every Mac problem now sort of seems to where to be recently, like: Oh, why didn't you just buy a replacement version of it? PM: Even if you have the Apple Care or whatever, they're still going to try to get some money out of you. HK: Exactly. It's not even worth it for that. So I suppose it's hard to be optimistic about tech, even as a consumer. PM: No, I think that makes sense. And I'm sure it's even more relevant seeing what's going on over in the UK. Now, this is my very terrible segue into what I had you on the show to talk about. Can you give us a low down? I'm sure people have been seeing these images, these videos of these far-right mobs attacking various cities within the UK. What's going on over there? HK: Sure. So there's two ways of looking at this. There's a lot of this sort of short view and the very, very long view of which the latter is, I imagine we'll be talking about that a lot more. But the short view is a couple of weeks ago in a town called Southport, which is in Merseyside. The closest city is Liverpool, I suppose. But in this very small town, it's summer holidays, all the kids are sort of out of school. And so lots of places around the country do summer camps and stuff. One of these summer camps, three young girls were murdered. They were attacked by a knife by a man who we don't know too much about because of UK reporting restrictions. But he was a 17-year-old who was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents. In the immediate aftermath of this, there was lots of speculation online and because of the UK's reporting laws, which sort of stated that because he was a child, he wasn't allowed to sort of be named and that the proceedings for something like this had to go through courts for the protection of children. We've had other instances of this where children who have sort of committed crimes often in their late teens have been afforded protections on the basis of being under 18. PM: And maybe to be clear, it was three children who were killed in the knife attack and another eight children were injured and two adults as well. HK: Yes. That is just something that's often lost. And even when I'm retelling the story, it's like: Oh yeah, that is an important thing. It's not to sort of diminish the scale or the sort of severity of the attack because it was really brutal. I think everyone sort of felt like, just a lot for the parents of those children and those children as well. But in this sort of aftermath, whenever something like this happens is often loads and loads of speculating. And as you can imagine, so much of that speculation becomes racist to really, really quickly. So when I was on Twitter and just keeping an eye on what sort of what was going on, it took about maybe 20-25 minutes before screenshots of the area around this summer camp were posted online. Now, in one of these screenshots, opposite where the summer camp is taking place, bearing in mind that this is a very small town, but opposite or a couple of streets down from where the summer camp is taking place was Southport Mosque. Southport Mosque is home to a very small community of Muslims who live in that part of the country, but because of how close it looked on Google Maps, and also just because racism and Islamophobia being very rampant in the UK and people are being in denial about it. It didn't take long before the sort of people were like: Oh, this is a Muslim attack. And this was sort of retweeted and reposted and the sentiments kept circulating around social media at a very, very fast pace. It didn't take long for social media influencers to pick it up. So, obviously the most famous was Andrew Tate, who very quickly started posting about how this person was a Syrian refugee, who was of fighting age is a term that they like to use. There was no evidence of this, by the way, at all. And then there was a lot of misinformation at the same time, but this man, had an Arabic name, they had an Arab name, like Anwar al Sharti or something like that. Arabic speakers sort of pointed out this isn't a real name. This means like Ahmed the kitchen or something like that. It's not a real name, obviously just to sort of be ignored. And then you have other sort of influences in sort of right-wing spaces, but also just among sort of very sort of niche British subcultural spaces, like football Twitter is a very big one where you sort of have very reactionary fans who sort of only identified by like what teams they support. And during the off-season, when football isn't played like right now, beyond Olympic football, there's no games taking place. And so, there's a joke that among sort of people who cover football and who like football more than I do, but the summer is a time when these guys get really racist because they can't really talk about anything else, but that sort of contributes to it as well. And then at the sort of crux of this established far-right groups, far-right figureheads, Tommy Robinson sort of being the biggest one his man called Steven Yaxley Lennon, who is a very famous far-right influencer who I suppose, for some of your Canadian listeners, might know him as a very brief time as a host on Rebel Media. He had a very short stint doing that, which was a very odd moment. PM: The interesting relationships between like the Global or Western far-right. HK: Well he's sort of a linchpin , and he used to be a linchpin connecting so many of these. And lots of the far-right across the Western world, and even beyond look to him as being an example of a successful street mobilizer. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. So this was sort of the beginning part of it. And then that evening, I think maybe the next day as sort of the aftermath of the attack and it's sort of taking place, there were talks about far-right mobilizations happening in Southport. A Telegram group was established and very quickly was sort of used as an organizing structure in which far-right groups from around the country were basically coming into Southport with the intention of pretty much starting a riot, which is what happened. The mobilization that was advertised as being a vigil for the three poor girls who were murdered very quickly sort of became an attack on Southport mosque. So Southport mosque, that's probably where the first sort of set of videos was sort of being shown. But you could see people throwing bricks into the mosque. You could see people trying to place a lot of stuff on fire. There were a couple of police cars that were on fire at the same time, like lots of other marches, in that vein, were sort of taking place. It feels so a far away, where it was only last week, but you had these far-right mobilizations happening across different towns, mostly in the North of England happening at quite rapid paces. And, so there were things that were happening in Liverpool and Hull. I think in Newcastle as well. There were lots of small towns and cities where these mobilizations were taking place. And quite often they were being targeted against mosques and Islamic centers. There were lots of stories, lots of news coming out about people of color being targeted, especially if you were Muslim, for example, and this sort of being filmed on TikTok, which exaggerated the mobilizations even more people who were visibly Muslim or visibly non white. We're sort of told not to work. But the group of people that were sort of being attacked the most were people who didn't really have a choice to sort of stay at home. So you're looking at delivery drivers, people who work in care, gig economy workers, the people who didn't have a choice, but to go through these streets on mopeds and stuff that were really dangerous. And quite a lot of them having either being beaten up or not being allowed access through these roads or in some cases having their cars or their motorbikes burnt to a crisp. This has sort of been happening for the past few days. Yesterday at the time of recording was supposed to be quite a big far-right mobilization, where they said that there were going to be a hundred protests across the country. Thankfully that didn't happen partly because of anti-fascist mobilization that occurred very quickly and to a much larger scale, especially in London, but also right-wing media and right-wing commentators who arguably have sort of been fanning the flames of this and have wanted this for a long time, having to sort of pull back and be like: Oh, we don't support the protesters. We don't support the rioters and so on. So all of which is to say that at the time of recording, it's not to sort of say we defeated fascism yesterday and things are great. The threat is still very much there, still very much mobile, but there is a bit of a stalemate at the moment, but nevertheless, it does underpin like a lot of the tensions and anxieties. And also just underpins a lot of the sort of structural racism and Islamophobia that is very present in the UK and is very likely to mobilize in very different ways. I think that the protests or the sort of marches and the riots that occurred last week when things were on fire, I forgot to also mention that one of the most horrifying things that took place over the weekend were also targets against refugees who are being housed in budget hotels across the country at the moment, in part because the previous government did so much austerity, that there was no sort of structure in place to keep refugees who are applying for asylum from being able to do so. And then their last couple of projects, one, which involved putting a bunch of refugees on a large sort of facility in the British waters. I think it's called the Bibby Stockholm. It's a stupid name, but it was really, really unhygienic and people were taking their own lives there and stuff. So it was deemed to be unsuitable by law and they couldn't operate there. And then the second big thing that the previous government tried to do was have a deal with Rwanda where they would send refugees over there. The Rwandan government took a bunch of money to entertain the government. But then we're like: No, we're not doing this actually. So, tough shit. And so what we've got right now, I think there's a lot of anti-refugee sentiment, a lot of Islamophobic sentiment, coupled with the sort of ongoing effects of long-term austerity to create this tinderbox moment of which I think the riots of the past couple of weeks have been one element of, but will not necessarily be the end point of all this. So that's succinctly what has happened. And I hope that makes sense. PM: No, it absolutely does. I appreciate you outlining all of that for us, because what you're saying there, and there's a lot that you explained, but just to reframe it around the types of things that I want to talk about that led to what has been happening here is obviously you talked about how social media and how say telegram and these groups have been important to organizing these far-right marches, demonstrations, attacks that have been happening throughout England and Wales and Northern Ireland as well over the past week or so as we talk. But then there's also this bigger question because I feel like I've seen a lot of stories about how social media is fueling these protests, putting a lot of the blame on social media and social media companies. And I don't fully disagree with that, but then I feel like that also takes away some of the blame or the responsibility from the much more long term mainstreaming of these racist and anti-migrant attitudes that you've seen within the political system, not just by like far-right politicians, but across a lot of the spectrum, including even into the labor party, which is now in government, as well as through the mainstream media. And a lot of the reporting that even you're more reputable mainstream publications have been doing. So I wonder how you think about that bigger picture of what is fueling something like this and what is driving it and the difference between what is happening now and what has led to this moment as well. Does that make sense? HK: It's a big question. I suppose it's like: Okay, what is the relationship between mainstream politics and media and the mobilization of the far-right? And again, that's a very big question because I feel like depending on where you want to begin and having sort of experiences but also having covered it as a reporter and all that stuff. I come at it from a sort of 20 or 30 years into this. I would sort of say that like, this begins with having to understand that Islamophobia is an institutional form of racism that is very embedded into British society. It begins sort of at 9/11 and the sort of like War on Terror type of stuff. But in reality, anti-immigrant sentiment has sort of been visible in Britain for decades and decades and decades. So when my family came in the late 1970s, it was very much sort of rooted in the idea of Britain and whiteness and the idea that, by having sort of like Asian Indian immigrants. And at the time, this was my my family sort of coming into the country, like we were sort of Ugandan Asians. And so they were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, who was supported by the British. And because of the sort of Commonwealth connections, they were sort of allowed to come to the UK. And there were, I think, a few thousand who sort of arrived in the UK. I'm not sure exactly the number, but that was sort of considered to be the first mass immigration movement to have occurred in the 20th century of East African nations. And it was also like the Ugandan Asians were the reference point for Enoch Powell and the 'Rivers of Blood' speech. The idea of it, like: Oh, if you have this many coming in, then they will soon sort of gain political purchase. And to do so, they will undermine democracy and will cause civil war because they'll bring their sort of savage and barbaric ways to the proper and friendly British streets, which never existed. Because there were always fucking constant riots, across the UK, forever. And so this fiction, but nevertheless, the reason why I think it's so important is because Powell's framing is the dominant form of which the new generation far-right are using to mobilize. It's this idea that this isn't just sort of a racial threat, but it's a cultural threat. It's a demographic threat. All of which are very prescient among the far-right language today. Well, this is also one of the times when the media, even though Powell was sort of removed from the Conservative party, he had support in the right-wing media. He had support from The Daily Mail, for example, Common Sense, and all that. And I would say that that sentiment continues to develop as more and more immigrants and refugees find themselves in the UK. It's like their threats are a sort of a combination of like: Oh, they're a drain on resources, but also they're a cultural threat or a demographic threat. There have been lots of sort of fear mongering about mixed-race children. The idea of white replacement, for example, is one of these sort of perennial fears that continues to sort of embolden the right or sort of animate the right today. And so in one way, these are a continuation of the idea of racial threats that have sort of been very much embedded into the British political psyche for a very long time. In relation to Muslims of the present, you've also got the idea of Muslims being terrorists, extremists, and all that stuff. And like, the whole of the British state, in the 2000s and the 2010s was sort of orientated around the surveillance and containment of mosques and religious centers and you know the idea of Muslims having to sort of work under the auspices of this surveillance framework, of which much of it continues to be enhanced by increasing surveillance technologies. One of the big stories I remember growing up was one where areas of Birmingham, which is another city in the UK with high Muslim populations were also the most surveilled; they had set up the most CCTV cameras in these very Muslim areas. These are also very working-class areas as well. And so there's a class dimension to where it's the victims of this surveillance infrastructure are working class people of color and working class Muslims. And so where the media and where right-wing media in particular, as they've sort of become closer to government, which is something that you and I have talked about before, but also very evident in the relationship between media and politics manifested in Boris Johnson, for example, former Times and Spectator editor who sort of becomes Prime Minister and really melds those two worlds together. But nevertheless, this is becomes a conjoined effort and one in which Islamophobia then becomes embedded into media and it becomes embedded into politics and it becomes a way in which politics is operated upon. So I would sort of say without going too much into the sort of specifics of it, Islamophobia animates a lot of British politics in general. And I feel like the reason why this has become so much more complicated to talk about is because the way in which this framework works, Muslims are represented as immediate threats in the sense of like: Oh, they are physically dangerous. They could sort of attack you. They could attack your families. They could attack your communities and so on. Most of which is sort of unfounded. But the bigger thing and the thing that I think is the reason why this becomes a much bigger problem is because Muslims are represented as an existential threat, that they are a demographic threat. They're an economic threat, especially as they sort of spread and become a more prosperous and become more middle class. They represent a religious threat, as the sort of decline of churches continues to take place. Mosques are sort of like being built at like a much faster rate. Because, again, Muslims have more money and so they can afford to buy centers and they can afford to make them religious like centers. And so like religious centers fit for purpose and so on. And so I would ultimately say that the sort of shift is as Muslims have integrated that they, as they've become a bigger part of British life, as they have done the things that they were supposed to do in order to sort of ascend to middle and upper middle class boundaries and have been able to sort of assert their identity more as a result of that, they are represented more holistically, not as sort of a class threat or a sort of a threat to an existing culture, but one in which that's what animates the idea of as the far-right sort of say, but oh, as the Muslim presence becomes bigger, they will take over everything. PM: Right. And I feel like when you look at the way that that is deployed through media systems, through political systems, maybe this is looking at the past in a nostalgic lens, but you associate, say the Mail or the Nigel Farage's or a certain side of the Conservative Party with this explicit racism, this explicit anti-migrant politics. But increasingly you see the way that the BBC frames things, the way that the Labour Party talks about things is being in this language as well. Is it giving them too much credit to say that they weren't always like this? Or have you seen a notable shift in just the way that these narratives have become widely accepted? HK: I think there's been a notable shift and it's not to sort of say that it wasn't there, but as I mentioned as the idea of Muslims as an existential threat becomes bigger than the idea of Muslims as an immediate threat, it is one in which that shift towards existential threat is something that has been accelerated by right-wing figures that include in public, like Nigel Farage, but in private include an expansive and much better funded right-wing media ecosystem. I think one thing to bear in mind, especially if you don't come from the UK, is just how pronounce the right-wing ecosystem is among British media types, so we have like a handful of people who like own right-wing titles are barely read, like barely anyone reads the Spectator in practice, the Telegraph, which is the right-wing newspaper doesn't really make any money. Paul Marshall, who's a private equity guy who is very much like invested in right-wing media projects and was on the news I think maybe last year for running various Twitter alt accounts where he sort of retweets the most insane racist shit and it's always been in denial about that despite the overwhelming evidence that he has a bunch of alt accounts like retweeting nazis effectively. They're responsible for accelerating the discourse into sort of one where treating a group like an existential threat becomes a normal way of operating. And so it wasn't to say it was sort of say that the BBC didn't always have an Islamophobic streak. Cause again, the sort of relationship between government and media and the ways in which media sort of relies on. access to government in order to sort of perpetuate itself and in order to sort of reinforce its importance was one which was always rooted in the idea that Muslims needed to be surveilled and be seen as suspicious and so on. But the shift towards the existential threat is now one where you shouldn't just be suspicious about the Muslims who are sort of gathering in the mosque in case we're talking about planning a terror attack, for example, which used to be sort of the way in which I would sort of at least describe that model in the early 2000s. But it's one where the idea of Muslims existing is enough to warrant a type of fear. Which is also again why the far-right are so fixated on demographic collapse and comparatively Muslims and Muslim immigrants will tend to have more children or culturally are more likely to have more than two kids. And the sort of that feeds into these much broader conspiracy theories around Great Replacement and so on, stuff that you talked about on the show before. So I'd like to answer your question really simply. I would probably say that the sort of like extreme right-wing actors have successfully been able to like push mainstream media to consider the threat to be much broader and much more fatalistic. But the foundations of that type of Islamophobia was evident. Much before any of these people had purchase or had social media presence. PM: It feels like that's a structural thing as well, right? You talk about the power and the influence of right-wing media in the UK. In North America, what we see is that as these major mainstream media publications have had their funding declined because there's less ad revenue. That what has survived is basically media that can get money from right-wing billionaires in order to fund how they operate or just to buy them outright. A lot more of the media ecosystem has been just captured and shifted to the right. And I wonder if that is a dynamic of play over there as well. HK: Again, I don't think there's been a shift to the right so much as I think British mainstream media has always sort of had a right-wing tint to it. Again, proximity to government and where successive governments have sort of felt like they can cordon off the right-wing threat by granting more concessions. It makes more sense for media types. It's like: Well, we'll just sort of also grant concessions to the way that they frame is like, that's the way that politics goes. Centrist politics is one where you are always constantly having to find the center ground and the center ground just happens to be going more and more right. And no need to interrogate that or wonder why that might be. So I think that even though the shift was always sort of moving rightwards anyway, again, it's like the movement itself is one where I think right-wing actors have been aware that they can push media to sort of get to their level and government will sort of come with it. And the added sort of components of this is obviously social media as well. Part of this is to do with newsroom economics, whereas social media has sort of taken over how information is distributed and the speed and the tempo of it. And where they've gotten rid of journalists and beat reporters and people who would sort of be embedded into communities, including Muslim communities and stuff are now having to sort of guide or sort of follow the tempo of social media platforms. And so that's accelerated the rightward shift too. And it has made me wonder whether That sort of acceleration has meant that government will also like successive governments will sort of do the same thing. Primarily on the basis that they will sort of see media types be like Oh, the general public think that there should be like lower zero immigration. And therefore we should move the same way because we want to sort of reflect the views of the public, not recognizing that like, there are sort of levels of technological mediation that have produced this result. And it's not one that is sort of wholly honest or even sort of derived in the like logical way. PM: As you've been talking about, we can see how traditional mainstream media can provoke and push these very racist and right-wing narratives. But obviously we're now in this environment where a lot of. The way that we interact with news and information is mediated by these major social media platforms, whether it's, traditionally Facebook or Twitter, but increasingly tick tock and these other platforms as well, because I feel like, okay, it's not like having racist and right-wing narratives is a new thing, right? It's been around for a long time. Media has always been able to do that. In particular, powerful groups have been able to influence media to push these types of things in society. But then, how does that change when we move into this social media environment where it feels like the discourse is accelerated, there's less time to check if something's accurate, and if there is a sort of group that wants to push total bullshit, like saying that this attacker in Southport was a Muslim asylum seeker, then these things can just take off. And before it can be fact checked or corrected, millions of people have seen it and maybe start to believe that. HK: The interesting thing about the riots and stuff that happened was that even when people did point out that, hey, like this wasn't a Muslim guy, wasn't a migrant, wasn't a refugee, all of that stuff, you could tell people all this and they're like: Yeah, but it doesn't matter. None of it matters. And so the other question is it even a question that people really want to hear the truth anymore? Or is it more of a case for what being on social media and being in this type of media environment accelerated by these social platforms? Is it one where the truth or sort of a shared reality becomes impossible to understand or like becomes so unimportant to people that it becomes impossible to use as a method of descalating or de radicalization or whatever you want to call it. I think that's like a much broader question. So to answer your first one, I think the effects of all this, and I think especially TikTok is that the rate of — I don't even want to say information because it's not really news gathering; it's just commentary — so the rate of commentary speeds up at a pace where it becomes difficult for news organizations to really keep a handle on. And you sort of seen this before, whenever sort of an attack or something like an event takes place, the ways in which social platforms handle this is really, really difficult. Twitter at the best of times before it was massively defunded and descaled was having a difficult time doing this anyway. But they had teams of fact checkers and moderators and so on who were able to at least try to create a timeline in which information was sort of coming out at a standard pace. But on Musk's Twitter, it's all really anarchic. I remember when the riots were first taking place and I was trying to use Twitter to keep up to date with what was sort of going on within five minutes, the porn bots took it over. And it's really bizarre, cause it was just like you would see people who clearly got a copy paste thing from a user sort of saying: Oh, I feel so ashamed about your behavior of these rioters who don't care about the little girls at all. And then the picture underneath under it would be a still from a porn film, right? And it was so bizarre that this had sort of taken over the timeline, within minutes of this attack sort of taking place. Then you sort of combine that with people who are charlatans and who very clearly understand how the algorithm works. And they understand that you have a small window in which is this sort of say whatever you want. Because, if enough people see it, then the sort of idea of who did it or what happened is already there. And, it becomes quite difficult then to take that out of people's minds. I think especially when people sort of go onto these platforms looking to confirm what they believe already happened. And again, that makes it very difficult to sort of say to people, actually, the idea of how you view the world is not really how it's reflected in reality, because to them, it doesn't really matter. They've already decided what's happened. And even if that didn't happen, even if it wasn't the case, they will just sort of respond, or they will respond by saying something along the lines of: Well, it could have happened. It could have happened in that way. So you can't technically say, but I'm wrong. I was watching parts of an interview that Andrew Tate did with Piers Morgan. earlier today. I don't know why this should sort of showed up in my recommended feed. Again, great algorithmic stuff. PM: You're getting the greatest content there, right? The Piers Morgan show. HK: Well, it's that meme, Socrates and Plato talking to each other? It felt very much like that, but credit to Piers Morgan, very minor credit to Piers Morgan. He sort of says: Well, look, every aspect is, he says to take every aspect of what you put on social media was incorrect. Wasn't a refugee, was born in this country, his parents had a right to stay, they had British passports of their citizens, all that type of stuff. And Andrew Tate basically responds by saying, yeah, but it could have happened in another way. It could have been a refugee. Refugees have committed violence all the time. And so there are strategies that these people employ that have far less to do with saying that they're right or wrong and much more about confirming people's fantasies and confirming people's sort of ideas of how the world works. And I think that's a much more difficult thing for people to sort of be able to intervene on. And I think especially on platforms like TikTok, where again, I think like the abundance of content on all platforms. So on TikTok in particular, and TikTok prides itself on this where we can sort of cater to so many identities and so many interests and so many hobbies and stuff, but this is going to be the ultimate platform because anyone can sort of disindulge in whatever they want. But the other side of that is, well, if you have a fantasy that is dangerous or a fantasy that is completely unreflective of how the world works or how people work, or is like. Dehumanizing then rather than sort of having places that intervene on that and be like, Hey, that's not how people work. Or, you can't just say that someone has criminal intent based on the country, but their parents were born in before they moved into, right. In the case of this guy, you can't remove the fact that he was born and grew up in Britain and that his bringing up is distinctly British. None of that matters because ultimately, the way in which these systems work and the way in which they optimize are ones where the sort of, you know the most successful content is one that confirms your biases and confirms your fantasies and confirms how you think the world works. And so I think that it's really difficult to articulate, but it's also really difficult to sort of curtail. But I feel like stuff like riots and stuff where It's already anarchic to begin with. News gathering in those types of environments is incredibly difficult. I've covered riots, I've covered protests, I've covered marches in the past. It is very, very difficult, even as like a news gatherer to sort of develop information and distribute and sort of send it to an editor and get it fact checked and stuff before it goes out. Now, with the demand to do that within seconds. That's basically impossible. So what you've got is a very anarchic, very chaotic information system, but is willing to give you whatever you want to confirm it. your view of the world versus a very old and somewhat outpaced system of newsgathering where you also have a massive level of distrust in part because the sort of traditional form of newsgathering has become so dependent on the tech side of it, even though their methods of gathering and distributing information, I would probably say is like almost diametrically opposed to each other. PM: And just to pick up on what you were saying there, obviously it's a different context, but I was talking to somebody a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago when the Olympics were starting. And remember there was that big controversy, a false controversy over the recreation of the "Last Supper" painting. HK: Which is still going on. Even today, people are like: Oh, the Olympics mocking Christianity. But that was debunked like two weeks ago. PM: That's what I mean, right? I was talking to somebody, and as you were saying, it was debunked. It was actually this Greek painting that they were redoing. But I was talking to somebody who was like: No, that was the Last Supper. They were making fun of Christianity because that is what they wanted to believe. And it was like, you couldn't say anything that would convince them differently. And, that happens on so many different issues and it doesn't need to be this big thing that is fueling far-right riots across the country, but it can be on just so many different smaller issues that then creates, as you're saying, this alternate world that someone is living in this world where the reality doesn't matter anymore. Because if a narrative fits with what you want to believe or the types of things that appeal to your personal beliefs, then all of a sudden, you're in this world where you're just seeking out the information and the confirmations to what you're hearing and you can probably find news stories that are basically saying that too because some news organizations are just picking up on whatever the thing on social media is and then we'll correct it in another story later So it just creates this information environment where people are living in different worlds it becomes very difficult to know what the reality is as a result of that and And it's very easy to see how people end up getting not even necessarily radicalized, but just divorced from reality. And you can't have this consistent conversation with people any longer. HK: Exactly. It opens up a lot of questions in terms of social effects of this are really evident. So there are lots of live streamers and stuff who go to these protests, because again, another way of making money out of chaos is by live streaming, apparently. And so you have these guys and you've got them everywhere who will go to protest and be like: Oh, why are you protesting? And a lot of these channels, like very clearly have an intention of like: We promote right-wing views, but we try to do it under the guise of like: Oh, we're just sort of going around asking questions. These people aren't racist. They just love their country, et cetera. But watching these interviews is really interesting because even the people who are sort of there, it's not to sort of say that: Oh yeah, they don't really know why they're there. And maybe it's because I also spend so much time or I have spent so much time online, but you can sort of see how the internet's cooked their brains a little bit, or quite a lot at times, because they'll sort of say things that are like, I would encourage people to watch it. Cause it's interesting to sort of see what happens when you're sort of navigating a real world environment. But, you sort of believe that what you've seen on the internet is real, that is the world that you understand. Because in some of these interviews, they'll, so for example, one of them with us, like: Oh, why have you come to this Southport protest or the right-wing thing. And they'll be like, and they'll sort of say, but, Oh yeah, I'm here to pay my respect to the little girls who have passed away. Okay, fine. But then a second later, there'll be like, yeah, but all these slur inserted there, they've come in and, they take all the money and they take all the jobs and they're setting up mosques everywhere. And like, there used to be a pub down the road and that's a mosque and everything. That's not true! There's no evidence of that, but it feels like an assemblage of stuff that they've read or they've seen on their phone. Maybe some of it they've also sort of invented in their head as well. So where your sort of reality becomes an assemblage of consumed online, put together by people who have sometimes nefarious ambitions, but sometimes they'll just sort of put stuff out there because you can do that. What's the effect of just putting out fiction? You never know. I've also seen right-wing Twitter accounts, praise themselves for being able to insert pieces of misinformation that they sort of felt got a lot more traction than they expected. That's a game to these people. I always go back to this thing that Adam Curtis said years and years ago about how eventually the internet will sort of become this place where you go to sort of mostly go for entertainment, but you never know what's true and what isn't. And it's not to sort of say that like the internet will be full of lies or it will be full of truths, but it's more like you'll sort of approach everything with this idea, but you don't actually know whether what you're reading is true or valid or whether it's not. And for some people, that'll be like a really scary experience because it'll be really dislocating and really detaching. But for other people, it'll be immensely entertaining because, again, so much of being online and so much of experiencing online is primarily for entertainment. Riot livestreams are a form of entertainment, it's not really journalism. The stuff that Tommy Robinson does is primarily entertainment, and he knows it. In the week before the Southport attack, Tommy Robinson had a very big demonstration in London where he screened an hour and a half long film. where the entire film was just about why he couldn't, even though a court told him to stop harassing this like teenager, why he refused to stop harassing a teenager. It was an hour and a half long film about how he was a victim because he couldn't stop harassing a teenager. It's like insane. But again, it frames his ideas. Well, these people sort of see it as entertainment, but they see it as entertainment that leads to material effects. And so again, to go back to British media, which is very right-wing, where it has sort of struggled to keep up the pace with it. They cannot be the same type of entertainment platforms as all these other sort of anarchic creators. Some of them having right-wing agendas and some of them having fascistic agendas, but some of them just wanting to cause chaos and mischief. And because they'll never sort of be able to sort of match to that, their only choices really are to try to shut them down. And in some cases, what's been interesting is the right-wing papers in the UK, oddly enough today have sort of had front covers, which is like: Oh yeah, the night when the fascists were sort of taken down. And it's like insane to look at cause it's like, well, but you didn't like the anti-fascists. You've been sort of printing stuff for years and years saying how they were destroying the country. You have laid the foundations for something like this to happen. But then, other right-wing outlets and your GB News, Talk TV, which are the very right-wing end of it, having to sort of accommodate a lot of these content creators purely on the basis that they know that they're never going to sort of get as much traction as these guys. So I think it's a very messy media environment, one where a lot of chaos can sort of ensue, but one in which the content creators who don't have any strings kind of pulling, holding them in and no real regulation are sort of like: Well, I can create great entertainment by just framing Muslims as more of an existential threat than the Daily Mail ever could. PM: This will drive engagement and will really rile people up. So I'll get my viewers. But you were talking about how you can tell that some of these people have their brains cooked by the internet. And it's clear that one of those people is the owner of Twitter (X) himself, Elon Musk, who has become a major right-wing influencer of his own. We talked in the past and there's been this ongoing conversation and discussion about how Facebook has helped to fuel right-wing politics in the past because of the way that it has decided to treat its platform. We know that YouTube has pushed right-wing extremism in its algorithms. Twitter is not immune from that, but since Elon Musk has taken over and the changes that he has made to the platform have made it so people on the right basically get boosted a lot more. All of this right-wing misinformation, these right-wing narratives get boosted. And then he is also doing the work of boosting them, whether it is the anti-migrant stuff, whether it is the great replacement stuff, as you were talking about the explicitly anti Muslim narratives. And now with these riots going on in the UK, he has been participating directly in that, tweeting that "Civil war is inevitable." I believe that was after the first night that these went on or the second, very early on. And just recently he retweeted this fake headline posted by Ashley Simon, who is co-leader of Britain First, a far-right party that talked about how the UK government was going to set up detainment camps on the Falkland Islands for these protesters, which was completely false, taken from a Telegram group, made up, but Elon Musk quote tweeted it and said: "Detainment camps." And, it took a while to delete it. What do you make of one, how social media platforms in general fuel this stuff, but also how, when you have someone like Elon Musk, who is participating in that, how does that become so much more difficult than to try to reign this stuff in? HK: I think this is such a good example of how the fiction is all that's important to these people, because in the aftermath of the riots, and, I think some of the right-wing sort of the sort of people who participated in them. Well, one of the things they weren't expecting, I think, was that right-wing media would sort of turn against them or had the appearance of turning against him, which is not to say that they've sort of stopped believing in the same things, but it's more just all the optics of this are really bad. And so we can't be seen to support the rioters. And so one of the things that I think they've sort of really latched to is the idea of like, well, we have to sort of be perpetually seen as victims. And so, we tried to burn down a hotel of children in it, but actually we were just doing it because we were scared for our children. We were scared, but our children's safety, why does no one talk about our children's safety and so on? And so the element of victimization is really important. So, and this is where fake news content or fake images and stuff become so important because really what's happening is that like the reinforcement of the victim narrative is so essential for perpetuating this movement. Like they need these types of grievances and everything. And I also imagine that probably is the thing that resonates with Elon Musk, as well. But he has to perpetually see himself as a victim because his platform is not doing great and advertisers don't want to do it. And I imagine he's also becoming more and more alienated by people who used to be his friends. And obviously he's going for a child custody battle with Grimes at the moment. This might be him trying to blow off some steam after going through that child custody battle. PM: He has a trans daughter who's airing all his dirty laundry \[both laugh\]. HK: So, he's probably not having the best of personal times right now. Just as a side point, I didn't realize that he had hired Andy Ngo as an official fact checker of Community Notes. Andy Ngo could be bullshitting because Andy Ngo has a reputation for doing so, but on his Twitter bio, he's fact checker for Community Notes. I had no idea how it worked because I assumed that Community Notes was a user based thing and someone could put in a Community Note that's sort of like, this person sort of is making up bullshit and then like, it sort of gets reviewed. And if it has a Wikipedia link, then it will sort of go in. There's a lot of Community Notes that are just like really weird and vindictive, but I thought it sort of worked in like a Wikipedia-ish way. But apparently, there are designated in-house fact checkers in Twitter. Although Andy Noh seems to be the only one who sort of admitted that he's doing it. And I'm really fascinated by like that or how that happened or like why, how that's going to work, how we sort of got to that point, but like Ilan has also always fallen for scams quite a lot, right. Or like fake stuff quite a lot. My impression though, is that the reason why he sort of seems to be going a lot harder on the UK, partly because we have a new Prime Minister who is by his standards, like a left-wing socialist. He is not a left-wing socialist by any means, but he's — PM: — What? I thought communism had returned to the UK! HK: Well, I feel like the UK is because of the riots and every time a riot happens, the MPs are always like: Oh, we need to ban like Blackberry. So we need to ban whatever the sort of contemporary form of technology is. And at the moment it's we need to ban social media, or we need to put really big controls and curtail TikTok and Twitter, in particular, because I feel like for lots of journalists and lots of middle-aged people and stuff who still use Twitter as their primary news source, it was very obvious and it's become very obvious to power users and stuff that this is filled with fascists now. It's very evident that, even despite how much you try to not see right-wing stuff, it becomes more and more impossible because of who's boosting what and the messy blue check system and all that type of stuff. So I feel like it's a combination of those things that has led Elon to sort of think like: Oh no, if anyone's going to like regulate us, if anyone's going to threaten my position at X, then it's going to be Keir Starmer. And I do wonder whether that's the reason why he seems to be sort of going so hard on the UK and doesn't really seem to have opinions on anything outside of that. But then at the same time, maybe that's giving him too much credit. He has been racist quite a lot. And he is not short of shy of boosting racists and everything. And it could just very well be the case of him seeing all this stuff, and like lots of Americans who sort of think that like London has been taken over by Muslims and become a caliphate, he may be one of those people that is convinced that that's happened. PM: Well, I feel like when you look at Elon Musk as well, he has been very engaged in what has been happening in the UK, but previously he was fighting an order in Australia where they were trying to get him or get Twitter (X) to take down the stabbing video that happened there earlier this year, late last year. And of course, he's been fighting the Supreme Court in Brazil as they've been trying to crack down on far-right movements now that Bolsonaro is out of power. And again, been trying to get in the way of that. HK: The far-right are the ones who are still paying him, right? And the far-right are the ones who are still like his biggest sort of customer base. And so it sort of also makes sense if every strategy that you've employed to make money isn't working, but the only people who are paying you are far-right freaks who like the boosterism because they like the attention, then like, there's no incentive to really like placate anyone else. And I wouldn't surprise me if some of his support for this was also just vindictive, the sense of: well, if everyone else is sort of abandoning me, then fuck it. I'm gonna, support the biggest fucking freaks around. Again, that might be as giving him too much credit though. And again, it could just very well be, yeah, he's a racist and racist support racist stuff. PM: Well, it could be a bit of all of it too, right? I think he's definitely a racist. We know he's a transphobe as well. But it seems like these things have become more prominent over the past few years and it seems like someone like Elon Musk then becomes like a standard bearer or a key example of how these social media platforms can lead people down these roads to this alternate reality. If someone like Elon Musk or even people who are far less powerful than him even have this inkling of racism and more openness to these right-wing ideas and then they're just constantly surrounded by it in this filter bubble. And they see all these people who are also engaged with it. And it's part of the entertainment that they experience. It's popular in the communities that they increasingly engage with, you can see how they increasingly go down that road and brainwash themselves into believing that this is the way that society works. HK: Again, it's the dominance of video as well adds to that as well. I think AI imagery too; the most effective AI is tends to sort of be the weirdest fantasy, that are used to reinforce the fear, the existing fears that you already have. So I do really feel like it comes down to this sort of sense of when the assemblage of content is produced at a higher and higher rate by people whose job it is or who see their job as sort of being to validate your fears or whatever, I think there are like lots of questions for news organizations, but also just for platforms who want to sort of see themselves as the public square as being like: Well, what happens when your public square like becomes so detached from reality it presents this, not even like sort of an elevated form, but like this very bizarre pastiche of real elements and fictional elements, and visually arresting elements. This cannot be healthy for people. And when you watch interviews of protests or interviews with the writers and stuff, you can sort of see if a lot of them like you're just not like it's very evident that you're just not in a healthy place and I don't think it's just about the far-right i think this is something a lot broader too. I see this when I go out, you sort of see this with random acts in the UK, one of the things that is very evident are just like random acts of anger and violence and stuff that seem to come with everyday interactions or hostility as well and I do wonder whether that's also sort of had an effect. But again, we can't sort of say that this is just like a technological problem because the final thing I always sort of think about when I'm thinking about like the cause of these riots or like, at least what sort of animating some of it is like decades of government policy, at least in the UK, which has sort of been about austerity. And it's a bit about detaching the State, removing safeguards, leaving people on their own, leaving people to socialize entirely via computers. And they have to interact in that way. And you need a smartphone to access very basic services and stuff like that. I feel like there was this great sense of alienation that leads people into seeking community and seeking comfort online. And when your online spaces are not really providing that, but they're providing like parts of it, but within this sort of broader tapestry of violence and chaos and disorder and this sort of sense of like, well, you can find community, but, you can only find community via a hostility of another, then you've got a really dangerous combination of like social factors that lead people to be convinced that like there is a section of society that are an existential threat to you and that you have a responsibility to act violently towards them to prevent them from existing. And I feel like that's the thing that's sort of really been missed out in among the commentary on these like riots, which is like this is only the beginning. Or it's one of the tipping points, but that underpinning anxiety and the underpinning rage is still very much present. And it may not have like political purchase in the sense of like, I'm sure the riots will have done quite a lot to diminish Nigel Farage's reputation, although I don't know, maybe it won't do. But even if he never gets in reaching distance to a government position or to even form a government, which is a very nightmare situation, but I don't think it's likely it will happen. If the riots show us anything, it's that acts of anarchic violence towards people of color are sort of going to be a lot more common than we expect. And they will also be a lot more unpredictable than we'll expect. PM: And just to pick up on what you're saying there, you can clearly see how an environment like that, right, where people live in this alternate reality, where you've had decades of austerity that have eroded the social framework and that lead people to have this life that is so mediated by devices, that is so insecure, and where they're being fed these racist and divisive narratives constantly are very much beneficial to the types of people who are funding these sorts of right-wing narratives and pushing this type of politics. Whether that is the Elon Musk's of the world, though I don't think that he is. I don't know if I would give him enough credit to be like masterminding something like that. And I think I would probably see him as more of like a follower down the road, but maybe I'm wrong on that. But also these people who are funding and pushing sort of right-wing media in order to try to put these ideas out into the world to convince people that this is the way that the world should work. And of course, our funding political parties to ensure that they are allowing this sort of world to come into being because ultimately, if you're dividing the majority of the population and saying that the reason why your life is so difficult now after decades of austerity is actually because of these migrants who are coming across the channel or because of these Muslims who are in your community and not because of these rich people who have been pushing these policies for ages. You can see how that benefits the very rich people who are getting super rich while everyone else is being made worse off. HK: And obviously the other aspect of this and the reason why the angle that government ministers and stuff are now taking is one of like: We need to sort of put restrictions or curtail the influence of social media. I don't think it's like necessarily incorrect in the sense that I do believe that like the sort of assemblage of content at this rate does cause social harms and it is worth exploring and it is worth doing research on, personally speaking, I do think that like it has impacts on our social relationships and the idea of what it means to be in a community and stuff. But I feel like that's a separate issue. The reason they're sort of going for it is because it provides a good and easy scapegoat for long term effects that are to do with like the degradation of the state and an unwillingness to build it back up. And so obviously it's still in their interest for people not to sort of think about this from like a class perspective and to think about this from a racial and cultural perspective. And it's also one reason why, as we sort of alluded to early in the episode, centrist political parties have appeased right-wing fantasies and right-wing myths. It was very amusing to sort of see government ministers condemn the rioters because, well, the motivations that they're sort of driven by are things that you sort of appeased during the UK election earlier this year. A lot of the sort of debates that were had were about how do you stop migrant boats? How do you stop refugee boats from coming into the UK? And, Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister, did not rule out the idea that they would use violent apparatus from the State in order to sort of prevent that. But he sort of said it in very sort of legal terms. His emphasis was very much the idea that like: oh, the Rwanda policy was too expensive. Not that it was too cruel. Not that it was too vicious, not that it was like dehumanizing, but it was too expensive. And that Labor would find a cheaper way of dealing with the refugee boats. So their motivations are still the same. And their sort of understanding of this is still the same. It's still in their interest to do so. But now we've just sort of got this added element of, well, how do we sort of like prevent the sort of chaos from ensuing and the optics, and that is to sort of curtail social media to sort of prevent mass mobilization, maybe. But the question what we're left with is, well, what happens when like individual random acts of violence become a lot more frequent. Mosques and stuff that have been targeted are still under threat and they don't have a lot of security. A lot of the security about those mosques have a either voluntary or funded very cheaply. We've had lots of religious centers and lots of minorities who have sort of been attacked and harassed. And, whenever that has sort of happened, police have always been sort of dismissive of it. And there's no plan to really fix that. So the underpinning problems I think are going to get worse. But I think as you sort of correctly mentioned, like as long as it doesn't sort of like undermine the optics of the state having control of things, which like these riots did, then I imagine the government will either sort of be fairly fine with like any stuff that happens or at worse, or sort of more likely rather, they will continue to appease the right in order to sort of wean them off. And so ironically, I do think that one of the outcomes of this won't be more protections for Muslim communities or more protection for minorities and refugees and so on. It will probably be vicious right-wing policies that are managed in a more appropriate way and are pushed as far out from the public as possible in order to avoid like the bad optics that the Tory government had when they were trying to do the same thing. PM: It's a pretty grim potential future, but you can clearly see how that is a very likely direction for things to go. I wonder, recognizing everything that you've said and that the roots of these riots throughout the UK are much deeper than something about social media and a lot of the talk about social media is about dismissing other factors that have clearly contributed to this over a long period of time. And going back to what you were saying about the clear issues that we can see in the way that technologies that a lot of these digital technologies have been used in our lives, and some of the consequences of that. Do you think that there is an opening to have a real discussion about what we need to do about social media platforms, recognizing that they're not the root of all the problems in society, but that they do have specific issues in particular with allowing these narratives to accelerate and take off so quickly and the social harms that potentially come with it, as well? Do you think that there's a real opening to talk about that or do you think that having a discussion be in response to an event like this leads more to this much more aggressive thinking where it's like: Oh, we just need to ban social media. We need to ban smartphones. Like it's not a very productive discussion. What do you think needs to happen there? HK: I feel like you'll sort of be the discussion that will be had in the UK will be on extreme ends. So you'll have one side that will be like: Social media is the problem and we need to curtail it, ban it for children, ban it for teenagers, whatever, the continuation of the whole teenagers shouldn't have smartphones type of thing. But I think the other side, which I think is one of the things that I've sort of been watching on the news are commentators who are like: Oh no, the government shouldn't ban social media. Or it's individual actors are doing so, but these are right-wing commentators who are also just as Islamophobic, but for them it's like they frame the Islamophobia as a free speech issue. So any curtailing of it, or even any sort of like interrogation as to like, okay, what is Islamophobia? What does it mean? What is anti-Muslim prejudice and stuff like that. So in the UK, for your listeners who don't know, there was a report that came out. The definition of Islamophobia is still not official. And it's been years; we've got like all party parliamentary groups that have submitted their own definitions. They wrote multiple papers on the subject, but every time they used to submit their own definitions, it to the government in order for it to sort of like codify Islamophobia and being able to build laws around protecting Muslim communities, it always was rejected. And it was rejected on the basis by, a very right-wing government who were just like: Well, we think that this will like impede on free speech issues, and freedom to criticize religion or whatever. So they just sort of rejected the whole thing. And for a period of time, they had their own definition of it. And their own definition really amounted to stuff like if a Muslim is attacked for being Muslim, then that's Islamophobia, but they wouldn't really expand beyond that. And even then it wasn't sort of made into law, which is to say that like there's a refusal to even acknowledge what Islamophobia is. And I think a lot of that is because any interrogation of it, even the most liberal interrogation of it would kind of make a lot of sort of members of polite society be guilty of being anti Muslim and that would sort of be seen as a real political damages to them. Because again, as I mentioned, Islamophobia is an endemic part of living in the UK, but it is also systemic too. And it is very much embedded into political and social discourse. To acknowledge that it's a problem would almost be seen as to criticize British society itself, which is why it's always been framed as a free speech issue. And so to like, try and answer your question, like, I think it'll exist on both sides of those spectrums. I don't think that this will be the thing that like, initiates a conversation as to the harms of social media. I think it'll be like, most of the stuff right now, in terms of the basis of the online safety bill was about like pornography and it was about the threat of like both online pornography and the, it's been rooted in like the protection of children and the protection of women and so on. So whether it expands to sort of like the protection of minorities and stuff, I'm not entirely sure. I'm not convinced that it will for a while, but my take on this is that like, I don't think that this will sort of trigger a serious conversation about the effects of social media. I feel like any conversation of it also has to interrogate how British society actually works and functions and who holds power and how power actually like manifests in this country. And I think for like an elite class of people who have been able to obfuscate it so cleverly for a long time, no, there is no incentive to sort of do that. It would like uncover too much of like the deep seated underbelly of how British class power actually works. And so until they can find a way to avoid having that discussion while also being able to like regulate social platforms, I feel like it's always going to be these things that's going to be said like stuff like: Oh, we should have a conversation about social media's effects on society, but like nothing materially will really happen. I mean, the final thing I guess is also just the British government's dependent on tech to solve their problems froze that, that's a bit of a spanner in the works as well. Britain still wants to be seen as a hub for tech and social media platforms and the place to do business and all that stuff, for all this hostility towards Musk, I imagine still wants X to have a presence in London and so on. And I feel like that dependence on technology, as a means of projecting progress, but also as a means of curtailing the effects of austerity. It is not in the British state's interest to really challenge tech power and its relationship to the state in a way that ought to be done. If there was actually an incentive to solve this problem. PM: I do wonder if we ever hit a moment where that shifts, and where it's not worthwhile anymore to keep allowing these companies to like run roughshod over regulations and over society and what have you. And also, the interrogation of what that free speech means, right? And how free speech has been deployed and grabbed by people like Elon Musk, but also these other people, you're talking about these right-wing commentators who use it for their own benefit to try to stop to ensure that the types of narratives that they want to get out there can get out there. They can try to defend them through the lens of free speech. Hussein, I know there's always a ton that we could talk about. We could keep going on for ages. It's great to have you on the show again. Thanks so much. HK: Thank you so much. There was a lot to talk about and I'm glad that I got to do it on your show. As you mentioned, this will be an ongoing thing, so I'm sure that we'll be able to talk about it again in the future.