Tech Won't Save Us - Is Social Media Fueling Far-Right Riots? w/ Hussein Kesvani

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Hussein Kesvani to discuss the far-right attacks that happened after the Southport stabbing in the UK and how larger structural issues in media, politics, and tech laid the groundwork for violence against visible minorities.Hussein Kesvani is a co-host of Trashfuture and Ten Thousand Posts.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:The stabbing in Southport resulted in the deaths of three children and injuries to eight children and two adults.After days of far-right attacks, there were large anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations across the UK.Some fascists attacked hotels housing asylum seekers, but in places like Bristol, locals started defending the hotels.In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered the “rivers of blood” speech.Elon Musk has been sharing a series of incendiary posts and false information that have helped fuel these attacks.The billionaire’s changes to Twitter have helped fuel right-wing misinformation.Support the show

There's a refusal to even acknowledge what Islamophobia is. And I think a lot of that is because any interrogation of it, even like the most liberal interrogation of it, would kind of make a lot of sort of members of polite society be guilty of like being anti-Muslim. Hello and welcome to TechHole and Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Hussein Kasvani. Hussein is the co-host of Trash Future and 10,000 Posts. Now, you've probably seen the far-right attacks and riots taking place across much of the UK recently. I know that as that started to happen, I started to see a lot of headlines talking about

how much social media was to blame for what was going on on the streets of many towns and cities across the United Kingdom. And it left me wondering how much social media is actually responsible for what is happening here, and how much is it actually much deeper things within society that are not just the result of social media, but maybe that social media and some actors using it are picking up on right now. So in this conversation with Hussein, I wanted to tease out some of those aspects. We talk about the role that social media plays in this, but I also wanted to talk about the statements and narratives that politicians have been using for a long time, very racist narratives around migrants and refugees and Muslims in particular, and also the way that those ideas are pushed out through mainstream

media platforms that a lot of people watch and that set the stage for something like this to happen. I know that we often focus a lot on Elon Musk and Twitter and his turn to the far right recently. And I feel like that leads us to really focus in particular on the negative aspects of social media. And I'm not here to say that that is not a thing that is happening and that there aren't a lot of problems with social media and the impacts that it has on society, as we'll talk about in this conversation. But I think that sometimes we can head down this road where we're blaming social media too much and acting as though it is divorced from this larger set of factors that impacts on so many of these events that we experience and that we see kind of taking off in our societies. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Hussein.

I think it digs into these topics really effectively. And hopefully you think that we have a good discussion kind of teasing these things out as well. I will note that this conversation was recorded on Thursday, August 8th. So for many of you about a week before you'll be hearing it. So just in case you notice that maybe some things have changed a bit or some things have evolved since what we're talking about, that is why that might be the case. So if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to help us keep making the show every single

week, having these critical conversations about technology and society, you can join supporters like Sam in Hamilton, Ontario, Maxine from Montreal, and Esri from Edinburgh in Scotland by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Hussein, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me on again. Absolutely. It's always great to chat. More often it's on one of your shows, but always great to have you back on this one too. Yeah, no, it's great. It's great to sort of cross-pollinate at least a little bit.

Absolutely. You know, I wish that we were talking about a more uplifting topic, but usually it seems like when we talk about tech, it's always kind of a downer. So yeah, it's bad stuff. It's bad stuff. It's never about like why the new iPhone is good or something like that. What, you're not all into these new AI features?

Yeah. Hussein Kaz kazvani the number one advocate for apple intelligence we i was talking to someone the other day just about how like nobody um you know those things were like whenever a new phone was released like people would sort of clap you out of like the apple store and stuff i don't know whether that still happens but like it feels like it's like less of a sort of pronounced thing now. It feels like it's much more, I mean, it was always like loser behavior, but I feel like if you're doing that now for like the new iPad, the new like thinner iPad or whatever, like even the sort of tech guys are sort of like, you're a bit of a loser.

Yeah. I can't imagine anyone like lining up overnight at the Apple store now to get the iPhone 16 or whatever we're on. I see more people get mad. So like I had to get my macbook like fixed the other month and i'm pretty sure i got swindled well like i definitely got swindled but in a way where like 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 like the big apple store in like covent garden in central london and it's like the place where

like if you were to launch a new product they would like hold a big party and like it used to be like you know a thing where like media people would get like invites to be like oh come to the apple store in covent garden and you can sort of get like exclusive like drinks party because we're launching like the new macbook air or whatever last time i went to go get my macbook replaced because like it had got some water damage because of rain of which they just did nothing about other than like, yeah, we can even repair this for you or for like 300 pounds cheaper, you can buy a new MacBook. Because, you know, economies of scale are great.

But like when I was sort of waiting in the thing where there's like a top floor where people get their stuff replayed, everyone is just sort of yelling at like, or getting mad at like the Apple genius people for being like, what do you mean you can't fix this very basic function? Like I can't afford to like spend 800 pounds to like buy a new like whatever right

but it's sort of basically it sort of feels like they you know what used to be a place where it's like okay we're coming to like fix your stuff is the solution for every like mac problem now sort of seems or it seems to be like recently like oh why didn't you just buy a replacement version of it even if you have the apple care or whatever they're still going to try to get some money out of you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's not even worth it for that. So yeah, things are, I suppose it's like, it's hard to be optimistic about tech even as a sort of like consumer. Yeah, 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 like a lowdown? You know, I'm sure people have been seeing these images, these videos of these like far right mobs attacking various cities within the UK. What's going on over there? Sure. I mean, like, so there's two ways of looking at this. There's like the sort of short view and the very, very long view of which the latter is sort of like, 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, like the closest city is like Liverpool, I suppose. But in this very small town, like it's a summer holiday, it's like all the kids are sort of out of school. And so

lots of places around the country do like summer camps and stuff uh one of these summer camps three like young girls were murdered they were attacked by a knife by a man who we don't know too much about because of like 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 like 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 like you know the proceedings for like something like this had to go through courts for like the protection of children we've had like other instances of this where like children who have sort of committed crimes often in their late teens have been afforded like protections on the basis

of being under 18 and maybe to be clear it was um three children who were killed in the knife attack and another eight children were injured and two adults as well yes yeah there's just something that's often like 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 like the sort of severity of the attack because it was really brutal and like 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 really really quickly so when i was on twitter and like looking just kind of keeping an eye on what sort of what was going on it took about like maybe 20-25 minutes before screenshots of the area around this like 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 like 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 like live in that part of the country. But because of how close it looked on Google Maps, and also just because, you know, racism and Islamophobia being very rampant in the UK, and like people are being in denial about it, it didn't take long before the sort of people were like, oh, this is like

a Muslim attack, right? And, you know, this was sort of retweeted and reposted and like the sentiments kind of kept getting like circulating around social media at a very, very fast pace. It didn't take long for like social media influencers to pick it up. So like, obviously the most famous one was Andrew Tate, who very quickly started posting about how this person was a Syrian refugee who was like, you know, 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 that like this man like had an Arabic name, like Anwar al-Sharati or something like that, which like from Arabic speakers sort

of points out that this isn't a real name. This is like, you know, this means like Ahmed the kitchen or something like that. Like it's not a real name, obviously just to sort of pointed out that this isn't a real name this is like you know this means like ahmed the kitchen or something like that like it's not a real name obviously just to sort of be ignored and then you have other sort of influences in like sort of right-wing spaces but also just among sort of very sort of niche british subcultural spaces like football twitter is like a very big one where you sort of have like very reactionary fans who sort of only identified by like what teams they support and during the off season when like football isn't played like right now beyond like olympic football like there's no games taking place and so the sun like there's a joke that

among like sort of people who cover football and who like football more than i do but like 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 like at the sort of crux of this established far-right groups far-right figureheads tommy robinson sort of being the biggest one uh is a man called stephen yaxley lennon who is like a very famous far-right influencer who i suppose like for some of your canadian listeners might know him as like a very brief time as like a host on rebel media yeah right that he had like a very short stint doing that which was like very a very odd moment the interesting relationships between like the

global or western far right where yeah well he's like sort of like a linchpin sort of it and he used to sort of be linchpin like connecting so many of these things right and lots of like the sort of the far right across the western world and like even beyond kind of look to him as sort of being an example of like 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 or like sort of i think maybe the next day as sort of like you know the kind of aftermath of the attack and it's sort of taking place there were talks about like far-right mobilizations happening in Southport.

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 kind of being a vigil for like, you know, the three kind of poor girls who were murdered very quickly sort of became an attack on Southport Mosque. So Southport Mosque, like then that's probably where like the first sort of set of videos was sort of being shown. But, you know, you could see people throwing bricks into the mosque.

You could see people trying to sort of like 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 taking place. It feels like such a far away, but 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. There were things that were happening in Liverpool, in Hull, I think in Newcastle as well. There were like 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 or lots of like news coming out about like people of color being targeted, especially if like you were Muslim, for example, and this sort of being filmed on TikTok, which kind of exaggerated the mobilizations even more. People who were like visibly Muslim or visibly like non-white were sort of told like not to work. But what like 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, like the people who didn't have a

choice but to sort of like go through these streets on mopeds and stuff that were like really dangerous. And, you know, quite a lot of them having either sort of like being beaten up or like not being allowed access through these roads, or in some cases having their cars or their motorbikes like burnt to a crisp. This has sort of been happening for like the past few days. Yesterday at the time of recording was supposed to be like quite a big far right mobilization, you know, where they said that like there were going to be like 100 protests across the country. Thankfully, that didn't happen, partly because of anti-fascist mobilization that kind of occurred very quickly and like 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 like it's not to sort of say that oh we defeated fascism yesterday and things are great the threat is very still very much there still very much mobile but there is like a bit of a stalemate at the moment but nevertheless it does underpin like a lot of a stalemate at the moment. But nevertheless, it does underpin a lot of the tensions and anxieties. And it also just underpins a lot of the structural racism and Islamophobia that is very present in the UK and is very likely to mobilize in very different ways.

I think the protests or the 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 structure in place to keep refugees who are applying for asylum from being able to do so. And then their last kind of couple of projects, one which involved putting a bunch of refugees on like a large sort of like facility in the British waters. I think it was called the Bibby Stock

Home. It's like a stupid name, but it was like really, really unhygienic and people were sort of taking their own lives there and stuff. So it was deemed like to be like 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 were like, no, we're not doing this actually, so tough shit. And so what we've got right now, I think, is a lot of anti-refugee sentiment, a lot of Islamophobic sentiment, coupled with the sort of ongoing effects of long-term austerity to kind of 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 endpoint of all this. So yeah, that's kind of succinctly what has happened. And I hope that makes sense. Yeah, 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 kind of reframe it around the types of things that I want to talk about, you know, that led to what has been happening here is obviously, you know, you talked about how social media and how say Telegram and these groups have been important to organizing these far right marches 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 um but then there's also this kind of bigger question because i 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 kind of 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 Labour

Party, which is now in government, as well as through the mainstream media and a lot of the reporting that even your more like reputable mainstream publications have been doing. So I wonder how you think about that kind of 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? Yeah, it's a big question. I suppose it's like, okay, what is the relationship between like mainstream politics and media and sort of like the mobilization of the far right? And again, that's like a very big question, because I feel like depending on where you want to begin, and having sort of experiences, but also having like covered

it as like 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 like, having to understand that Islamophobia is like an institutional form of racism that is very embedded into like British society. It begins sort of at 9-11 and the sort of like war on terror type of stuff. But like, in reality, anti-immigrant sentiment has sort of been visible in Britain for like decades and decades and decades. So like when my family kind of came in the late 1970s, it was very much sort of rooted in kind of 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 family coming into the country. We were Ugandan Asians. And so they were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, who was supported by the

British. And because of the Commonwealth connections, they were allowed to come to the UK. And there were, I think, a few thousand who arrived in the UK. I'm not sure like exactly the number, but that was sort of considered to be the first like mass immigration movement to have occurred in like the 20th century of like East African Asians. And it was also like, you know, the Ugandan Asians were sort of like the reference point for Enoch Powell and the rivers of blood speech, the idea that like, oh, if you have this many coming in, then like, you know, they will soon sort of gain political purchase and to do so they will like undermine democracy and it will cause civil war because like you know they'll bring their sort of savage and barbaric ways to

like the proper and you know friendly british streets which never existed because there were always fucking constant riots like across across the uk like forever and so this kind of fiction but nevertheless like the reason why i think it's so important is because across the uk like forever and so this kind of fiction but nevertheless like the reason why i think it's so important is because like the framing like powell's framing is like the kind of dominant form of which like the new generation far right of like using to mobilize it's this idea that like this isn't just sort of like a racial threat but it's a cultural threat it's a demographic threat all of which are sort of like you know very kind of prescient in among the far right language today and so like well this is also one of the times when like the media kind of, even though

like Powell was kind of, even though Powell was sort of removed from the Conservative Party, he had support in like the right wing media, he had support from the Daily Mail, for example, like, you know, common sense and all that. And I would sort of say that like that sentiment kind of continues to develop as like, more and more immigrants and refugees kind of like find themselves in the UK. It's sort of like, you know, their threats are sort of a combination of like, oh, they're a drain on resources, but also like they're a cultural threat or a demographic threat. You know, there have been lots of sort of fear mongering about mixed race children. The idea of like white replacement, for example, is like one of these sort of perennial fears that kind of continues to sort of embolden the right or sort of animate the right today. And so in one way, it's like 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. The whole of the British state in the 2000s and the 2010s was orientated around the surveillance and containment of mosques and religious centers, and the idea of Muslims having to 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 the idea of 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 like there's like a class dimension too where it's like the victims of this surveillance infrastructure are like working class people of color and working class muslims and so like where the media and where like you know right-wing media in particular as they've sort of become closer to government which is something that like you and i have talked about before but also like you know 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 kind of 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, like, without kind of going too much into the sort of specifics of it, like 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, you know, they are like physically dangerous. They could sort of attack you. They could attack your families. They could attack your communities and so on. Or like a lot of most of which is like sort of unfounded. But the bigger thing and the thing that I think is the reason 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 like a demographic threat they're an economic threat especially as they sort of spread and become more prosperous and become more like middle class they represent a religious threat you know as the sort of like decline of churches continues to take place mosques are sort of like being built at like a much faster rate because, you know, again, like Muslims have more money and so they can afford to buy centres and they can afford to make them like religious centres and so like religious centres fit for purpose and so on. And so I would ultimately say that like the sort of shift is as Muslims have integrated,

that as they've become like a bigger part of British life, as they have sort of have done the things that they were supposed to do in order to ascend to middle and upper middle class boundaries, and have been able to assert their identity more as a result of that, they are represented more holistically, not as a class threat or a threat to an existing culture, but one in which that's what animates the idea of, you know, as the far right sort of say, but oh, as the Muslim presence becomes bigger, like, you know, they will take over everything. Right. And I feel like when you look at the way that that is deployed through media systems, through political systems, it's like, maybe this is looking at the past through like a nostalgic lens, but you associate say the male the male or the Farages or a certain side of

the Conservative Party with this kind of 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 like a notable shift in just the way that these narratives have become widely accepted? I think there's been a notable shift. And it's not to sort of say that it wasn't kind of there. But as I mentioned, like 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 like that shift towards existential threat is something that has been

accelerated by kind of right wing figures that include in public like Nigel Farage, but like in private include like an expansive and much better funded like right-wing media ecosystem. You know, I think one thing to bear in mind, especially if you don't come from the UK, it's just how like pronounced the right-wing ecosystem is among like British media types. You know, so we have like a handful of people who like own right-wing titles that are like barely read, like, You know, so we have like a handful of people who like own right-wing titles or like barely read, like, you know, like barely anyone reads The Spectator in practice.

The Telegraph, like, which is like the right-wing newspaper doesn't really make any money. Paul Marshall, who's like a private equity guy who is very much like invested in right-wing media projects and was on the news, like I think maybe last year

for running like various twitter alt accounts where he sort of kind of retweets the most insane racist shit and it's always been in denial about that despite the overwhelming evidence that like he has a bunch of alt accounts like retweeting nazis effectively they're responsible for like sort of 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 that the BBC didn't always have an Islamophobic streak, because again, the relationship between government and media and the ways in which media relies on access to government in order to perpetuate itself and in order to reinforce its importance

was one which was always rooted in the idea that like Muslims needed to be surveilled and be seen as suspicious and so on. But the shift towards the existential threat is now one where it's like, you shouldn't just be suspicious about like the Muslims who are sort of gathering in the mosque in case they're talking about like planning a terror attack, for example, which used to be sort of like the way in which I would sort of at least describe that model in the early 2000s but it's one where it's just like the idea of muslims existing is like enough to kind of warrant a type of fear which is also again like why the far right are so sort of fixated on like demographic collapse and the sort of like comparatively muslims and like muslim immigrants like will tend to have more children or like you know culturally are sort of more likely to have more than two kids and the

sort of that feeds into these much broader conspiracy theories around like great replacement and so on, like stuff that you kind of 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 kind of 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. It feels like that's kind of a structural thing as well, right? You talk about the power and influence of right-wing media in the UK. In North America, what we see is that as

kind of 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. Like a lot more of the media ecosystem has been just kind of captured and shifted to the right. And I wonder if that is a dynamic at play over there as well. Yeah. I mean, like, again, I don't think there's like been a shift to the right so much as like, I think British mainstream media has always sort of had like a right wing tint to it. Again, like proximity to government and where like successive governments

have sort of felt like they can kind of cordon off the right wing threat by granting more concessions. It makes more sense for, you know, to media types, it's like, well, we'll just sort of also grant concessions too. The way they frame it is like, that's the way that politics goes. Like, you know, centrist politics is one where, you know, you are always constantly having to find the center ground and the center ground just happens to be going more and more right. And like, you know, no need to interrogate that or like wonder why that might be. Yeah. So I kind of think that like, even though the shift was always sort of moving rightwards anyway, again, it's like, even though the shift was always sort of moving

rightwards anyway, again, it's like, you know, the movement itself is one where I think right-wing actors have kind of been aware that they can push media to sort of get to their level and like government will sort of come with it. And like the added sort of components of this is obviously social media as well. Part of this is to do with like newsroom economics, whereas social media has sort of like taken over how information is distributed and like the speed and the tempo of it and where like they've gotten rid of journalists and beat reporters and people who would sort of be embedded into like communities including like muslim communities and stuff are now having to sort of guide or like 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 kind of meant that government will also, or 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, you know, the general public kind of think that there should be like lower or zero immigration. And therefore like 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 kind of produced this result. And it's not one that is sort of like wholly honest or even sort of like derived in the kind of like logical way. As a person who is pretty visible and opinionated online, I'm hyper aware of safety and security. It's easier than ever to find personal information about people online and all that data can have actual consequences in the real world. Delete Me is designed to stop that from happening, and that's why I've been using it.

Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal info from the largest people search databases on the web and in the process helps prevent potential id theft doxing and phishing scams to put it simply delete me does all of the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal info off the web data brokers hate delete me when you sign up delete me immediately goes to work scrubbing all of your personal information from data broker platforms your personal profile is no longer theirs to sell take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for delete me now at a special discount for our listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete.me plan by texting TECH to 64000. That's TECH to 64000. The only way to get 20% off is to text TECH to 64000. Once again, that's TECH to 64000. Disclaimer, message and data rates may apply see terms for details 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, you know, traditionally Facebook or Twitter, but increasingly TikTok 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, you know, 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. The interesting thing about the riots and stuff that happened was that even when people did point out that, hey, 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. Like none of it matters. Right. And so the other question is like, is it even a question that people really want to like hear the truth anymore? Or is it more of a case for like what being on social media and being like in this type of media environment

accelerated by these social platforms is it one where like the truth of like or like sort of a shared reality kind of becomes impossible to or like becomes so unimportant to people that it becomes like impossible to use as a kind of method of de-escalating or de-radicalization or whatever you want to call it you know i think that's like a much broader question so to kind of like answer your first one i think the effects of all this and i think especially tiktok is that the rate of kind of like, I don't even want to say information because it's not really news gathering, it's just commentary. So the rate of commentary like sort of speeds up at a pace where like it becomes difficult for news organizations

to really kind of keep a handle on, right? You know, and you've sort of seen this before, like whenever sort of an attack or something kind of like an event takes place the ways in which social platforms handle this is really really difficult and like twitter at the best of times before it was like massively defunded and de-escalated and de-scaled was having a difficult time doing this anyway right but they had like teams of like fact checkers and moderators and so on who were able to kind of at least try to create a timeline in which like information was sort of coming out at like you know a standard pace but with on on musk twitter like it's all really anarchic i remember when the riots were sort of first taking place and i was trying to use twitter to like keep up

to date with what was sort of going on within five minutes like the porn bots kind of took it over and it's really bizarre because it was just like you know you would see people who were like clearly got like a copy paste thing from like a user sort of saying that, oh, you know, I feel so ashamed about the behavior of like, you know, these writers, like who don't care about the little girls at all. And then the picture under it would be like a still from like a porn film. Right. And it was so bizarre that like this had sort of taken over the timeline, like within like minutes of this attack sort of taking place then you sort of combine that with like kind of people who are charlatans and who very clearly

understand how the algorithm works and they understand but like you have a small window in which is to sort of say whatever you want because like if enough people see it then like the sort of idea of who did it or what happened is already there and like it becomes quite difficult then to sort of like take that out of people's minds. I think, especially when people sort of go onto these platforms, looking to kind of confirm what they believe already happened. And again, that like makes it very difficult to sort of say to people, actually the idea of like how you view the world is not really how it's reflected in reality because to them, it doesn't really matter. Like they've already decided what's happened. And even if that didn't't happen like 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 like you can't technically say that i'm wrong i was watching like parts of an interview that andrew tate did with piers morgan earlier today i don't know why this should sort of showed up on my recommended feed again like great algorithmic stuff you're getting the greatest kind of content there right the piers morgan show well you know it's like that meme like socrates and plato like talking to each other um it felt very much like that but like credit to piers morgan very minor credit to piers morgan he sort of says well look every aspect as he says to take every aspect of what you put on social media was incorrect like wasn't a refugee

was born in this country his parents had like a right to stay like they had brit British passports of their citizens, all that type of stuff. And Andrew Tate like basically responds by saying, yeah, but like it could have happened in another way. Like it could have been a refugee. Refugees have committed violence all the time. And so it's kind of like there are strategies that these people employ that have far less to do with like saying that they're right or wrong and much more about kind of confirming people's fantasies and confirming people's sort of ideas of how the world works. And I think that's like a much more difficult thing for like 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, you know, and TikTok prides itself

on this where it's like, you know, 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 like anyone can sort of just indulge in whatever they want. But the other side of that is like, well, if you have like 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, like, that's not how people work. Or like, you can't just say that someone has like criminal intent based on like the country, but their parents were born in before they moved into right. In the case of this guy, like you can't remove the fact that he was born and grew up in Britain

and that his bringing up is distinctly British. Like none of that matters because ultimately like this, the way in which these systems work and the way in which they optimize are ones where the sort of, you know, uh, the most successful content is one that kind of confirms your biases and confirms your fantasies and confirms how you think the world works. And so I think that like, it's really difficult to articulate, but it's also really difficult to sort of like curtail, but i feel like stuff like riots and stuff where it's already kind of 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 like very very difficult even as like a news gatherer to sort of like develop information and distribute and like sort of send it to an editor

and get it kind of fact-checked and stuff before it goes out now like with the sort of like demand to do that within seconds like that's basically impossible so what you've got is like a very anarchic very chaotic information system that is willing to give you whatever you want to kind of confirm your view of the world versus a very old and like somewhat kind of like outpaced system of news gathering where you also have like a massive level of distrust in part because the sort of traditional system of news gathering, where you also have like a massive level of distrust, in part because the sort of traditional form of news gathering has become so dependent on the tech side of it, even though like their methods of gathering and distributing information, like I would probably say is like almost diametrically opposed to each other.

Yeah. 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 weeks ago, when the Olympics were starting. And remember, there was that big controversy, you know, a false controversy over the recreation of the Last Supper painting. Which is still going on. Like, even today, it's like people are like, oh, the Olympics, like mocking Christianity. And it's like, but that was debunked like two weeks ago. That's what I mean, right? I was talking to somebody. And as you were saying but that was debunked like two weeks ago. That's what I mean, right? I was talking to somebody and as you were saying, it was debunked.

It was actually like 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 like, that is what they wanted to believe. And it was like, you couldn't say anything that would convince them differently. And, you know, that happens on so many different issues and it doesn't need to be this big thing that is like fueling you know kind of far-right riots across the country but it can be on just like so many different smaller issues that then creates as you're saying this like 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 like 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 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. Yeah, exactly. You know, it opens up a lot

of questions in terms of like, well, the sort of social effects of this are really evident. So there are lots of like live streamers and stuff who go to these protests, because again, like another way of making money out of chaos is by like live streaming, apparently. And so you have these guys and you know, you've got them everywhere, who will go to protests and be like, oh, why are you protesting? And like a of these channels 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, but it's more just like, and maybe maybe just 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 kind of cut their brains a little bit or like quite a lot at times because they'll sort of like say things that are like i would like encourage people to watch it because like it's interesting to sort of see what happens when you're sort of navigating like a real world environment but like you sort of believe that what you've seen on the internet is real. Like that is kind of the world that you understand. Because like in some of these interviews, they'll kind of, so for example, one of them like was

asked like, oh, why have you come to this like, you know, Southport protest, you know, or the right wing thing. And they'll be like, and they'll sort of say that, oh yeah, I'm here to like pay my respect to the little girls who have passed away. Okay, fine. But then like a second later, they'll be like, yeah, but you know, all these like, you know, slur inserted there, like, you know, they've come in and like, you know, they take all the money and they take all the jobs and they're setting up mosques everywhere. And like, you know, there used to be a pub down the road and that's a mosque and everything like that's not true. Like there's no evidence of that, but it's just like, it feels like an assemblage of stuff that they've kind of read or they've seen on their phones. And like,

maybe some of it, they've also sort of invented in their head as well. So where your reality becomes an assemblage of all these things that you've consumed online, put together by people who have sometimes nefarious ambitions, but sometimes they'll just 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 like you know praise themselves so being able to like insert like pieces of misinformation that they sort of felt kind of got a lot more traction than they expected like you know that's kind of a game to these people i always go back to this thing that adam curtis said like years and years ago about how eventually like the internet will sort of become this place where like you go to sort of mostly go for entertainment but like you kind of 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 like 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. The Riot live streams 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 like 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 like 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 like frames his, well, these people sort of see it as entertainment, but they see it as entertainment that leads to kind of material effects. And so again, to kind of go back to like where like British media, which is very right wing, like where it has sort of struggled to kind of keep up the pace with it. They cannot be the same

type of entertainment platforms as all these other sort of like 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 kind of like try to shut them down and in some case like what's been interesting is like the right-wing kind of papers in the uk oddly enough today have sort of like 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-fascist. Like you've been

sort of printing stuff for years and years saying how they were like destroying the country. Like you have kind of laid the foundations for something like this to happen. But then, you know, other right wing kind of outlets outlets and you know your sort of gb news talk tv which are like 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 like a very messy media environment one where a lot of chaos can sort of ensue but one in which like the content creators who don't have any strings kind of pulling, like holding them in and no real regulation are sort of like,

well, I can create great entertainment by sort of just framing Muslims as like more of an existential threat than like the Daily Mail ever could. Yeah. 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 like 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 you know, there's been like 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 kind of right-wing extremism in its algorithms. You know, 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 kind of 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, like 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, you know, took a while to delete it. Like, what do you make of of one, I guess how social media platforms in general kind of 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 rein this stuff in? I think this is such a good example of like how the fiction is sort of like all that's important to these people, because like in the aftermath of the riots and like, I think some of the right wing sort of, of um like the sort of people who participated in them but one of the things they weren't expecting i think was that like right wing media would sort of kind of turn against them or like have the appearance of turning against them which is not to say that they don't like you know they've sort of stopped believing in the same things but it's more just like oh the optics of this are really bad right and so we can't be seen to like so it's

sort of put the rioters and so like one of the things 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 right and so yeah we tried to burn down a hotel of children in it but like actually we were just doing it because we were scared for our children we were scared but like you know our children's safety why does no one talk about our children's safety and so on and so like the element of victimization is really important so and this is where like fake news content or like fake kind of images and stuff become so important because really what's happening is that like the reinforcement of the victim narrative is so essential for like perpetuating this movement like they need these types of grievances and everything and i also imagine

that like that probably is the thing that resonates with elon musk as well but like he has to kind of perpetually see himself as a victim because, you know, his platform's not doing great and advertisers don't want to do it. And like, you know, I imagine he's also becoming more and more alienated by like people who used to be his friends. And like, obviously, he's going for a child custody battle with Grimes at the moment. This might be him trying to like blow off some steam after going through that child custody battle. Yeah, he has a trans daughter who's airing all his dirty laundry so like he's probably not having like the best of personal times right now just as a side point like i didn't realize that he had hired andy no as like a like an official fact checker of like community notes like andy

no could be bullshitting because like andy no has a reputation for doing so. But on his Twitter bio, he's like fact checker for community notes. I had no idea how it worked because I assume that community notes was like user-based thing. And like, you know, someone could put in a community note that's sort of like, yeah, this person sort of is making up bullshit. And then like it sort of gets reviewed. And if it kind of has a Wikipedia link, then it'll sort of go in, right? There's a lot of community notes that are just like really weird and vindictive,

but I thought it sort of worked in a kind of like Wikipedia-ish way. But apparently like, yeah, there are like designated in-house fact checkers in Twitter. Although Andy Ngo seems to be the only one who sort of admitted that he's doing it. And I'm really fascinated by, really fascinated by like that or

how that happened or like why that like how that's going to work. I mean, I'm fascinated to like know how we sort of got to that point. But like Elon is also always fallen for like 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 like a new prime minister who is, you know, by his standards, like a left-wing socialist. He is not a left-wing socialist by any means. What? I thought communism had returned to the UK. Well, yeah, you know, I feel like the UK is kind of because of like the riots and every time a riot happens, the sort of the MPs are always like, oh, we need to ban like BlackBerry. So we need to

ban like whatever the sort of contemporary form of technology is. And at the moment, it's like, we need to ban social media, or we need to put really big controls and curtail TikTok and Twitter and all that stuff. 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. Oh no, this is filled with like fascists now. Like it's very evident that like, even despite how much you try to like not see right wing stuff, it becomes more and more impossible because of like who's boosting what and like,

you know, the messy blue check system and all that type of stuff. So I feel like it's a combination of all those things that has led Elon to sort of think for like, oh no, like if anyone's going to like regulate us, if anyone's going to like threaten my position at like 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, it's like maybe that's giving him too much credit. Like he has been racist quite a lot. And like, he is not sort of shy of like boosting racists and everything. And it could just very well be the case of like him seeing all this stuff and like, like lots of Americans who sort of think that like London has been kind of taken over by Muslims and

become a caliphate. He may be one of those people that is convinced that that's happened. Yeah. 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, you know, Twitter X to take down the stabbing video that happened there earlier this year, late last year. Yeah. 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, you know, been trying to get in the way of that.

The far-right are like the ones who are still paying him, you know, been trying to get in the way of that. The far right are like 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 for like, well, yeah, if you're like,

if every strategy that you've employed to make money isn't working, but the only people who are paying you are like far right freaks who like the boosterism because they like the attention, then like there's no incentive to really like placate anyone else, right? You and i and i wouldn't surprise me some of those

some of his support for this was also just vindictive like you know the sense of well if everyone else is sort of abandoning me then like you know fuck it i'm gonna you know support the biggest kind of fucking freaks around um again that might be just giving him too much credit though and again it could just very well be, yeah, he's, he's a racist and racist support racist stuff. Yeah. 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. Um, but it seems like these things have become more prominent over the past few years. And, you know, it seems like someone like Elon Musk then becomes like a standard bearer or like a key example of how these social media platforms can lead people down these roads to like this alternate reality. Like, you know, if someone like Elon Musk or

even people who are far less powerful than him even have this inkling of kind of racism and this 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 as popular in the communities that they increasingly engage with. You can see how they kind of increasingly go down that road and kind of brainwash themselves into believing that this is the way that society works. Yeah. Again, it's like the dominance of like video as well kind of adds to that as well. You know, I think AI imagery too,

like which is very much like the most effective AI tends to sort of be like the weirdest kind of like fantasies that are used to reinforce like the fear, the existing fears that you already have. So there's like,

I do really feel like it comes down to this sort of sense of like when the assemblage of content sort of like is produced at like a higher and higher rate by people whose like job it is or who see their job as sort of being to kind of validate your fears or whatever. I think there are like lots of questions for news organizations, but also just

for platforms who kind of 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 that it presents this kind of like, not even like sort of an elevated form but like this very bizarre pastiche of like real elements and fictional elements and like you know visually arresting elements like i mean my thinking whenever i think about it's like this cannot be healthy for people and when you watch like interviews of protests or interviews of the writers and stuff like you can sort of see with 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 like about the far right.

I think this is something a lot broader too. Like I see this when I go out, I, you know, you sort of see this with like random acts, like in the UK, like one of the things that is very evident are just like random acts of like anger and violence and stuff that like seem to kind of come with everyday interactions or hostility as well. And I do wonder whether like that's also sort of had an effect, but again, it's like, we can't sort of say that this is just like a technological problem because the final thing that like, I always sort of kind of think about when I'm thinking about like the

cause of these riots or like at least what's 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 been about like detaching the state, removing sort of safeguards leaving people on their own leaving people to like socialize entirely via computers and they have to interact in that way and you need like a smartphone to access like very basic services and stuff like that i feel like there is this great sense of alienation that leads people into sort of seeking community and seeking kind of 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 like

violence and chaos and disorder and this sort of sense of like, well, you can find community, but you kind of, you can only find community via like a hostility of another, then you've got like a really dangerous combination of like social factors that lead people to kind of be convinced that like there is a section of society that like are an existential threat to you and that you have a responsibility to act violently towards them to sort of like prevent them from existing and i feel like that's the thing that's sort of really been missed out in among for the sort of commentary on these like rights which is like this is kind of only the beginning or it's like one of the sort of like tipping points but like 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 you know i'm sure the rights will have done like quite a lot to sort of diminish my nigel farage's reputation although i don't know maybe it won't do but you know even if he never sort of gets in reaching distance to like government position or to even form a government, which is a very nightmare situation, but I don't think it's likely it'll happen. But I feel like if the riots show us anything, it's that acts of anarchic violence towards people of color are going to be a lot more common than we expect. And they'll also be a lot more unpredictable than we'll expect. Yeah. 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,

you know, 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, right? 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, are 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 and obviously the other aspect of this and the reason why like the angle that like government ministers and stuff are now taking is one of like we need to sort of put restrictions or like curtail the influence of social media which like i don't think it's like necessarily like incorrect in the sense that I do believe that like the sort of

assemblage of content at this rate, like does kind of cause social harms and like, it is worth exploring and it is worth like, kind of like doing research on like personally speaking, I do think that like it has impacts on our sort of social relationships and the idea of like what it means to be in a community and stuff. But I feel like that's a separate issue like the reason they're sort of going for it is because it kind of 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 kind of build it back up and so like obviously it's still in is there interest to be like 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 kind of centrist political parties have kind of appeased right-wing fantasies and right-wing myths like it was very funny sort of like see or very amusing to sort of see government ministers like condemn the rioters because it was just like well the motivations that they're sort of driven by are things that you sort of appeased during the 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. He sort of said

it in very sort of legal terms. His emphasis of said it in like very sort of like legal terms. His emphasis was very much the idea of 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 like refugee boats. So like 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 like well how do we sort of like prevent the sort of chaos from ensuing in the optics and that is to sort of curtail social media to sort of prevent like mass mobilization maybe but the question what we sort

of left with is like well what happens when like individual random acts of violence like become a lot more frequent mosques and stuff that have targeted, they're still sort of under threat and they don't have a lot of security. A lot of the security that those mosques have are like either voluntary or like funded very cheaply. You know, we've had like lots of religious centers and lots of minorities who have sort of been attacked and harassed. And like, whenever that has sort of happened, police have kind of always been sort of dismissive of it. And there's no plan to really kind of fix that. So the underpinning problems I think are going to get worse. But I think always been sort of dismissive of it. And there's no plan to really kind of 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 kind of 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 worst, or sort of more likely rather, they will kind of continue to appease the right in order to sort of like wean them off and so ironically i do think that one of the sort of outcomes of this won't be like more protections for muslim communities or like you know more protection for minorities and refugees and so on it will probably

be like vicious right-wing policies that are managed in a more appropriate way and are kind of 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 like do the same thing. 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 sorts of narratives to accelerate and take off so quickly, and the kind of 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, you know, having a discussion be in response to an event like this, you know, leads more to this kind of 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? Yeah. I mean, I feel like you'll sort of be the discussion that will be had in the UK will be like on extreme end. So you'll have like one side that will be like social media is

the problem and we need to sort of like curtail it, ban it for children, ban it for teenagers, whatever. Like the continuation of the whole, like, you know, teenagers shouldn't have smartphones type of thing. But I think the other side, which i think is like one of the things i've sort of been watching on the news are like commentators who are like oh no you know the government shouldn't ban social media or it's like you know it's like individual actors are doing so but like these are right-wing commentators who like are also just as islamophobic but for them it's like they frame the islamophobia as like a free speech issue so any curtailing of it was sort of like, or even any sort of like interrogation as to like, okay, what is Islamophobia and what does it kind of like mean? And what does it mean to like,

what is sort of like anti-Muslim prejudice and stuff like that? So in the UK, for your listeners who don't know, like, you know, we had, there was like a report that came out, the definition of Islamophobia is still like not official. And it's been years, like, you know, we've got like all party parliamentary groups that have sort of like submitted their own definitions. They wrote like multiple papers on the subject, but every time they used to submit it to the government in order for it to sort of like, you know, about part of the process of like codifying Islamophobia and sort of being able to build laws around protecting Muslim communities, it always was rejected. And it was rejected on the basis by you know a very right-wing government who were just like well we think that this will

like impede on free speech issues you know and so you know 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 like a muslim is attacked for being muslim then like you know that's islamophobia but they wouldn't really kind of 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 like 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 damage 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 Britishish society itself which is why it's always been framed as a free speech issue and so to like try 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 like the harms of social media i think it'll be like most of the stuff right now in terms of like 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 the protection of children and the protection of women and so on. So whether it expands to 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 I don't think that this will 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 manifests in this country. And I think for an elite class of people who have been able to obfuscate it so cleverly for a long time, 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. And then the final thing, I guess, is also just the British government's dependent on tech to solve their problems. That's a bit of a spanner in the works as well, right? 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 it 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. Yeah, I do wonder if we ever hit a

moment where that shifts, right? And where it's not worthwhile anymore to keep allowing these companies to 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, like 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 and 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.

Thank you so much. Yeah, there was like a lot to talk about and I'm glad that I got to do it on your show. And like, as you mentioned, like this will be an ongoing thing. So I'm sure that we'll be able to talk about it again in the future. Hussain Kesvani is a co-host of Trash Future and 10,000 Posts. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou Fry. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening. Make

sure to come back next week. Thank you.