A polarisation engine’: How social media has created a ‘perfect storm’ for UK’s far-right riots
The 1996 Dunblane massacre and the outcry that followed are held up in the US as a textbook example of how an act of terror mobilised a country to demand effective gun regulation.
The atrocity, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed, provoked a wave of national revulsion that, within weeks, led to 750,000 people signing a petition demanding a change to the law. Within a year and a half, new legislation had outlawed the ownership of handguns.
Almost 30 years on, the horrific violence visited on a dance class in Southport has sparked a very different reaction. A reaction that shocked many in Britain this week but which experts in domestic extremism – and especially those who look at the intersection of violence and technology – say is all too depressingly familiar. And in this, our new age of algorithmic outrage, depressingly inevitable.
“We’ve always had radicalisation, but in the past, leaders would be the bridge and bring people together,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist and trenchant tech critic who won the 2021 Nobel peace prize. “That’s impossible to do now, because what used to radicalise extremists and terrorists is now radicalising the public. Because the information ecosystem is designed that way.”
For Ressa, everything about the violence that erupted on Southport’s streets and then in towns across the country, fuelled by wild rumours on social media and anti-immigrant rhetoric, was deeply familiar. “There’s always been propaganda and there’s always been violence. What’s brought violence mainstream is social media. [The US Capitol attack on] January 6 is the perfect example: people wouldn’t have been able to find each other if social media didn’t cluster them together and isolate them to incite them further.”
The biggest difference between the Dunblane massacre in 1996 and now is a wholesale transformation in the way we communicate. In our instant information environment, informed by algorithms that send the most shocking, outrageous or emotional comments viral, social media is designed to do the exact opposite of bringing unity: it’s a polarisation engine. [Continue reading…]