Social media

At around five weeks into my pregnancy my phone found out about it, and from that point on I was subjected to a barrage of social media content about how much children suck. The first was a video by a woman with the username @childfreemillennial, who filmed herself walking through the children’s clothing aisle at a supermarket. She paused, turned to the camera and gagged. I was so shocked at the sheer nastiness and so hormonal that I cried. According to @childfreemillennial, the most loving thing we can do for our children is to never have them – in this economy, in this society, in this climate. According to @childfreemillennial, the most loving thing we can do for our children is to never have them This woman was not a one-off.

At the beginning of the spring term of my second year at university, a French boy called Xavier looked up from where he was sitting, on the floor of my friend’s flat, and announced that his new year’s resolution was to give up fantasising. Xav was deep in unrequited love with my friend so we assumed at first that he was simply through with pining, but that was not quite what he meant. He wasn’t taking a break from romantic fantasies, Xav said, so much as all the pointless wallowing in imaginary scenarios in which he came out top. Wishful thinking, you might call it. He was spending too much time doing it and he would from now on resist the temptation.

Right after Donald Trump’s landslide, I opined on YouTube that this turning point could sound the death knell for Woke World – an observation that decayed to hoary cliché within hours. I also supposed that Trump’s triumph might signal to the UK that all that diversity, equality and inclusion/systemic racism guff is totally yesterday – in the hopes that even if Brits don’t care about fairness, rationality and reason, they might at least be horrified by appearing passé.

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian regimes to clamp down on free speech. But after we raised the alarm, the government stripped out the most draconian clauses and put in some protections for freedom of expression, so even though it’s bad, it’s not quite as awful as it could have been. What about the BBC, which got several things wrong in its reporting of an explosion in the car park of Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital? Step forward Sir Keir Starmer.

We’re told these riots are about immigration, racism, angry Islam, elite blindness and identity politics – and, to a point, that’s all true. But the disorder in British cities is also about the internet – and online videos in particular. People just can’t stop sharing ‘riot porn’, whether it be savage beatings, vicious clashes between rioters and the police, or buildings and cars being set on fire. Violence, like sex, goes viral because it is so addictive to watch. Unlike with pornography, however, there’s no stigma attached to the circulation of such footage, especially if the person on the receiving end of the brutality seems to be a villain. It’s schadenfreude on steroids.