Freddy Gray

Facebook wants to move its business model towards the metaverse, that virtual future in which we will all hang out online through headsets and pretend it isn’t weird. The trouble is, we already appear to live in an alternate reality created by communications specialists with highly political agendas. Just look at the clearly PR-orchestrated Online Safety vs Facebook story which the media is playing out before our non-digital eyes. This week’s protagonist is Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who appeared yesterday in parliament to give evidence to MPs scrutinising the Online Harms Bill. That is the bill through which the government says it intends to regulate social media companies to stop online hate, bullying, terrorist radicalisation and so on.

Last week, some racist graffiti was found at Parkway North and Parkway Central schools in the Midwest American state of Missouri. Somebody had scrawled 'HOPE ALL BLACK PEOPLE DIE' and the n-word across the bathrooms. A protest erupted. Students ‘boycotted’ classes to show their disgust. But then the sense of outrage suddenly fell flat after it emerged that the person who had scrawled the racist graffiti was in fact black. It was, then, another hate hoax — a prank, effectively, at the expense of America’s preoccupation with racism, or perhaps more bizarrely an insane stunt in search for victimhood. (Or just an elaborate attempt to bunk off school.

Joe Biden’s presidency appears to be unravelling at remarkable speed. Back in January, in the days after his inauguration, Biden enjoyed considerable public support. His job-approval score was 58 per cent, with only 35 per cent disapproving. That could be put down to a widespread sense of relief that the sturm and drang of the Trump years were finally over, especially in the aftermath of the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. Biden benefitted too from being widely regarded as a decent man. And it didn’t hurt that large parts of the news media spent all day every day praising him as a marvellous antidote to his frightful predecessor. Yet the evidence is now clear: the more Biden does the job of president, the less Americans approve.

For European Union enthusiasts, the ‘trade deal with America’ has joined ‘£350 million pledge on a bus’ as one of the great Brexit lies. A certain amount of gloating has therefore greeted the news that Joe Biden last night ‘downplayed’ the possibility of a US-U.K. Free Trade Agreement. It’s a ‘snub’, Brexiteer hopes are dashed, and so on. But did Biden actually ‘downplay’ anything? Not really, since nobody has been seriously playing up the possibility of late. Many journalists are today talking as if the Prime Minister had been hoping to announce with Biden the trade deal Donald Trump promised Britain in 2017. But Boris has been the one minimising the government’s hopes.

It’s been said far too many times that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have a lot in common. Trump himself called the Prime Minister ‘Britain Trump’ – to Donald’s mind, the greatest compliment any man could give. Others use the Trump-Boris analogy to pour scorn. French newspapers have called him ‘mini-Trump’. Or ‘Trump with a thesaurus,’ is how Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister who now works for Facebook, put it. To most international media, Brexit and Trump, and therefore Boris and Trump, were part of the same horrid phenomenon. Both men were called populists, nationalists, demagogues, liars – yet they kept winning.

How do you take the pleasure out of something so marvellous and joyful as Emma Raducanu’s US open victory last night? Easy — turn on Twitter, which spoils everything including sport. Raducanu’s victory is truly a great triumph; the most breathtaking sporting feat by a female British athlete in our lifetimes. Emma is 18 and beautiful, just did her A-levels and got A* marks, had been 400/1 to win the tournament, never dropped a set — all these facts make her achievement even more delightful. I’ll stop the adulation there, because an entire industry of sports commentators already exists to make these points over and over. We don’t all need to join in. Yet for some reason it’s expected that we do.