Far right junk being pushed on our timelines
I have never once actively sought out right wing content, let alone far right antisemitic and anti-migrant media, yet X, Youtube, and Instagram seem to be pushing all sorts of far right content at me in the last couple of months. Not only are these posts and media content junk, it is toxic and corrosive to the general conversation. I am pro-migration, pro-multiculturalism, and feminist in every conceivable way, yet the various algorithms seem to think I want to see right wing content. It is deeply troubling, because while I have the background knowledge to dismiss these posts as rubbish, someone seeing this content as the only content they receive could see it as the only content there is.
This matters because if you spend your free time scrolling through the socials and consuming niche media content you are going to be influenced by that content, something which the UK government is urgently addressing in the wake of the recent race based riots. The French arrest of the Telegram CEO, the Ukrainian targeting of Russian bloggers, and the desperate attempt by the Trump campaign team to utilise social media shows that right wing content is a dominant form of media consumption and not a minor footnote. Since 2015 there has been a cold war between Russian dis-information and Western governments, and after the war in Gaza broke out both sides have used the socials to garner…
