Every racist is an influencer now

Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in I t’s funny, isn’t it, how the performance and consumption of cruelty have become a daily pastime for millions in Britain. I think about this a lot. I, like every other person in their twenties, spend a lot of my time online, where racist activists and content creators, as well as some politicians, have embraced a politics that uses the pain of dehumanised people as a commodity to excite their supporters or revel in simply being nasty. At the Reform UK conference last month, a young woman protesting Nigel Farage’s gift of £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne was mobbed by men hitting her with their crutches, pulling her hair and gleefully shouting abuse. This encounter was quickly turned into a promotional video on Reform UK’s social media channels – all the more ironic since, given his record-breaking donations to the party, some of that social media spend likely comes from Harborne’s own pockets. Nor is the left wing immune: in February 2025, Labour MP Clive Lewis criticised Sir Keir Starmer’s government for a similar stunt in using deportation footage for promotional party material. Somehow, these same politicians have called out the kind of violence that I have recently reported on. a spate of attacks on homes, family homes and HMOs in Salford, Greater Manchester. On social media today, you can see livestreamers who earn a living by posting about firebombs, doors kicked in and “Send Them Back” scrawled in red over doors that children pass on their way to school. Recommended GB News is allowed to promote Reform – so I’m setting up Woke TV Shabana Mahmood faces a mutiny on immigration I fear Britain’s politics are about to turn as ugly as Europe’s I mention these episodes together not because they are entirely the same, but because their differences in format, style or content differ far more than their underlying substance. They turn pain into pornography, the kind of stuff that earns people thousands of pounds on X, TikTok and YouTube. Despite some of the online fuel, leading to even teenagers being charged with vandalism, arson and harassment crimes, Salford Council has confirmed it does not house asylum seekers in HMOs. The apostle Paul wrote that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”. What may have started with some people as a way of documenting the inconsistency people see – asylum accommodation versus homelessness on their streets – has mutated, so that the financial and validation incentives of posting on social media drive increasingly extreme behaviour, culminating in the right-wing agitator Danny Tommo’s stunt of slashing an RNLI vessel involved in active rescue. The content I am talking about now reaches millions, and might earn the same, too. Prominent accounts on YouTube and X are generating revenue of upwards of £10,000 to £20,000 a month. Posters are rewarded for being inflammatory. The places where this content is generated are more often in the North, North West and Midlands, which also disproportionately host asylum seekers, while also having higher levels of average poverty and deprivation. To combat this, I make three recommendations. ‘Part of the distrust that the public has for politicians and political leaders is partially premised on the fact that so many appear willing to trade their principles for money, and for clicks that send people to the polls’ ( PA ) First, part of the distrust that the public has for politicians and political leaders is partially premised on the fact that so many appear willing to trade their principles for money , and for clicks that send people to the polls. There are radical solutions to drive social integration: funding for community projects, dropping restrictions on asylum seekers working, and delivering a structured “integratory” process that moves beyond English language lessons and performative sticking-plasters like having to work for charities for free (Shabana Mahmood’s proposals). Second, we have to engage the public with the devolution agenda championed by Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and more. We must look at inequality in income and wealth, particularly as it applies to housing and the cost of living. This is consistently the biggest issue facing Brits on a day-to-day basis; the fact that you can spend half of your income on rent is a policy and moral failure to me. People must feel like they have control, and that extends to their economic and financial fortunes; otherwise the gap between North and South will only expand. Third, we must consider how we move beyond a simple reflex to try and regulate new markets; politicians are slow to the shifting landscape that threatens to move beyond their control. Hitler’s speeches went viral on TikTok in 2024. I encourage any leader to be on social media as a vanguard for the fight against misinformation and hate, but perhaps most importantly against a lack of empathy. Recommended Racists in Reform? They’re not a bug, they’re a feature Oh good, AI is about to ruin parenting My dad and partner died. Now I don’t know what to do with their ashes We must consider the proposals of Ian Russell , who lost his daughter Molly to suicide after viewing harmful online content. Not simply to ask companies to regulate themselves, but to reiterate that any content that exploits others is a duty not merely for Ofcom, but for tech firms, implementing a duty of care. In the wake of Trump, we have seen how X and Meta have rolled back fact-checking. But we have also seen an alternative approach: moves made in Australia to give people power over algorithms, and the 2023 Online Safety Act, which pushed some of the most egregious examples of harm behind age-verification software. Even if it is imperfect, the ball is in our court. We have a responsibility to ensure the truth spreads more freely than misinformation – or, to give it its proper name, lies.