On Monday 5 August 2024, BBC Newsnight chose to feature former Morley and Outwood MP Andrea Jenkyns, alongside former Labour MP Ben Bradshaw and ex-England cricketer Azeem Rafiq, presumably to present a ‘balanced’ perspective on the ongoing riots across England.
In the course of the interview, Jenkyns compared the defacement of a statue of Queen Victoria to rioters blocking exits and setting fire to a hotel they believed housed asylum seekers. She additionally implied that arrests had not been made in connection with riots in Harehills on 18 July, when in fact the total number of arrests currently stand at 27. No fact check appeared at the end of the programme.
Sting like a … wasp?
It is well known that bees and wasps sting in a different way; bees only sting once, and die soon afterwards, whilst wasps sting over and over again.
During her tenure as an MP, Jenkyns was well known as an inflammatory social media poster. Very much taking the path of the wasp, many of her tweets containing a sting aimed at people she considered ‘enemies’. This has continued following her defeat in the recent election.
On 29 July, I tweeted (very much off the cuff) my thought that the government were right to curb the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners (like myself) because I would prefer the money to “go to disadvantaged kids”.
The post got far more attention than I had anticipated, including a response from peer of the realm and ex-Boris Johnson advisor Lord Moylan. He commented that “most of it” would fund “irregular migrant accommodation” – a veiled reference to the type of hotel that rioters attempted to burn down less than a week later. I checked this claim and found that the truth of the matter was rather more complex. I responded with a link to this information and consequently received no reply from Moylan.
It thus seemed that his post had served the purpose intended; a sting buried in the thread to spin the narrative towards the immigration debate.
Both Moylan and Jenkyns, whether intentionally or not, are inflaming resentment against ethnic minorities/migrants via implication and insinuation; little stings dropped into public communications that drive factionalism and division, adding to an already tense situation.
Divisive rhetoric and civil unrest
This rhetoric is not new, as I pointed out in an article a few weeks ago, quoting a paragraph from the 1914 novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:
“The papers they read were filled with … the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving … how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade … The country was in a hell of a state, poverty, hunger and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the thresholds of thousands more … down with the foreigners and all their works. Out with them … The country would be ruined if not protected in some way.”
Rioting is also not new, and has occurred across geography and history since human civilisation began. In living British memory we have the 1980–81 riots against the newly elected Thatcher government, the poll tax riots of 1990, and the 2011 riots. In Yorkshire, there were riots in Bradford, Oldham and Harehills in 2001.
What is new, is the coordinated marshalling of riots across nations via social media. The Capitol riots in the US in 2021, for example, alongside more subtle agitation via ‘drip, drip’ misinformation, such as that outlined in the examples of Moylan and Jenkyns above, arriving as small ‘stings’ which come together to create an atmosphere of fear and societal division.
I have studied the psychology of social media for a decade now. And I have unearthed pieces of a picture I believe we now urgently need to put together in order to preserve peace, law and order within networked societies.
We need to talk about social media
In 2017, I reflected on a pre-Musk Twitter, and the enormous anger that was being channelled through it: “Could a general underlying factor be that the ways in which human beings evolved to communicate are simply not compatible with an interface at which one sits alone creating messages that can be instantly accessed by billions?”
In 2021, I considered how discourse is brutalised through social media, people saying things on these platforms they would be highly unlikely to say in spoken conversations: “[Diane] Abbott recently commented: ‘I think the distinction between abuse and genuine political debate is, would they say it if they met you in the street? No, they wouldn’t.’” In this article, I also linked to a study of 50,000 tweets celebrating the brutal murder of a young female MP, a mother to two small children.
We need to talk about the children
The most powerful impacts of social networking are on young minds. In 2016, I created a vignette from information collected in research with 18–21 year old women regarding how they felt that social networking, added to other pressures, had impacted on their earlier teenage lives: “Like most people of her generation in English-speaking post-industrial societies, Rachel is not cold, or hungry, or homeless, or physically deprived, but she feels constantly on edge.”
At the end of 2021, I looked at the planned social media bill and some potential missed opportunities to safeguard young people: “[MPs] must also include reference to the extreme vulnerability of young people in these discussions and explicitly include this consideration as they construct the final draft of the legislation.”
In early 2024, I considered how the internet had contributed to the murder of 15-year-old Brianna Ghey, in its provision of extreme ‘dark web’ material to the children who killed her. I examined how social media had been used to discuss and locate a murder victim and had been the focus of one of the murderers’ pursuit of infamy: “After her conviction the girl who murdered Brianna admitted to stabbing her many times, despite initially pleading not guilty. The judge expressed suspicion that this was because ‘having been convicted, now [she] wants to paint herself in as bad a light as possible … a desire to become as (in)famous as those she had researched on the dark web.’”
Parents led by Brianna’s mother later banded together to seek ways to limit children’s access to harmful material on the internet and to the full extent of social media. They never received anything more than platitudes from the government of the time.
We need to talk about mass hysteria
In early 2023, I outlined the dangers of mass hysteria spread by social media. Rather like rioting, this is a facet of human behaviour that has been present across history. But the speed and distance with which it spreads has made it a much bigger problem for modern networked societies.
It is the result of heightened anxiety created by living within the wasp factory of social media. It is poorly informed and misguided attempts to ‘help’ others, that users have read about online: “People are inclined to greatly over-exaggerate their own skills in an area in which they in fact, have very incomplete knowledge; for example, why amateur sleuths may think that they are doing something very useful, when in fact they are doing more harm than good.”
In Spring 2024 I returned to this phenomenon, to examine extensive conspiracy theory tweeting about the Princess of Wales: “Clearly none of the individuals who, in the words of the 1994 Press Complaints Commission, engaged in ‘dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’ had considered how they would feel if it happened to them; they had removed other people from the same reality as the self and objectified them into the subject of sensational gossip.”
The madness of mass communication
Looking back over this decade of research, which includes academic writing beyond the examples quoted here, I return to the conclusion I reached in 2017. Instant communication with potentially billions of other people has been a huge shock to the human psyche, and up to this point, we have handled the transition very badly.
I don’t however think that the principal problem we face is the martialling of civil disobedience through the internet. The few individuals engaging in this can be very easily discovered through the technology they have utilised and subsequently brought to justice. I would suggest that the main issue, currently flying beneath the radar, is the continual and insidious nature of ‘small sting’ misinformation, most particularly through the social media accounts of public figures with high numbers of followers.
It may well be that some of them do not fully understand what they are doing; it is therefore time for governments in networked societies to make them aware. And, in the end, it may be necessary for national governments to create an offence of spreading misinformation likely to incite harm (physical or psychological) thorough social media, focusing principally on high follower public figure accounts when it comes to bringing offenders to justice.
Having an adult conversation
We need a more rational, adult, joined-up conversation about the problems that the internet and social media bring to networked societies, and ways that we might ameliorate them. We can’t put the tech genie back into the bottle. And in my opinion, we shouldn’t even try to do so, given that the internet brings benefits as well as problems, in the general manner of technological advance.
We now have a new government, which seems more inclined to take a ‘grown-up’, progressive and research-informed attitude to societal reform. I would urge them to bring this topic to the very top of their agenda. Current candidate for the Conservative leadership James Cleverly now seems to have woken up to this issue. Cross-party participation in this discussion will be very welcome.
The objective should be to ensure that the online environment is responsibly managed, rather than harnessed by the worst facets of human nature. We must fumigate the social media wasp factory that relentlessly stings populations into fear and anxiety, triggering irrational and injurious actions and reactions.
More from Dr Pam Jarvis:
- The time traveller’s daughter
- Childhood mental health: why the kids are not ok
- Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
