Social media

I’m sharing my boyfriend with 60,000 other people

I fell in love with a social media influencer. I could say there are three people in our relationship but I’d be lying. There are 63,423. Imagine a world in which your partner’s private life is his professional life: with thousands of fawning acolytes all vying for his approval, all competing for online traction — a traction that comes from your other half’s thumbs. His fingers hover over the phone rather a lot, giving updates into whatever he’s up to. It’s a little disconcerting. Life with an influencer can be challenging. Every trip must be documented, every meal photographed prior to consumption. I’ve lost count of the number of times

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter ban is nothing to celebrate

Marjorie Taylor Greene is nuttier than M&M World. Not your garden-variety conservative, or even a conservative at all, but a conspiracy theorist who rode these febrile times into a seat in Congress. She describes American Airlines Flight 77 as ‘the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon’ on 9/11, remarking that ‘it’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon’. She suspects the 2018 California wildfires were started by a Rothschild-funded ‘laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth’ in order to help Democrats build a high-speed rail project. Her Facebook account has liked a post proposing ‘a bullet to the head’ for Nancy Pelosi.

Am I being impersonated by an actor from Colorado or a mining company?

Someone else with my name is wreaking havoc with my attempts to control the Twitter account I don’t want. Obviously, I haven’t been on Twitter other than to stick my toe in briefly, then pull it back out after realising how very cold it is in there. But I can’t work out how to deactivate my account. I’ve tried many times but it is beyond me, so I have had to stay on Twitter but not actually go on Twitter. This position was holding up fine, until I started getting emails telling me someone had logged into my account and if that wasn’t me I should do something about it.

The good and bad news about the Online Safety Bill

If you care about free speech, the just-published report of the Joint Committee on the Online Safety Bill – a cross-party parliamentary committee composed of six MPs and six peers – is a mixed bag. This is the Bill which began life as a White Paper under Theresa May. Its aim? To make the UK the safest place in the world to go online. It will achieve this by subjecting social media platforms and internet search engines to state regulation, empowering Ofcom to impose swingeing fines on companies that fail to observe a new ‘duty of care’. Let’s start with the good news. The Joint Committee recommends that the current

I’ve been back one week and the good old US of A has never seemed more depressing

New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamist gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No siree, people over here are shot every day and night but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, with the rest of Gotham experiencing a level of street crime not seen in a decade. Robberies and felonious assaults are up 15 per cent in a year and gun arrests by a whopping 20 per cent.

Letters: The contentious issues of religious conversion

Hard to reconcile Sir: Although not an Anglican, I appreciate Michael Nazir-Ali’s dilemma (‘A change of mind and heart’, 23 October) and know many Anglicans whose loyalty to the C of E is being severely tested. But insofar as his theology is classically Protestant and evangelical, it is difficult to see how the former bishop can reconcile it with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on the sacraments, the office of the Pope, the role of Mary, purgatory and justification, to name but a few contentious issues. He speaks of how ‘what Anglicanism in its classical form has held most dear is being fulfilled in the progression of the

Why I hate WhatsApp

‘My phone says I can’t go out until Tuesday, so I can’t come and meet you,’ said my friend. And she repeated this down the line several times, as I insisted I did not understand. I had nipped outside the hairdresser with my hair in highlighter foils to take her call and was standing on the street, phone tucked under the silver-paper flaps, a stiff wind blowing. I assumed she must be saying something else and I had misheard. ‘It’s the app on my phone,’ she explained. ‘I’ve counted the days myself and I should be able to go out today, but my phone says I have to stay in

The problem with ‘David’s law’

Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments, is the kind of statistic you would expect in a failing state. One of the shocking things about Sir David Amess’s murder is that many MPs weren’t surprised by it. Parliamentarians are acutely aware that when they are away from the Palace of Westminster, with its armed guards and security scanners, they are a soft target. Their job requires them to mix with the public and that involves a certain level of risk. One senior Tory MP points to how during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, MPs who were thought

The death of David Amess and the narcissism of the discourse

The speed with which tragedy turns into farce these days is quite something. Within minutes of Sir David Amess’s death being announced, social media was filled with sizzling hot takes. The back-and-forth centred on whether the decline in ‘civility’ and the use of dehumanising language in politics was to blame for the murder of an MP. It recalled nothing so much as the recriminations after Jo Cox’s death, except that the teams here had, as it were, swapped shirts at half-time. Back then, the left more or less directly attributed Jo Cox’s murder to the language used by the partisans of Brexit: ‘traitors’, ‘saboteurs’ and so on. Back then, the

Facebook’s empire is beginning to crumble

When empires crumble they slide slowly at first, then the temple walls come crashing down. Facebook is not quite at the latter stage yet, but you can hear the creaking in the pillars and lintels. This week, the social media giant suffered two blows: an outage which took down its platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, and an expose by a disillusioned ex-employee who accuses the company of saying one thing about social responsibility in public – while behaving quite differently in private. Many of us might not notice if Facebook suddenly wasn’t there. But it is a different story for the many businesses which have built their model on

I miss life before Big Tech

Do any of you remember the time when everything took place on the terraces and in outdoor cafés? Before everyone retreated into laptops and mobile telephones and Twitter? When the streets thrummed with possibility and the potential for new encounters was everywhere? Well, that’s all gone now, thanks to some pretty ugly-looking fellows with names such as Dorsey and Zuckerberg. But we’re the ones who adopted their useless inventions and live by them as if they were the Sermon on the Mount. The social consequences have been devastating — the young make noises instead of articulating speech — and had Cassandra been around 20 or so years ago she would

Emma Raducanu’s victory is being spoiled by the usual suspects

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

Technology is robbing us of the power to forget

Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media. Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’. As she wrote in Wired, at

I was held to ransom by hackers

I’m the owner of two small galleries which sell 20th-century ceramics and artworks. One of the ways we’ve become known is through Instagram. We’ve got almost 50,000 followers and sell a lot of work through there. In May, I was away for the weekend with friends in Somerset. On Saturday morning, I saw an email in our shared work account (purporting to be) from Instagram. It was congratulating us for getting a blue tick — verification that confirms the account is an ‘authentic presence’. Thrilled, I clicked the link in the email to confirm. It took me to an official-looking Instagram page where I entered our login details. I was

Mesmerising and monstrous: @zola reviewed

The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of viral tweets — makes a tight, original fist of such material. @zola is A’Ziah ‘Zola’ Wells King, who in 2015 as a 19-year-old exotic dancer and stripper living in Detroit unleashed a 148-tweet thread, billed as #thestory, which detailed a chain of nasty but fascinating events during a surreal trip to Tampa. Full of sex,

Isn’t it time social media cracked down on racism?

No sooner had Bukayo Saka’s penalty kick thudded into the gloves of the Italian goalkeeper than you could see it coming. Racists were not going to miss the opportunity to attack the England team. And sure enough, within hours the sewer that is Twitter (even at the best of times) had become a torrent of effluent. I don’t know a great deal about coding, but I can’t think it is really all that difficult to pick up certain words and remove them Yes, it does show there is still an underbelly of racism in English society — even if the charge that we are a country of ‘systemic racism’ left

The bogus business of stigma-busting

Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so horribly stigmatised that celebrities are increasingly keen to raise awareness not of diseases or disabilities, but of the stigma that’s said to surround them. So: less campaigning for cancer research, more for breaking the stigma around talking about cancer. Less feeding the world, more brave standing up to the stigma attached to food poverty. Once you’re alert for stigma, it’s astonishing how much mention of it there is. There are the obvious and much discussed stigmas surrounding mental illness and sexuality, but also (I’ve read) there’s a stigma around having

Beware Boris’s sinister crackdown on free speech

A Conservative government that boasts it is a defender of free speech against the attacks of ‘the woke’ is about to impose the severest censorship this country has seen in peacetime since parliament abolished press controls in the 1690s. In an extraordinary power grab – which is all the more extraordinary for the absence of opposition – ministers want to silence views that carry no criminal penalty. This is more than a much-needed crackdown on racial attacks on black footballers or incitements to violent crime or any other crime; it is an unmerited attack on free speech. The government’s draft Online Safety bill imposes a ‘duty of care’ on internet companies to remove content that

Big Tech is turning into Big Brother

The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed upon us by Chinese scientists. I don’t know either way, but I would suggest that a suspicion that the virus was man-made, given the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scarcely qualifies as a lunatic conspiracy theory to be banned from public utterance. But that’s what the Big Tech companies decided — almost certainly

How TikTok can turn a book into a bestseller

I have an American friend who loves reading, but is clueless about technology. The last time I visited him he was still using Internet Explorer, which even Microsoft has given up on. My friend was puzzled when he walked into his local bookshop and was met by a table of books with the sign ‘#BookTok made me read it’. Soon afterwards I received a bewildered WhatsApp message: ‘What is BookTok?!’ Until recently, I didn’t know. Before the pandemic, I was a working stand-up comic. I’ve never been on television and you probably haven’t heard of me, but I was happy. I worked six nights a week, made enough to pay