Social media

A brilliant, tense, ragged slice of drama: Waiting for Lefty reviewed

A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel Redford whose Borat accent becomes grating after a little. She plays Masha, a computer wizard and language expert, who works for a firm of hackers appointed to spread fake news ahead of the referendum. Masha uses two techniques. She poses as a British Facebook subscriber and drops scary comments on to her timeline. ‘If we don’t leave the EU, Muslim extremists will flood the country.’ Her other ploy is to share a quiz about bikinis with her female correspondents. If the offer is taken up, the bots can harvest data

TikTok intifada: the role of new media in old conflicts

In Israel last month, a video on the social media platform TikTok encouraged users to film themselves assaulting Orthodox Jews. That video became a spark that ignited outrage across the country. A band of Jewish extremists, Lehava, organised a march in response. They clashed with Arab groups at Damascus Gate. In a situation that was already a tinderbox, things escalated from there. Why did it happen? Why would any ordinary person get pleasure from assault? ‘There is a competition for likes and views,’ a 15-year-old victim told an Israeli news organisation. ‘A video of an Arab slapping an ultra-Orthodox man will get you both.’ A violent riot set off by

Covid has emboldened our modern censors

The past year has accelerated all kinds of trends that were already moving through our societies. Social atomisation, the decline of the high street and communities, the rise of the nanny state — Covid and lockdown have brought all of these to the fore. Among the most concerning is the rise of Big Tech censorship, and the way in which a handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs have come to set the terms of debate and even rule on what is true. This week representatives from Facebook and Twitter were brought before parliament to discuss their firms’ censorship of discussion around Covid. Two particularly pertinent cases were raised — though there

Lara Prendergast

The curious rise of cottagecore

Cottagecore, not to be confused with cottaging, is an aspirational lifestyle trend. The word is relatively new —although you’ll find it used all over TikTok — but the idea isn’t. If you have ever dreamt of leaving behind the urban sprawl for something more bucolic, or donned a cheesecloth dress and flower crown in the hope that it will make you seem a little folksy, you’ll understand the aesthetic. Cottagecore is the eternal search for a pastoral idyll, updated for the Instagram generation. It is hardly surprising that such a romantic movement has been revived during a time of pestilence and isolation. Throughout the pandemic, many of us have felt

The first-century saint who went viral

Earlier this year, Saint Veronica went viral. A tweet observing that every painting of the saint made her look like a merchandise seller at the Crucifixion was liked more than 35,000 times and retweeted more than 6,700 times. Not bad for a first-century saint. I disagree slightly. Veronica doesn’t strike me so much as a proto T-shirt tout, more as an early Christian super-fan. ‘I touched the hem of his garment.’ ‘Yeah? Well, I literally mopped the sweat from his brow.’ The Sudarium of Saint Veronica is one of art history’s more peculiar subjects. While some saints and their attributes are easy to confuse (Tau? Sword? Saw? Tongs?), if there’s

Promising material squandered: BKLYN – The Musical reviewed

BKLYN — The Musical gives itself a headache for no reason. What does ‘BKLYN’ mean? Perhaps it’s a random jumble of letters caused by a muffin landing on the keyboard. A punter who sees the title once and later looks it up online is unlikely to recall the precise order of the letters, and his search will probably fail. And he’ll have trouble discussing the show with his friends because he won’t know how ‘BKLYN’ is pronounced. It turns out that the show’s heroine is called Brooklyn, and the writers decided to capitalise her name and extract three of its letters. Sensible theatre-makers don’t create problems like this for themselves.

The true cost of Gordon Elliott’s crass stupidity

Thanks to Covid, there could be no spine-tingling roar at the Cheltenham Festival this year as the first race runners set off, no exultant crowds lining the rails from the finish to the winners’ enclosure to cheer their sweaty heroes. Twitchy racing officials will have watched with their gaze half averted for fear that equine fatalities or excessive whip use by jockeys desperate to extract the last ounce of effort from their mounts will have swelled the chorus of the sport’s opponents and would-be eradicators. Publishing schedules mean that I must write before a Festival race is run, but I have no doubt that the week will have been dominated

Clubhouse left me with one question: why am I here?

For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I could jabber all night without taking the phone out of service for everyone else. Getting your own line was a rite of passage for teenage girls in America back then, and everybody just sighed and let us get on with it. Talking on the phone all the time was simply something girls did. Women, meanwhile, at least according to film and TV, spent their time sitting by the phone eagerly awaiting calls from men that usually didn’t come. But then the feminised world of the endless, open-ended voice call dwindled with

The myth of ‘progressive’ thinking

One of the guiding instincts on the political left is that society should be ‘progressive’. Social attitudes, politics and the economy should all advance together, making society fairer and more equal in the process. In this view, a tax can be progressive if it targets the income of the wealthy, just as a law is considered progressive if it protects the rights of a minority. This progressive worldview permeates almost all thinking on the modern left. And yet the contemporary idea of the progressive society has undergone a logical collapse. It has been driven that way by activists, some of whom represent groups with valid causes, but whose messages have

Can Clubhouse compete with Twitter?

Everyone wants to be an influencer. Even for hobbyists like me there’s a strangely addictive quality to the upward crawl of the follower count on the three big beasts: Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Now, influencers have their eye on a fourth.  Clubhouse is a new, invite-only social network beloved by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The format is similar to an old-school chat room, but all the rooms are packed full of ‘influencers’ (mostly small-time) where you can listen to and comment on each other’s audio files. Packed full of love-heart ❤️ and thanks 🙏 emojis, it’s definitely a nice place to hang out. Expect to hear the word ‘community’ a

The big tech bullies

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed colour, but he did a decent job. It all went

Lloyd Evans

How Facebook became a freedom-gobbling corporate monster

Southwark Playhouse is beating the latest lockdown with a zingy new musical about social media. The performers, Francesca Forristal and Jordan Paul Clarke, remember the far-off days when Facebook was just a harmless supplement to ordinary social interactions. How did it turn into a freedom-gobbling corporate monster? We meet the Zuckerbergs, Mark and Priscilla, as they usher a TV crew into their mansion like a pair of politburo bigwigs showing tourists around a glue factory in North Korea. The down-to-earth billionaires offer bland answers to scripted questions. ‘How do you raise children when you can give them anything?’ Mark reveals that the mini-Zuckerbergs are treated like normal kids. ‘But, guys,’

Bad influence: Instagramming from Dubai isn’t ‘work’

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

‘The internet raised me’: the strange world of online star Belle Delphine

Belle Delphine lives in a mock Tudor house in a gated community in Hove. It’s necrotic, and soothing. You could be anywhere, and this is apt. Belle lives on the internet, where she entertains her subscribers, who pay $35 a month through the website OnlyFans. She is 21, and she grew up on the internet. ‘It raised me,’ she says. I watch one of her films before we meet. It shows her dressed as a Disney princess in a long pink wig and small clothes. She attacks herself with paint and rides a fluffy unicorn while shouting. Is the unicorn the internet? Is she the unicorn? I hate the film

The dangers of censoring anti-vaxxers

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media companies which fail to ‘stamp out dangerous anti-vaccine content’ can face financial and criminal penalties. ‘The government has a pitiful track record on taking action against online platforms that are facilitating the spread of disinformation,’ said Jo Stevens, Labour’s shadow culture secretary. ‘This is literally a matter of life and death and anyone who is dissuaded from being vaccinated because of this is one person too many.’ My first thought on hearing this was how pitifully out of touch the Labour party is. Does Keir Starmer not realise how zealous

Why New Yorkers are fleeing the city in droves

New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as just another statistic. The know-nothings on social media, who express utter drivel on a daily basis, will have pretty much ignored it, but a dreaded pro-Biden sheet actually published the full story. A young Japanese man came over to the Bagel from Tokyo to make it as a jazz pianist, and that he did. He started a trio of his own and toured with several bands until the fateful night of 27 September, when he rode the New York subway after a video shoot. Tadataka Unno is now 40, and

The dismal rise of the modern elopement

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate

How many people would refuse a Covid vaccine?

Worth a shot? How worried should we be about people refusing to have a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed? In a YouGov poll for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate this week, 6% said they would definitely refuse a vaccination, a further 10% said they would probably refuse and a further 15% said they weren’t sure. A better guide, perhaps, is how many allow their children to be vaccinated. According to government statistics, the rate of vaccination among children varies from 86.5% for the MMR2 vaccination at five years to 94.2% for the DTaP/IPV/Hib at two years. Poor third The rapper Kanye West launched his campaign for the US

Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’. Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in