How hate and misinformation travels

I was watching Mehdi Hasan being interviewed on Sky News this week, a form of self-flagellation for which no reasonable tribunal would consider the punishment proportionate to the offence. While difficult to endure, it prompted a far more interesting question than anything discussed on screen.

The occasion was the launch of Zeteo, Hasan’s online news platform, in the United Kingdom. The interview itself was unremarkable, what struck me was what wasn’t said.

Here was a man who has spent years making some of the most inflammatory claims imaginable about Israel and Zionism. A man who has compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust and repeatedly platformed and defended figures accused of antisemitism. A man whose own record contains comments about non-believers and the LGBTQ community that would likely end the career of almost any mainstream broadcaster. Yet none of it was raised.

The presenter nervously circled around criticism of traditional media before moving on. He appeared so uncomfortable and out of his depth that I briefly wondered whether, like Guy Goma, he had wandered onto the set by accident and decided to just muddle through. There was no meaningful challenge to the assertion that genocide in Gaza is an established fact. No challenge to casualty figures presented as unquestionable truth despite ongoing disputes over their accuracy and their providence being direct from Hamas. No challenge to claims about Israeli actions in Lebanon or Iran. No challenge to years of rhetoric that has helped shape how millions of people understand one of the most complex conflicts on earth.

Instead, the interview treated Hasan not as a deeply controversial political activist, but as simply another media entrepreneur launching another media product. Perhaps that is the point, that the story is no longer Mehdi Hasan, but the system that has made Mehdi Hasan possible.

Across Britain, politicians are engaged in an increasingly urgent debate about restricting social media access for under-16s. The argument is straightforward enough. Children are vulnerable, highly susceptible to manipulation, struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. They can be drawn into rabbit holes of extremism, misinformation and hate.

All of which is certainly true, but what is less clear is why we stop worrying the moment somebody turns sixteen, or eighteen, or forty. Because if the past few years have taught us anything, it is that adults are proving no more resilient than children.

The great myth of the social media age is that information has been democratised. In reality, information has been industrialised.

The algorithm does not exist to inform us, it exists to engage us. Its purpose is not to tell us what is true but to show us what will keep us watching. Anger performs, fear performs, outrage performs, tribalism performs. Nuance does not.

Once the algorithm discovers which buttons to press, it presses them relentlessly. If you are frightened, it will show you reasons to be more frightened. If you are angry, it will show you reasons to be more angry. If you are convinced somebody is responsible for your problems, it will provide an endless stream of evidence confirming that belief.

Not because any of it is true, but because it works.

The result is not an informed citizenry. It is millions of people living inside personalised realities, each one carefully curated to confirm what they already believe, a self-perpetuating echo chamber of bias confirmation.

The speed at which this happens is perhaps the most remarkable part. A newspaper once had editors, a broadcaster once had producers. Information moved slowly enough to be challenged before it reached millions of people. Today a hashtag can circle the globe within minutes.

A claim appears online, it is shared by an influencer, then a celebrity, then a politician, then spread indiscriminately by bots, then by a journalist reporting on the fact that everyone is talking about it. Within hours it acquires the appearance of truth, not because it has been verified but because it has been amplified.

The distinction matters, because truth and popularity are not the same thing. Yet increasingly they are treated as if they are.

Consider how many viral narratives from the past twenty months have followed precisely this path. Disturbing claims, shocking images and emotionally charged slogans race around the world at extraordinary speed, generating outrage and engagement before the facts are fully understood.

By the time evidence emerges that a claim was exaggerated, misleading or entirely false, the correction arrives to an audience that has already moved on. The original post may be forgotten, the impression it created is not. That is the true asymmetry of the social media age.

A lie does not have to survive scrutiny to be effective, it merely has to arrive first and increasingly, we are seeing where that leads.

Over recent weeks we have watched communities in Britain descend into anger and disorder. In Belfast, tensions have erupted into violence. In Southampton, a local tragedy became fuel for online speculation and outrage long before the facts had settled. Across the country we have seen asylum hotels targeted, communities polarised and rumours spread at extraordinary speed.

The details differ, the mechanism does not.

Legitimate fears and grievances are seized upon, simplified, amplified and weaponised. Claims race across social media faster than any investigation can keep pace. Entire groups of people become symbols of wider frustrations, individuals become avatars for causes, communities become targets.

By the time the facts emerge, the emotional verdict has often already been delivered.

For Britain’s Jewish community, none of this is new. Since 7 October, Jews have been warning about the consequences of online dehumanisation. We have watched social media fill with claims of genocide presented as unquestionable fact. We have watched Holocaust inversion become commonplace. We have watched Jewish pain minimised, Jewish fears dismissed and Jewish voices excluded from conversations supposedly about tolerance and inclusion.

We have also witnessed how easily a slogan can become a substitute for understanding. “All Eyes on Rafah” became one of the defining social media campaigns of the conflict. Millions shared it, celebrities promoted it, influencers amplified it, bots spread it. Many who posted it could not have found Rafah on a map a week earlier.

The slogan spread not because people understood the complexity of what was happening there, but because participation itself became a form of social currency. To share was to demonstrate virtue, while to question was to invite condemnation.

Yet while the hashtag travelled around the world, a less convenient reality received far less attention, that Israeli hostages, alive and dead, were being held beneath Rafah in terror tunnels. One narrative became universal, the other remained largely invisible. Not because one fitted the facts more comfortably than the other, but because one fitted the algorithm more comfortably than the other.

For twenty months many Jews have been told that what they are seeing is not happening, yet the pattern has been painfully obvious. Hate online becomes hate in real life. The language changes first, then the behaviour follows. A slur becomes acceptable online, soon it becomes acceptable on the street. A conspiracy gains traction online, soon it becomes justification for harassment. The dehumanisation of a people becomes normalised online, eventually somebody decides to act upon it.

Verbal abuse becomes intimidation, intimidation becomes violence, violence becomes arson, violence becomes stabbings.

None of this happens overnight, it happens through repetition and through normalisation, through the gradual erosion of the boundaries that once separated disagreement from demonisation. But once it has happened, once hate has gone from online to IRL, there is very little one can do to go back.

To be fair, for the first time there are signs that the questions are at least being asked. Social media companies that once appeared untouchable increasingly find themselves facing scrutiny from governments, regulators, courts and campaigners. Executives who spent years presenting themselves as little more than neutral custodians of digital town squares are being asked whether they bear any responsibility for what those town squares have become.

These are important conversations, but let us not pretend the tide has turned. The business model, incentive structures and algorithms remain unchanged. The overwhelming measure of success remains engagement, not accuracy, reach, not truth, attention, not responsibility.

We should be careful not to mistake scrutiny for accountability.

The reality is that we are still conducting a vast social experiment in which some of the most powerful information distribution systems ever created are rewarded for amplifying outrage, division and fear. The only difference is that we are now beginning to acknowledge that the experiment may not be going entirely to plan.

This is why the latest figures from the Pew Research Center should concern far more people than just Jews. Across the 36 countries surveyed, the median percentage of people holding an unfavourable view of Israel now stands at 69%. Among younger generations the numbers are often significantly higher. In Britain, among those under 35, the figure has reached an astonishing 84%.

People will disagree about why, they will point to governments, military campaigns, politicians and policy decisions, but there are other questions that deserve asking.

How much of this shift has occurred because of what people believe they know rather than what they actually know? How much has been shaped not by direct experience or rigorous reporting but by an endless torrent of algorithmically selected content designed to provoke emotional reactions? How much has been shaped by influencers masquerading as journalists, activists masquerading as analysts and social media feeds masquerading as news?

These questions matter because the issue extends far beyond Israel. Today it may be Jews, immigrants and Muslims. The day after that it may be refugees, politicians, corporations or any other convenient target.

The algorithm does not care who it burns, it only cares that the fire keeps spreading.

That is why the conversation we need to have is larger than one journalist, one platform or one conflict. The question is whether societies can survive when truth becomes merely another form of content. Once facts become optional, once outrage becomes currency and once engagement becomes more valuable than accuracy, we should not be surprised by what follows. We built systems that reward division, we should not be shocked that division is what they produce.

The Jewish community has been one of the first targets of this ecosystem, it will not be the last. We have simply been living with its consequences for longer than most. The dehumanisation of Israel and Zionists did not stay online, it never does and the same path will be followed for others.

The lesson of the past twenty months is not that Jews are uniquely vulnerable. It is that no society can consume a daily diet of outrage, distortion and dehumanisation without eventually becoming shaped by it.

The fire that begins with one community never stays contained for long and by the time everyone else notices the smoke, the fire has already taken hold.