HATE
What is it good for?
You need not cast your eyes very far to see the inspiration for this article.
Do you have a social media account? If yes, then proceed to the next paragraph. If no, then head straight to the last chapter. Also … really?
We are beset on all sides by hate.
I’d say that’s a fair statement to make if you use any form of social media in 2026. It really doesn’t matter which flavour you are partial to, every app, every platform is now fully wrapped up in the monetisation of hatred business model.
I’m writing this in a week where we are witnessing modern pogroms on the streets of Belfast — armed gangs of balaclava wearing men, scouring the streets looking to terrorise anyone with black or brown skin. In some instances, taking fire to their homes and literally burning them out. In the United Kingdom. In 2026.
This latest round of rioting in a very troubled region sparked into life after a terrifying attack on one of Belfast’s streets; a man was captured on video in, what appeared to be, an attempt to behead someone. The man wielding the knife was black, and the victim was white. Those two facts were enough to instigate some of the most serious riots we’ve seen since 2024; just those two facts.
Without another shred of information available, Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage took to 𝕏 to start the ball rolling on what led into the night of terror for those innocent families forced to flee their burning homes in Belfast.
I spend a great deal of time on 𝕏 — I still find it useful for investigations, and it still provides credible information if you know where to look. My approach to 𝕏 is to treat it like the dark web [as it very much is morphing into] — by design, I’d add. If you are careful, take precautionary measures and don’t engage with the clickbait, scams and racism, there is invaluable treasure to be found. The fact that we have to employ these methods on a publicly available social media platform, is so very wrong on so many levels, especially when you think that it’s open to thirteen-year-old kids … for free.
There is another article sitting in my drafts currently about the children’s use of social media debate, so I’ll leave you hanging until I finish that, but what is glaringly obvious, is the urgency lacking in the government to regulate these platforms. I have a twelve-year-old son, I fully understand the issue from a parent’s perspective and from a user view as well; someone who is forging a career by using the platforms for good. I know I’m not unique in that aspect, but I think it affords me some clarity that bypasses some.
So. Can we plot the rise of this hateful progression over years? Absolutely we can.
But before I run a brief history of hate within the social media sector, there are a few things we need to look at first. Such as why and how bad news and hateful behaviour interacts better on social media than positivity.
Ranking systems over neutral feeds. Social media has changed the way its algorithms prioritise content. Once upon a time, in the halcyon days of Friends Reunited and early Facebook, we were all catching up with old school friends, reminiscing about summer jobs and nights out clubbing in the 90s. But positivity no longer creates ‘sticky content’ — you may see something lovely on 𝕏 and think “ooh, that’s nice” but then, invariably, quickly scroll on by.
Hateful or conspiratorial content produces a much stickier response.
If a user scrolls to a post containing rage-bait or similar, it provokes a much stronger reaction — both on the positive and negative fronts; reaction is the key word.
That kind of post does not just receive likes, it may attract angry comments, rebukes, quotes, pile-ons, defensive replies, screenshots and reaction videos. To a ranking system, that looks like relevance, even when the ‘relevance’ is actually poisonous and divisive.
In a report from 2025, the UK government said:
Public safety: Algorithmically accelerated misinformation is a danger that companies, government—both national and local, law enforcement, and security services need to work together to address.
Platforms should algorithmically demote fact-checked misinformation, with established processes setting out more stringent measures to take during crises.
This report1 was directly addressing the influence that social media had on the rioting that occurred after the Southport killings in 2024. Has anything been implemented? Sort of. Can the government reasonably be expected to act further? Absolutely.
Meta’s own explanation2 of the Facebook feed says its systems rank content using thousands of signals, including whether a user is likely to comment, share, spend time viewing a post, view comments, or interact with it. Meta says those predictions are combined into a score that determines the final ordering of the feed.
So, in order for the government to regulate these platforms, they would have to insist that the largest companies in the world rewrite their entire algorithmic code base, and that just isn’t going to happen in reality. Labour’s idea has been to farm the monitoring task out to Ofcom, an already stumbling regulator that runs on only 1,557 staff; they are being handed, effectively, the entire internet to police, on top of the Royal Mail, mobile phones, TV networks and streaming platforms. I am a regular critic of Ofcom’s rulings, but the brief they have been handed is hugely unfair and entirely impossible to manage.
A bit more about their response towards the end.
One last phenomenon that drives our modern social platforms is rage-bait. It’s a doom loop of hatred, often designed by bad actors in far-flung lands, designed to create the hate we see so frequently in our feeds.
The rage-bait loop goes a little like this:
Someone posts an inflammatory claim.
Supporters share it because it confirms their worldview.
Opponents share or quote it to condemn it.
The argument creates comments, replies and watch-time.
The platform reads that activity as relevance and importance.
The post is shown to more people.
Creators learn that harsher posts travel further.
The next post becomes even more extreme.
This is why social media outrage is so difficult to suppress — even people who hate the posts are actively participating in its spread.
A timeline of significant events in our recent history that show the surge in inflammatory content driving real world hatred … from Myanmar to Belfast.
Myanmar: The social atrocity: Meta and the right to remedy for the Rohingya
Beginning in August 2017, the Myanmar security forces undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. This report is based on an in-depth investigation into Meta (formerly Facebook)’s role in the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya. Meta’s algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya – pouring fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increasing the risk of an outbreak of mass violence. The report concludes that Meta substantially contributed to adverse human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya and has a responsibility to provide survivors with an effective remedy.
This is the introduction to an article3 by Amnesty International in 2022, dealing with the direct influence that Meta had in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar in 2017. Please click here and read the full piece when you have a chance, as it is extraordinarily eye-opening. But the crux of the matter is, we’re almost a decade on from that atrocity being inflamed by social media and zero lessons have been learned; as we’ll see in a moment, things have become markedly worse online since that desperately sad point in time.
Myanmar became the case that showed how platform harms in fragile societies could move beyond ‘hurty words’ into a mass-violence threat. It also exposed a recurring weakness: platforms had entered a society at scale without enough local-language moderation, local context, or crisis-risk management systems.
A gunman opened fire in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people and injuring 50 more. As he did so, he filmed the entire crime and live-streamed it directly to Facebook.
What ensued was an exhausting race for social media pages to take the footage down, as it was replicated seemingly endlessly and shared widely in the wake of the attack.
And through social media, it found its way onto the front pages of some of the world’s biggest news websites in the form of still images, GIFs, and even the full video.
This series of events has, once again, shone a spotlight on how sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit try — and fail — to address far-right extremism on their platforms.
An introduction to a piece on the BBC website4 shortly after an utterly devastating terrorist attack in New Zealand.
The 2019 Christchurch massacre was broadcast, live, on Facebook. That sentence, right there, should have been enough to end Facebook’s existence as a mainstream social media platform. But, of course, it did not. In the wake of this awful tragedy, a global initiative was created called the Christchurch Call — an attempt to bring governments and tech firms together to remove terror material from platforms.
Jacinda Ardern led the call alongside President Macron of France; they managed to enlist participation from several countries, including the UK. Tech firms that made a commitment on that agreement were: Amazon, Facebook, Dailymotion, Google, Microsoft, Qwant, Twitter/𝕏 and YouTube. A valiant but non-binding agreement.
UK: X’s design and policy choices created fertile ground for inflammatory, racist narratives targeting Muslims and migrants following Southport attack
Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, played a central role in the spread of false narratives and harmful content which contributed to racist violence against Muslim and migrant communities in the UK, following the tragic murder of three young girls in the town of Southport, Amnesty International has established in a technical explainer which was published today.
A technical analysis of X’s open-source code (or publicly available software) reveals that its recommender system (or content-ranking algorithms), which drives the “For You” page, systematically prioritises content that sparks outrage, provokes heated exchanges, reactions and engagement, without adequate safeguards to prevent or mitigate harm.
Another article from Amnesty International5. This time referencing the use of 𝕏 to disseminate fake news vile racism before, during and after the rioting in 2024. This particular bout of civil unrest was ignited after bad actors such as Andrew Tate and Nigel Farage spread false rumours about the immigration status and religion of the killer, Axel Rudakubana. They lit the fuse of hatred by claiming, falsely, that he was an immigrant that had arrived here by small boat — the truth being that he was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents. Add the contributions of Tommy Robinson and the owner of 𝕏, and the tensions mounted, eventually spilling over into all our looting and rioting on our streets.
One year after the riots, Amnesty said 𝕏 had created a ‘staggering amplification of hate’ during the 2024 unrest. It said false claims that the attacker was Muslim, a refugee or a migrant who arrived by boat reached an estimated 27 million impressions within 24 hours, and that Tommy Robinson’s posts received well over 580 million views in the two weeks after the attack.
This brings us to today — June 11th 2026. A second night of violence has just subsided in Belfast — yet another event stirred up and promoted online. Yet another event agitated and/or created by Tommy Robinson, aided by Nigel Farage across the 𝕏 platform, alongside Facebook and TikTok this time.
These past two nights in Belfast have become a live litmus test for Ofcom’s new regulatory powers — Ofcom’s crisis-protocol. It tests whether the Online Safety Act framework can move quickly enough when a local violent incident is reframed online as a racial or immigration flashpoint.
Ofcom has today written to online service providers operating in the UK about the increased risk of their platforms being used to stir up hatred, provoke violence and commit other offences under UK law, in the context of recent civil unrest in Belfast.
Providers have duties under the UK’s Online Safety Act to protect people in the UK from illegal content, and Ofcom’s job is to make sure sites and apps have appropriate measures in place to comply with these duties, rather than tell platforms which specific posts or accounts to take down.
Ofcom issued this article6 of warning to platforms after the first night of violence in Belfast. As I mentioned above, Ofcom have such a gigantic remit and such little resource that they can only issue warnings such as this. In reality, they have almost no way of enforcing this threat. It would take a far more robust act of legislation to curb the social media platforms and actually enforce the laws.
And this is the saddest part of the entire story for me; there is, quite literally, nothing our government can/will do to stop this online terrorism. Tommy Robinson, for example, has been sending out calls to arms in Belfast and the wider UK … from Moscow. He is sitting in a hostile nation, directing his foot soldiers into violence — Lord Haw-Haw for the 21st century. Will the government act and bring him in for questioning? No, of course not … la la, free speech or something.
I fear there is more to play out in Belfast and the online space is rammed full of hateful racists, trolls, bots and Tommy Robinson fanatics. Far from improving, our online spaces are markedly worse. Far, far worse. Ofcom’s proclamation has no effect because the owners of the platforms know they can ignore it, safe in the knowledge that there is no enforcement to follow. Why make costly change when they are not required?
The country is in a rage-bait loop. With social media platforms and bad actors daring the government to act and of course, they won’t.
Hate. What is it good for?
Enriching billionaires appears to be the very specific answer.
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Source: UK Parliament Reporting
Source: Amnesty International
Source: Amnesty International
There is so much to unpack in this brilliant article. It certainly identifies the key points: social media companies construct their algorithms to amplify hate in the pursuit of profits; the UK's regulatory framework is too feeble and regulators too poorly resourced (deliberately?); key actors are engaging in behaviour that inflames tensions and incites division (seemingly oblivious to the consequences, but possibly fully aware and hoping for them).
What is staggering is that people think this is a new dimension of these platforms, though. Anyone working with children in the early days of the smartphone revolution will tell you how ignorant this view is. The behaviour we find so troubling today found its grounding in the uses that generation made of the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and even the sharing functions of popular console games.
That generation has now grown up. Some have become parents. Those behaviours they learned have become normalised as far as they see things. Social Media companies have learned too. The way you describe the structure of algorithms and their approach to moderation (which has now been abandoned) simply highlights that truth.
How do we tackle this? Moreover, how do we tackle this when the companies running this not only have a vested interest in it, but also have the overt backing of the American Government. So we not only have bot-farms in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. We also have the owner of Twitter piling in to divide British society, inflame tensions, and weaken the nation.
Are we getting to the point where we need a divestiture program similar to that pushed for Israel? It will be much harder since America has inveigled itself into so many aspects of British society and industry that we are effectively as much a part of America as Puerto Rico, and equally subservient.
Then again, does that support the growing call from some politicians to rethink the extent to which we have become reliant on American technology and services? Do we put greater protections in place to prevent the swift sell-off of companies to foreign owners for a handful to benefit financially while workers and customers bear the fallout?
It does seem to be the time to start a greater debate about these issues. We need to challenge politicians on their acceptance of measures that have effectively stripped us of our sovereignty. The Americans have the ability to cripple the UK in ways that even the most innovative Bond villain would applaud admiringly.
Why make costly change when it is not required? Who says it isn't required? Who says the status quo is in Britain's benefit? As the old saying goes: "Cui bono?" The most important question, though, is what is the cost of inaction?
Another great piece Don. Well worth a read.