Another Type of Flag-hanging

the algorithm shows up to 4x as much far right content. What are we to do?

This is part THREE about TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other shortform video content. You can read parts One and Two here.

Lately, I spend a lot of time on zoom calls with progressive organisations. Usually they start when someone pops into view and tells me about their area of the UK where Reform and far-right flag operations are happening. Everywhere you look, there they are, they tell me. Miles and miles of English flags. I nod, because I’ve seen them myself visiting the outskirts of London. You can drive and drive for miles and they’re every couple meters.

From here.

The flags intimidate minorities, they proclaim Englishness, white Englishness. What do we do, ask the folks at the other end of the line. I don’t always know, even as I piece together approaches with them.

That’s the first variant of call; the second type looks only a little bit different. On this second type of call, instead of discussing literal flags, the folks at the other end of the call are concerned about a kind of metaphorical flag: the shortform video. The internet is flooded with shortform right-wing content, and if you open a new account or don’t curate your algorithm, you’ll drown in it soon enough. In the same towns where the flags hang, people come into community centres repeating lines from these videos, alarming the minorities and others who use the same spaces. The videos and the flags hang together, demarcating worldviews and the places to which those worldviews lay claim.

The flags were hung by coordinated efforts and recruitment, often directly coordinated by people like “Tommy Robinson” (not his real name). The videos were “hung” this way too, at least in many cases.

For being a paid political influencer right now is big business. Not just in the UK, and not just for the right, I might add. A thinktank in the US paid a cohort of influencers 8,000 a month to work for the Democratic party (without disclosing this financial relationship to their viewers, I might add). Similarly, the Israeli government appears to pay some influencers about 7,000 dollars per post to promote their interests. Netanyahu repeatedly told an audience recently that if Israel somehow loses evangelical support in America, it will need another groundswell of support from somewhere else: ““We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers…they are very important.”

But while both far right and soft-left can funnel money into influencing, unfortunately, all the very worst people seem to have figured out how to use this influential tool well. Statistically, even accounts that look at progressive content get fed far, far more far-right content. In Germany, researchers ran an experiment where they created five new TikTok accounts and had each follow content from each of the five major parties. Even the four accounts that intentionally followed other parties go fed up to 75% content related to the AFD, the German far right party.

There is no single account of why the right/far right might dominate so much on these platforms. Perhaps they are better at ragebait and sincerity, both of which tend to do well, as I’ve outlined in previous parts of this series. Perhaps these right wing groups win because they’re very well funded. Perhaps it’s because they don’t police themselves for the exact correct formulation before they click post, and thus can generate far more quickly. They have certainly gotten very good at the kind of speedy responses that other groups are bad at. As one commentator has noted,

Keir Starmer announced his ID card plan around 3pm on Thursday.

Around 3 hours later, Nigel Farage and Reform had video response content on Tik Tok, Instagram and YouTube.

Thanks to Reform’s new Westminster Social Media studio (Stop calling it a TV studio!)

24 hours later these 3 posts had around 800,000 views and 60,000 likes.

Labour posted a basic graphic 12 hours later on Instagram. They’ve said nothing on TikTok or YouTube. It has around 1000 likes.

The right probably have the ability to win on these platforms for many reasons. I particularly consider how they can play fast and loose without generating the same kind of puritanical in-fighting, for there are far fewer standards for what is politically “correct” within their movements. It’s also possible the right are especially well positioned to gather momentum through messages of anger, panic and fear. These seem to spread particularly fast online, as does misinformation, and the right’s messages about (say) migrants and trans people often fit these criteria.

Whatever the exact advantage the far right has, shortform video is so popular right now (as popular and often more popular than “normal” television!) that it can feel important not to cede all of it to the extensive reach of right. I feel a tug to step into the strange world of shortform video in response. And yet - what really one can we do with the format? Is it really possible to fight flags with more flags?

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Hang on, you might be thinking, don’t you think this world of online content is more or less irrelevant? Look at your last book! Aren’t you the “debating doesn’t matter” lady? Don’t you think “talking” about politics is irrelevant really?

Yes, indeed, I have written about how just being exposed to ideas on their own isn’t much of an influence on people’s political views. (And empirical studies demonstrate this, too). It is very rare that someone goes online and does a radical 180 on their views. However,

• It is probably true that shortform video is pretty good for recruitment and mobilization when it comes to causes people are already inclined to be sympathetic towards. (Notice this is different than persuasion!). (There’s remarkably little direct research on this - but it certain does seem to work to, for example, drive donations…)

• Videos like this might be good for mobilization and recruitment because the way social media currently works means that we don’t just consume content, we repost and share it and defend it and connect with it - and those actions that we do ourselves may in fact change our minds. (Check out a nice article on this here). Being online leads people to make new friends, reinforce bonds based on political disagreement, argue back with people who write them to tell them they are wrong, share posts in a way that makes them feel “active” and thus more committed to a line of thought.

• Finally in some cases videos get people offline - into the streets to protest, to (yes) hang flags, to peel stickers off buildings or to put new ones up, to help each other or attack each other, and so much more. As I note at the end of my book, Stephen Bannon has perfected getting people to act first online, then offline and to turn their smaller actions into bigger ones, until they are part of his movement. As he puts it, “[These days in America] There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club [a previously popular social membership club] things that you used to have before. [And so, political organising can work if it mobilises people towards each other and a social world they’ve been lacking…] People [I’ve recruited through my strategy] tell me all the time: ‘You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.’ They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do…”

Oof. Bannon has it down, strategically if nowhere else. If social media matters, it matters because it reaches the right people with that powerful algorithm, gets them to become micro-activists online, and then as useful gets them to go offline for the cause where they further transform. Andrew Tate similarly got young men to join his community and with it his way of thought by giving them videos of himself to post online, promising them a cut of any of his course sales that came through their posts. Even if these young men sold nothing, they became committed to his cause through their posting, and doubtless more in line with him ideologically on the whole. I have no doubt many of the young men hanging flags across the UK were recruited with tactics that are not that different to that of Tate, and which may literally have been strategised by those working cross-Atlantic with Bannon. Videos are reposted, then created and posted, flags are hung, people are brought into the fold and further mobilised. Who knows what happens next? And meanwhile, most of us are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling between work and on the toilet and before bed.

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Back in the 50s, Frankfurt School theorists like Theodor Adorno worried that “mass culture” would feed a kind of slow, quasi-to-fully-fascist sludge directly to us, numbing us to capitalist reality, to our shared “wrong life.” (The kind of “wrong life” I feel most sure of when I’m in Stansted airport, eating terrible food and helping to destroy the environment.).

These older theorists imagined that “mass culture” reinforces wrong life in part because it stunts our subjectivity, our perception, our sense of self, scripting it and enclosing us in just a few possibilities. A few giant Hollywood companies could not only script most everything you’d ever watch, but also your internal script: your own kiss scene, your own idea of a hero. It’s not just that you conform; it’s that you can no longer imagine another kind of first kiss, or another kind of love outside of the scripted romance. You soon think you need a particular kind of lover, rather than a wholly different form of life.

Nowadays, we live less according to the scripts of a few movie studios or advertising companies and more in an infinitely-niched-down, ironic and post-ironic internet culture. A single script for anything is less clear, at least outside of a particular subculture.

But, interestingly, though the precise words of our lives may be less scripted, the format for communication has become almost uniform nevertheless. I can tell this is true because I find I have to teach a “format script” to my students, who are learning to make shortform videos, usually for progressive and radical causes. A good video has a hook, I tell them. And it’s true; that is simply crucial. Other, only slightly less crucial bits: an explainer of some kind, a joke, suspense, “layers” and punchline at the end, plus ideally something to make you share it. It works. All this is effective; it is also, for both viewer and creator, comically and painfully repetitive. Scroll for a little while and you’ll feel like you’re losing your mind. Create videos for a while and you will lose your mind. After you lose your mind, you’ll return to scrolling and also find the repetitive format weirdly soothing and discomforting at the same time.

Today’s mass culture replacement seems to be the mass platform, and the format that this particular shortform video algorithm requires. Adorno and co thought the script ultimately only helps fascists, for it limits the imagination of anyone who might oppose them to few cultural memes.

When I’m making videos, I can’t help but wonder if I’m feeding the modern imagination-limiting machine. At the same time, I fear leaving the most popular format on earth to those who don’t even blink before they post.

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You might, then, be wondering what I plan to do now. I will tell you, in shortform. I am still going to write on Substack, first of all, and more frequently than I do now. I need longform content to think, and my book tour season is ending for a bit, so I finally have time to think alongside writing my next book. Some ideas need more than 90 seconds, many require thousands of words.

I will probably also continue to make TikToks/reels. I do this not because I think this will persuade those that disagree with me (it won’t), but rather to continue to build an audience (Instagram seems to be what’s selling my book), as well as to bolster those who might agree or come to think more deeply as they do as they scroll along. Whenever people write me and tell me interesting things in response to these videos, I begin to feel less caught up in the bind of the stilted format, more drawn into a shared reality that is dynamic, open-ended, even intriguing.

And that alone certainly makes up for the many trolls…

That said, I’m also taking one step back until my paperback release, just to refresh my brain. Which means for the moment, I’ll be posting videos a bit less and waiting till inspiration strikes.

In this lull, I’ve yet to fully answer, even for myself, this crucial question: is the solution to right-wing videos left-wing videos?

Here’s my first pass at an answer, however: If so, only somewhat. We are ultimately not in a simple turf war. More flags, especially on their own, will not help. For if we think about the “left” as a group that broadly seeks the end of exploitation, greater equity, and a variety of kinds of freedom (not just “freedom-from”), then the left and right are facing entirely different kinds of strategic goals. The right mostly needs to catalyse people’s fears into compliance and endorsement of the rule of the powerful-posing-as-underdogs; the left, however, needs to bring people together to engage in slow, scary, annoying collaboration across difference. If those of us on the left decide to use the same format for some of our work (the shortform video) even if only for recruitment, we still have to do it with a twist for this reason. We can’t just use fear of others. We have to get people offline to do much more challenging stuff than the right wants them to do. Not fun little flag-hanging escapades, but boring, challenging stuff they’ve not done before, like talking to their neighbours, redistributing food supplies, going on strike, interrupting bad infrastructure and building new ones. Notably, for all this we need them to be brave and skilled and resilient and willing to keep going, rather than fearful.

I often think about how the algorithm of (for example) TikTok particularly downrates any piece of content that makes you quit the app. If you tell your viewers to quit the app now, and they do, your videos will not be shown to futher people. And so, if you want to get people to leave the digital world and do something in the real world, you have to get them to do something incredibly counterintuitive: hear your message, then scroll to the next video, and then sneak offline to do something in the real world, while leaving your video in a place where more people can still see it in the future. As awkward as that sounds, that’s what I think we must do - use the number one medium that people are watching right now according to its rules yet against itself, and against those who have thus far used it best. Weirdly to do that we need them to watch, then scroll more to help us get our message out (!) and then quit. Adorno would groan.

Should you make shortform video in line with this strange challenge? Only, I think, honestly, if you’re willing to take the challenge on full force, with all it involves. The trap of content of this type is that it looks effortless to produce; it is in fact a specialist’s game, or (weirdly) sometimes a game of luck, where some (currently very sincere and rageful people) do accidentally hack it. Producing this kind of shortform video also involves a huge toll on the self, as I’ve outlined in previous parts of this piece.

To do well in this format, one has to embrace all this: the intense strategic analysis, the showing of your face in most cases. the harassment, the being misunderstood, the annoying-ness, the labour, the bleak overconsumption and repetition these platforms instill. The best we can do against the virtual flags of the right is to understand the structure of the thing deeply, and dive in when the moment is right, driving people offline as the right does does but to very different ends.

I’ll be writing a bit more about that challenge here sometimes. If you need help, let me know.