Fake content and far-right radicalisation online are reshaping our politics and society. We live in an age of unreality, where everything is fake — except the hate.
The internet has rewired how we think, argue and even feel. The exponential rise of online porn alone suggests future historians might call this the golden age of wanking. But it’s not just desire that the web has amplified — it’s rage, delusion, and radicalisation.
The shorter and louder the opinion, the more likely it is to hit home. We can’t process complex ideas because we can’t concentrate on anything for more than two sentences. We struggle to tell truth from lies, reality from fantasy, because we no longer read books that teach us that difference. And the lies and fantasies online are far more exciting than the reality of our lives.
The people ranting online about immigrants and small boats imagine themselves as heroic defenders of Britain — modern-day Spitfire pilots — rather than sad, bald men with too few friends and too much time.
I research these corners of the internet for my blog, but also because I have no choice. People I went to school with have been radicalised in real time. Each morning they share the latest outrage-inducing content they’ve been served, without realising they’re just feeding the machine.
An old school mate posted a photo of a Tommy Robinson march — all smiling white faces and Union flags, like a modern VE Day. When I pointed out it was an AI fake, he said that didn’t matter “so long as he liked it”. Then he blocked me.
This is the age of unreality.
Shadow Banning and Algorithmic Bias
Algorithms are not neutral. They decide what you see. The more engagement a post gets, the more it’s promoted. Divisive, extreme content thrives; sensible, moderate posts vanish.
The algorithms on many platforms systematically prioritise authoritarianism over democracy, right over left. I’ve experienced shadow banning myself. One of my social media accounts has been quietly buried by the algorithm — because I don’t click, like or share the right kind of content. And by “right,” I mean very right-wing.
The result is clear in traffic stats: posts that don’t feed the algorithm’s rage machine get buried. I don’t write for the clicks, but it is frustrating when something you spend time on is squashed because of someone else’s agenda.
Click, Like, Share — Don’t Read
People rarely read the content they share anymore. They click, like and share based on headlines and images alone.
The Daily Telegraph has mastered this. They post divisive, attention-grabbing headlines that spread widely — even though the articles are behind a paywall. Weeks later, the retractions and apologies quietly appear, but they don’t get shared like the original falsehoods.
I once posted one of my blogs on a right-wing Facebook group. Forty-three people “liked” it just because it featured tatty England flags on lampposts. I guarantee none of them read it.
Another example: a Sunderland Echo article about reforming local government funding went viral among Reform UK supporters. They saw the word “reform,” clicked like, shared it — and completely misunderstood the story. The lone voice at the end trying to explain reality felt very small.
Fake Profiles and Foreign Operators
Fake content and far-right radicalisation online thrive in spaces like “Have Your Say” groups on Facebook. Many of these are run by Reform supporters who censor anything that challenges their white nationalist views.
Lonely older right-wingers spend hours sharing vast amounts of divisive content, without ever asking who produces it. Some is crude; some is highly sophisticated. It’s an industry — and a lucrative one.
This profile photo came from someone posting in one of those groups. It’s obviously AI-generated. So is the content. But it doesn’t matter — it gets engagement, and that’s what counts.
One of the most active meme accounts targeting British users is based in Sri Lanka. Its owners have realised there’s money to be made churning out content that pushes the buttons of older right-wing Brits.
This is another one
This isn’t unusual. The page owner’s location is public — if you know where to look. Plenty of “British” meme accounts are run from far outside the UK. Pointing this out doesn’t win friends. People who’ve known you for 50 years will trust a teenager in Colombo more than they trust you.
Nostalgia and Radicalisation
Spend enough time in these online spaces and you’ll notice a theme: nostalgia. There’s a powerful overlap between far-right radicalisation and a yearning for a whiter, simpler Britain. A time when social hierarchies were rigid and everyone “knew their place”.
This nostalgic fantasy fuels engagement. It turns history into a grievance machine.
Anger Replaces Engagement
Engagement has given way to enragement. People are angry, and anger sells.
The online right feeds a permanent sense of crisis — that everything is broken, that your family, your kids, your way of life is under imminent threat.
Democracy, they say, has failed. It hasn’t delivered the outcomes they want. So they start calling for someone to “fix the mess” by breaking the rules — suspending democracy and the rule of law.
This isn’t just about Nigel Farage entering Downing Street. The endgame is to erode trust in elections altogether, to hollow out politics until only anger, suspicion and paranoia remain.
Once politics becomes a show of bad ideas and empty slogans, reason gives way to prejudice. Hatred is no longer a marginal motivation — it’s mainstream. Parts of the left have succumbed too, in their loathing of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
There’s a limit to how many people you can love, but no limit on how many you can hate. And righteous hatred — the hatred that feels morally justified — is the most intoxicating of all.
Everything Is Fake but the Hate Is Real
The internet has broken some people. Everything is fake — but the hate is real. Real enough to demand action, but abstract enough to indulge without consequence.
Fake content and far-right radicalisation online have turned politics into performance. Nostalgia, algorithms and rage have replaced truth, reason and democracy.
Everything is possible, when nothing is real.
“Hatred is no longer a marginal motivation — it’s mainstream.”
And Boris Johnson will go down in infamy for helping to mainstream this hatred, not because he is racist himself or even out of a true belief in Brexit, but simply in pursuit of his own personal ambition to be Prime Minister.
If UKIP’s Leave.EU had been the official Leave campaign then Remain would almost certainly have won, as Nigel Farage (and UKIP more generally) were still considered somewhat dodgy. While conversely if Vote Leave had campaigned on a more traditional Eurosceptic basis, then Remain again would almost certainly have won as traditional Euroscepticism was a minority interest.
Boris was able to achieve a Leave win in a referendum the only way it could have been achieved: by having a campaign that was both fronted by mainstream Tories (above all himself, likely the most popular Tory at the time) and ultimately based on opposition to immigration. And running such a campaign of course made anti-immigrant politics respectable in way that UKIP (let alone the BNP before them) never could have done.
Agreed, the distinction between mainstream conservatives and the racist far right has broken down completely
Do you think that this firewall collapsed in part because the Greatest Generation is no longer with us?
It was likely because Edward Heath personally fought in World War II that he was so determined to get the UK into the EEC (even though he had to do so on bad terms, which contributed to the later rise of Euroscepticism), and also why he sacked Enoch Powell the day after his “Rivers of Blood” speech.
Another factor is that almost half of Britain’s pensioners were living in poverty until the mid-’90s, and thus voted Labour (out of fear that the Tories would cut their already-meagre state pensions even further) in spite of holding very reactionary (largely homophobic and pro-death penalty) views.
As rising homeownership rates and the increasing political salience of pensions (as the baby boomer generation approached retirement) reduced pensioner poverty from 40% in 1990 to 13% in 2010, more and more pensioners were freed up to vote on the basis of their (reactionary) values as opposed to their personal economic interest.
There is a lot to unpick from that.
One thing I’d add regarding personal attacks on you, and others, is that we can’t always be sure if the person is genuine, an actor or a bot. There are people paid to infiltrate SM to push narratives and to shut arguments down, often with ad hominem attacks. This works on both sides, left and right. It prevents discourse and forces people back into their safety zones. I’m certain this is done deliberately to create friction between left and right.
I agree, it is hard to tell who is really angry and who is acting to stir things up! At least some of them are genuine, but some I suspect are bad actors
George- for some reason I can’t reply directly to you.
Yes, there has been a big change from the wartime generation, to their children, who expect to be respected in the same way they respected their elders and betters without doing any of the things their parents did to earn that respect.
Brown did some great work in ending pensioner poverty. I heard Dennis Skinner speak about WFA. He claimed that they knew that lots of it went to people who didn’t need it, but that didn’t matter because they knew that money would circulate to kids and grandkids.
Since 2010 there has been a massive and unprecedented shift in wealth from those who work to those (pensioners) who don’t. Any attempts to redress that balance, will be fought tooth and nail.
This blog only seems to support three levels of comments, so the best you could have done would have been to reply to your own comment (that was the parent of my last comment).