Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

Fake news reaches Harrogate!

No, Mother Russia has not sought to widen her sphere of influence beyond the first Trump election and the Brexit referendum and intervened in the bubbling Harrogate controversy over the proposed railway Station Gateway development.  Instead, it seems that local activists have taken a leaf from Vladimir Putin’s book and hijacked social media for means nefarious.  Keen-eyed observers of the medium have discovered several fake Facebook accounts whipping up anti-cycling and active travel scheme sentiment in the town.

One of the accounts is in the nom de guerre of one Tara Gunne.  Our anti-cycling heroine was the most prolific of the imaginary campaigners, even corresponding through the letters pages of the Harrogate Advertiser.  This until suspicious resident James Smith followed his nose and uncovered a calumny; it turns out there is no Tara Gunne.  Further inspection reveals that the photograph used on Ms. Gunne’s account is, in fact, one Hazel May, of Liverpool.  Ms. May’s profession, one of the oldest and most storied, is what we euphemistically call “adult entertainer.”  Basic internet research take one directly to pictures of Ms. May that leave little to the imagination.  Not the wealthy, romantic and stylised eroticism of 50 Shades of Grey these, but rather the cheap, cold and grainy; Readers Wives, photographed in poor light.

The picture of Ms. May used by this publication offers our lady in repose, clothed but with a large knee in the foreground, raised suspiciously close to her ears.  It turns out that in order for the Stray Ferret to use the photo it had to be carefully cropped, lest we be treated to a vision worthy of the Georgia O’Keefe treatment.  The nuda veritas, as it were.  I came away from my research traumatised, with a new blemish on my internet browsing history, now a target for unwanted pop-up videos of a certain sort and of a chatbot question to make one’s blood run cold and chill one’s bones; “wanna chat big boy?”

Ok, now that I’ve had my fun let’s get serious.  I’ve written here before about my views on social media and its negative impacts on contemporary society.  Once more unto the breach.  The thing about social media is that it can and often does drive news coverage.  And, as the Tara Gunne episode aptly demonstrates, using social media to reflect false sentiment and to influence debate is no longer the sole bailiwick of intelligence agencies, big business and their digital communication advisors.  Anyone can open a fake Facebook or Twitter account in moments and crack on with creating misinformation, distortion and outright lie.  The social media companies argue, broadly speaking, that they are information platforms rather than publishers.  This can’t be right.  As news makers and curators they must be made to take responsibility for the veracity of the information they publish and the authenticity of their sources.

Social media has had a material effect on the currency that is truth; it seems I have been operating under the false apprehension that the Enlightenment had settled how we determine what is accurate, credible, proven and solid.  Opinion now trumps fact; emotion trumps objectivity and we have created a culture that promotes “living our own truth.”  Harry and Megan are certainly living theirs (and endlessly talking about it) enabled by America’s Oprah Winfrey.  Call me old fashioned but I think we should live the truth.  Although it’s said that the twosome were not paid for their appearance, Oprah’s Harpo Productions reportedly banked $7m for bagging the interview.  Perhaps that explains why, by all accounts, she gave them such an easy ride; Paxman this was not.

I didn’t watch.  The writer and broadcaster Trevor Phillips did and has written a quite brilliant essay in The Times.  Read it, please.  Phillips is black and the father of two mixed race children, one of whom, now adult, still suffers from an eating disorder and mental illness so acute that she is regularly hospitalised to avoid self-harming or suicide.  Like Phillips I have two mixed race children; one of whom is as uninterestingly white as me and one of whom is dark like her Mother.  My younger daughter, the dark one, also battles her demons.  I was once called to collect her from the British Transport Police because she attempted to jump in front of a train at Worcester Park Station in London.  I had to section my daughter, twice.  The point is this, I’m sure that Harry and Megan found the Court of Windsor suffocating and anachronistic.  I don’t doubt that someone in the Royal Family wondered aloud about the likely skin tone of baby Sussex.  And I have no reason to doubt Megan’s claim that she contemplated killing herself.  But, as they sit in their $15m mansion in California and plot how to fulfil their $25m film, podcast and documentary deal with Netflix (providing “different stories” from “amazing people” to “build resilience”) you’ll forgive me if I’m not sympathetic.

Social media provides the means to curate one’s own life; or, in the case of Tara Gunne, to curate someone else’s life; to give an impressionistic account of one’s own fabulousness, rather than a figurative, faithful and prosaic rendering.  It is now so ubiquitous that its effects have moved beyond an assault on fact and is in danger of creating collective cultural hysteria.  The global fuss over Harry and Megan is both symptom and cause.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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