Middle Rage - Social Media and the War on Democracy - EMF 2026

Hello. [applause] Thank you for coming. It's uh it's really quite surprising, I must admit. When I saw us in the big top, I thought, "Oh my word." You know, that's really quite uh an interesting thing. I wasn't expect I was expecting a nice little cozy room with about 20 people in it. So, this is not quite what I was expecting. Anyway, let's get started. Start off with this um middleage social media and the war on democracy is actually a documentary that we made um as part of the smidge project. Now, the smidge project was one of those European Commission projects that we actually got during the Brexit post Brexit period. You see all the partners there at the bottom. Um so there was across um eight partners, six countries and we did research uh 600 people um on a survey, focus groups, all sorts of really really good quality research. But one of the things I really want to make sure you understand is that we were the very first to do this work. Right. The point is Oh, is it going to do it? Yeah, there we go. The point is there is a lot of work on young people. You know, we're going, "Oh my goodness me, we got to worry about these people being radicalized." You know, we're worried about terrorism. We're worried about our young people. There's loads of different initiatives that are already been brought in to try and protect young people. And nobody is thinking about the middle-aged. You know, they're safe, they're boring, they do they've already got the world sorted. They don't need to be educated or or anything at all, but it doesn't seem to be moving the slides along. I just thought I'd mention. So, try again. But see if it does it. There we go. It's finally doing it. Okay. So, this this is a picture during um some of the riots that went off a couple of years ago. And you can see this picture is so good. It was actually selected by the conversation for an article that I wrote. But what I find interesting are the people that are actually in the middle of this are middle-aged. Even the policeman's middle-aged. But you've got that guy, he looks really, really angry, really upset, right? And when you see stuff in the media, they go talking and focusing on the young person. and the middle-aged person is standing there in the background quite often, go on my son, throw that bottle, and they're not really looking at the people that are influencing our young people. So, it's all very well putting in all these initiatives, but if the person who is radicalizing them is not being addressed, it's pointless. And this is something that's been happening for a number of years now. I just want to the first thing I wanted to do just after giving you a little bit of context you know saying about this 40s 50s 60s these middle-aged working adult population and what we did we actually did a really really good documentary so what I'm going to do just for about 10 minutes I'm going to show you a part of the documentary you will be able to access this afterwards it's available on YouTube so please I'd recommend that you actually go and watch the whole thing. But then what I'll do, I'll explain to you how we found um how we found our data, how we found our results, what we actually discovered about the middle age that is different and distinctive from the young people and also distinctively different from those who were much older. So we can argue that this is the if you like the older working population, right? because the much older people tend to be retired and there is a little bit of wiggle room across that age group. Right. So I what I'd like to do now hopefully this will work. Um for some reason that didn't move. Okay. So I'm just going to show you a little bit of this. Is it working? It's working on my screen. It's not working. Ah, such is life. I don't you just love tech. >> Have a look. >> So, it's working here. Look. >> Okay, that's the second. >> Yes, but it's not working on >> Yeah. >> Is it an embedded? Do we have a >> It is embedded. >> Okay. Uh >> I'm so sorry. While he tries to sort that out, I'll continue talking so you don't get bored because [snorts] that's always an issue, isn't it? and you have a technical problem and people standing there going and nobody's twiddling their thumbs and going back on their phone. And of course, you don't want to go on your phone because that is part of the problem, right? We know this. The algorithms drive you and they make you look at more and more stuff and they make you share more and more stuff and they make you like more and more stuff and every time you like something it be feeds the algorithm. And the problem with it is we have got no power in the UK. We cannot stop these, you know, these people, these companies, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, you know them. We can do nothing apart from ban them. Can you imagine? We ban Twitter. Outrage, freedom of speech. Everybody be absolutely furious. So we all right, we accept we can't ban them. So then what do we do? We have to learn better hygiene, better ways of online behavior and online interaction. We need to be aware when AI fakes have really made something, you know, really get to you because a lot of the time they know exactly which buttons to press to make you cross. Oh, we're ready. Superb. Thank you very much. >> Do you want to play? >> Yeah, just play. [music] What kind of an online environment are from the beginning >> these people in that they feel that it's appropriate to post something like we should burn down the asylum hotel. [music] >> There's a lot of stuff out there on the internet that is clearly not good. My training as a lawyer has helped me see the difference between extremism that's likely to lead to terrorism and extremism which is just extremism. >> So language itself has a power by twisting, manipulating, shaping language. [music] You can change the way people think about the world. >> Then it's not a huge leap for it to go from 4chan to a place like Instagram where it can find a much bigger audience. The role played by algorithms, but also more broadly the architecture of social media lends itself perfectly to being used [music] almost as a propaganda machine. >> It's not easy to tell people that they are being manipulated because people don't want to feel manipulated. >> [music] >> There was a lot of people on public Facebook groups defending sometimes the action of the riers like on the street but more often very strongly defending [music] the people who had posted and had been subsequently arrested some of who were charged. So if they can grab your attention blaming someone and it raises your hat, suddenly you're getting angry and you need to do something and and you're going to go and smash some up. [music] [music] Over the course of my career in data journalism, social media has played a big role because social media is helping to shape democracy. [music] I think over the course of our research, we started to notice some patterns and when we looked into the moderators and administrators, we were kind of surprised by their profile. They seemed to be middle-aged and older. There were [music] a lot of retirees and in fact some of the posts called for other retirees with time on their hands to help run these Facebook pages. [music] They are category of people that often times become quite invisible in a lot of uh conversations that we have about societal issues but at the same time they're a category of people with a lot of political power. >> [music] >> I think one of the things that makes the 45 to 65 demographic particularly susceptible, it's a psychological question really. Their understanding, their belief, their their sort of set of values, their way of understanding the world is being attacked, is being [music] eroded by changes in society. Generally, [music] it does undermine your sense of where you belong, how secure you feel. >> [music] >> By that point in life, we will have kind of solidified a lot of our identities. So, they're more solid, maybe more stable, but also maybe less open uh in terms of acquiring new identities. >> Middle-aged people are in a kind of transition from being young or or relatively youthful to not quite being old, but they're getting there, right? So they don't quite have the kind of status and respect maybe of like that we might give the elderly, but they also don't quite have their youth anymore. >> That's the problem. Everybody talks about young people and old people and middle-aged people do most of the work in the conceptual space, in the intellectual space, in the understanding of what they do and what they think. The media, for example, are more interested when somebody does something outrageous or strange than in the normality of their lives. That's understandable. There's not much of a story in a perfectly normal, relatively boring middle-aged life, bringing up children, going to work every day, coming home exhausted, and meeting the weekend with relief. >> Underpinning so, so much across all of these categories was a sense of disillusionment and a dissatisfaction with how society is being run. the opportunities that people feel that they do not have. >> We can think about the fact that there are certain parts of what is going on in the life of a middle-aged person that can impact their identity. So on the one hand, people who are middle-aged have carrying responsibilities probably towards elders. They are in situations where maybe they are thinking about retiring or they're dealing with kind of job insecurities. We know that there's issues around agism going on in in kind of occupational spaces, but also in society at large. So they tend to vote more than younger generations. So they're quite politically engaged in formal politics. And so I think all of these things interconnect in really important ways to give them a certain status in society. Uh that means they have political power but they have identities that maybe are less flexible [music] through language. You can physically alter the world in various ways. You do this. So you can um offend people and they can physically feel feel offended. Um you can lie and people will react to that and do something based on what you're saying and assuming it's true. We understand the world in terms of narratives and stories. And a narrative by its very nature has an aspect of conflict in it, but we're almost hardwired um to think in those ways. That's how we learn things. We were approached to work with activists on a a new idea, some an idea that would hopefully unify people over a over an existential threat to humanity. And at the time it was called Out of Time. We felt that Out of Time wasn't particularly good name. It didn't explain what it was about. And so we renamed it Extinction Rebellion. This was a rebellion against our own extinction. Not about the death of the planet cuz the planet won't die. And we were going to hold the government to account because governments are supposed to look after us. The difference between a conversation like we would have normally every day and a conversation you have online is that what do you pick up when you have a conversation with a person ordinarily. You you're looking at way more cues. You're looking at how their hands move, how their face reacts, all of those sort of things. All of those things are missing in social media. Um but what's even worse is there's something in the background that you're not seeing. There's an algorithm. >> What an algorithm really originally means is it's a recipe. It's a recipe for achieving a target. We throw a whole lot of data in a pot and we stir the pot. We use that to determine what we should feed back to any specific person. >> Sometimes, you know, social media can be genuinely social. When that happens is you're actually talking to a real person that you know, and that's very different. And I think when you know someone and you're reading what they've said, then you can understand how their face might look, that's a real relationship. When you've not met someone and you're talking with them online, none of those things exist. You don't even know if you're talking to a person. And if you are talking to something that isn't a human, then it is there to elicit some sort of response from you that you don't know what that response is. And this is where things begin to spiral out of control and feeds and such like are designed to [music] keep your attention. So disinformation as distinct from misinformation is false information that is spread purposefully in order to deceive or mislead in some way. Whereas misinformation is misleading information that is shared maybe without intent. maybe the person sharing it doesn't realize that it's not true or misleading. >> So, a very very popular phrase used by populists is that something is just common sense. There's a particular way of viewing the world. It's just the way things are and so forth. But the issue here is that common sense is actually always going to be constructed. So when you say something is common sense, in fact you're just trying to promote the idea that your view of the world is more important than other people's. And one of the ways of doing this is through repetition, through making it look as if everyone believes this. One thing about conspiracy theories and the way they work on social media is that this idea that everything is connected in some way as part of a grand design fits really well with how social media work because social media encourage us to share to link to make connections. The kind of basic structures of social media are about finding connections between things and then also social media platforms rely on the feed or the stream. So there's this kind of endless uh avalanche of content that people who are invested in conspiracies can tap into and say, "Oh, look, here's another example. There's another example. This connects to that. These things link together." So then they're building networks, which is also what social media want us to do. They're creating kind of communities of of people interpreting events as they unfold. So the kind of demands of social media fit the kind of framework of conspiracy theories really well. [music] The kind of confusion that co created because it was an unprecedented event was kind of a perfect situation for conspiracy theorists to come in and say no there's a real explanation behind all of this. That's another part about conspiracy theories is they can be quite comforting because co was disorientating and confusing. So if you could have a kind of simple explanation for what was really going on that was you know provided some resolution to people's anxiety about what was happening. The majority of people on these sites were genuine in their belief that the information that they were putting into their posts was it was a genuinely held belief and therefore falls into the category of misinformation. >> I've studied national identity in contexts like Serbia, Turkey, Romania, um European identity more broadly, but also in the context of UK and its relationship to political change such as Brexit. So I would say the thing that is uh useful in studying the same phenomenon across different contexts is that it gives you an understanding of what might be the same but also where are crucial differences. So an example would be that and in most cases national identity is defined against another. So it's defined in a world of other nations where it makes sense to have a national identity and often times it is one where people express patriotism and in-group criticism is often silenced. So we don't like to hear kind of criticism of our group because it makes us feel bad about ourselves as members of the group. However, different contexts come with different problems. So that means that what national identity means in one context. So the values associated with it, the norms and by implication, the actions are going to be different. In some countries, national identity is much more associated with religious identity and so the two overlap. In other countries, that's less the case and it might be more related to racial identity, ethnic identity, but also other kind of values around civic um civic belonging and and kind of defined more in terms of citizenship rather than kind of culture or heritage. stopped it. Oh yes, I'm back. I stopped it there. As you can see, there's still quite a lot of the uh video to go, but obviously this will be a 30 minute documentary. So, I really encourage you to go and um uh watch the rest of it. Notice that we've got we won an award. Look, the AI for good uh responsible innovation impact communication because quite a few of the things that we'd put in there were AI generated. certainly some of the um let's say some of the more violent parts of the video where you see people running around and shouting and throwing things. So, we didn't really want to use live real uh footage in certain areas because we you know we thought about the privacy of the individuals involved during that uh during those things. So, it was really important we felt to make sure that we utilized AI in a responsible way and we ended up winning an award which was really quite nice. Right, let me just um move on to the next video and next slide. There we go. So, the thing about the middle-aged is this whole invisible middle thing, right? Everybody cares about the young people. We got to save the children. We got to think of the children. I think of that woman in the Simpsons. Please, somebody think of the children. You remember the one, right? Everybody thinks about the kids because they are the future. I get that. That's dead important. And we worry about the much older people, you know, we think they're in danger of being scammed or fished or whatever it is, you know, and we worry and we want to look after them. So the ones in the middle are left to their own devices. The problem is when they do research, right, we go any sort of research, academic research and any other market research, they tend to go, "Oh, right. Anything over over 50s." Now, I don't know about you, but I think isn't Elon Musk around about 57, 58, something like that. I think Peter Teal is a similar age. A lot of these tech geeks are all very much the same age and they're so powerful, right? And they they have everything going for them and they're very rich. Then you go, okay, my mom is 85, right? She's blind. She can hardly walk. She's getting a few memory problems these days and she's not very tech-savvy. She worries about breaking the internet. Right. Social science research puts those two groups in the same category. Over 50. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk and my mom are not the same. Right? They cannot be compared. They cannot be researched as a homogeneous blob. This is bonkers. Why did we do this? And we've been doing this forever, right? So my project, we're trying to change that and say, "No, we need to really consider those in the middle. They are so powerful. They are so influential. They are your boss. They are the main politicians that are doing all the decision making. These are the most powerful people in the world." And we ignore them. We think they're boring. As Lord Carl said, boring, steady, it's all good. And this is obviously a stupid thing to do. The media consistently does the same thing. You know, I don't know how many women in the room now have or whatever. Have you seen the Dove adverts? They're about the only ones that have middle-aged and older people actually in the adverts. You see these L'Oreal use this wrinkle treatment. She's 30. She hasn't got a line on her face. I'm sorry. I'm 62. There is no way that cream is going to make me look like her. Right? It's just not going to happen. I'm happy. I'm comfortable in my skin. But the problem is even the media and marketing aim at young people even when they're trying to sell to the middle-aged and the older people who've all got all the money. I mean that's the weird thing, right? We've got all the money, the middle-aged. And yet they are marketing constantly youth culture, youth, youth, youth, and ignoring everything else. But remember, we got the money and we've also got the vote. Now, as I've already said, we do have this whole dichotomy, this weird thing about the CEOs and and everybody. And also, do you notice there's this other thing? So, they do these things called downsizing. And when they downsize, they get rid of the most expensive people in the organization who are also the most skilled and experienced. So, you'd think if you were, I don't know, if you're an accountant working for a big company and you've just been made redundant, you would think with your 35 years or whatever it is of experience, you're going to have no problem getting another job. Good luck getting a job anything better than being Q because at the age of 55, I'm not decrying being Q in any way. But the point is at the age of 50, 55 and that's thereabouts, employers think you're too old, too set in your ways, too boring again, not able to learn. and they will not employ you. But the government and the world has decided we can't retire until we're sort of like 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, whenever it happens to be. So what are you supposed to do for the next 15 or 20 years? So you go and work in place like B and Q, which isn't bad, but it's still not being an accountant anymore and the salary are, you know, there's no comparison. And can you imagine how that makes people feel? Scrap heap. no longer wanted all my skills, experience, expertise thrown onto the scrap heap because they want a nice cheap 30-year-old. And this builds resentment. One or two things about the research what we found. So, one of the things that we found that was really important is show don't tell. We actually had somebody in our focus group turn around to us and go, "Oh, yes, we know young people need to be educated. It's really important, right? And we've got to protect our much older people from being scammed. But we've been to the University of Life. We don't need no education. 1979 Pink Floyd, right? But the point is, we don't need to be educated because we built the internet. We built the technology. Yes, you might have, but you're not really geared up for dealing with the way that those technologies have now been utilized and manipulated in order to make you think differently from the way you probably would do if you hadn't been manipulated. And so that was really interesting, the fact they don't want to be educated. Show don't tell, right? That's the thing. Show don't tell. provide opportunities for people to learn without telling them they've got to. It's user configured tools, all those sorts of things. But I think one of the most important things that we got to remember is that when we're talking about online safety and we're talking about vulnerability and all of those sorts of things, one of the most important things is say the whole of society is at risk. Okay? It's not just little pockets of vulnerability. Everybody is at risk of this manipulation by the algorithm. You got to remember that these social media companies, they actually have psychologists and they work alongside the people building the algorithms. And those psychologists know exactly what makes you tick, right? They know how to bring out the outrage, how to make you cross, how to make you wound up, how to make you want and go and have a look at some more of the same content. And the problem with that is we can't fight that because they are actually addressing the reptilian backbrain. It's not conscious. We can't actually fight this directly. We need to go in there with knowledge that that is what they're doing. That is the manipulation and when you know then you can do something to protect yourself. But of course it's very very difficult to do that if you are not aware right I realize I have one minute left and of course nobody's been able to see my slide so that's absolutely fine. So I think certain things that we need to be really really sure about and that is that we are not going to ignore the middle-aged anymore. Ignore them at your peril. These are the ones grooming the youth. I read a study recently about jihadis. And they said one of the number one ways to get a young person to be a suicide bomber or similar was the returning fighters. The middleage who didn't die. The ones that came back from fighting. The ones that came back. They are the ones that influence the youth. So if we want to improve our resilience to all this manipulation, the number one thing to do is to make sure that we have the whole of society is included in any online safety issues. That's it. Thank you very much. [applause] Fantastic.