Excellent piece from The Manchester Mill:
It wasn’t just about how much time people were spending online. Lewis now recalls that period as a moment when he could feel the presence of the state up close. “It was the first time in our lives we’d seen the government say: ‘You’re gonna do what we tell you to’”. He says his group included lots of young mums who were frustrated by the lockdowns, cooped up at home watching their bored children “playing up”. To people like that, neat theories about who was to blame were appealing. Ordinary people were being drawn into online networks that they would never have been part of before the pandemic, spaces that very quickly filled up with messages that had nothing to do with lockdowns or the much-hated Rule of Six.
One online influencer who expanded her following during the pandemic was Bernie Spofforth, a 55-year-old managing director of a clothing company in Cheshire who enjoyed little public profile before the lockdowns began. As the journalist David Aaronovitch has noted, Spofforth was banned from X (then called Twitter) for posts spreading Covid-19 misinformation and in early 2022 she appeared on Talk TV to tell viewers that the vaccine policy was not based on science but represented a form of social control.
On the day of the mass stabbings in Southport, Spofforth seems to have been the first person to spread the false claim that the attack had been perpetrated by a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the country on a small boat and was on an M16 watchlist. That claim spread quickly around the internet, boosted by figures like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. This week, a person matching Spofforth’s description was arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false communication.
Sunder Katwala, who studies attitudes to immigration and integration at the British Future think tank, noticed a “collision” between a new breed of pandemic activists and the online far-right, both groups that are very small but “imagine themselves to be quite broad”. The merging of concerns about vaccines and lockdowns into more hateful messages introduced people to ideas and influencers who they previously may have considered weird and extreme. “People can spot a far-right that has swastikas, but normal mainstream people will struggle to spot these more diffuse forms of extremism,” Katwala says.
https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/the-enemies-within-how-the-pandemic
Mark Carrigan 