Yesterday being Tuesday, Meg and I pop into our nomal 'Tuesday' routines. Earlier this morning, I had seen my son and communicated the latest bit of family news to him. My sister who has contracted COVID has been moved to a specialised COVID bubble where she was visited by suitably masked and gowned daughters last night. She texted me to say that her symptoms were not severe at this stage and she actually felt worse several days ago before a diagnosis had been made. I had a restless period in the night but took the opportunity of getting some documents printed off and occupied myself with a bit of internet browsing. After breakfast, Meg and I popped down the hill to meet up with our three Waitrose friends. Afterwards, as Tuesday is a 'sit' day, I popped out for 20-30 minutes and visited our small local AgeUK shop which is not on the High street and bought a beautiful Denby 3 pint oven pot with lid in which I can cook stews and soups in the winter months ahead. I am bringing our soup maker back into commission these days but need to remember exactly the mix and the programs which have proved to be successful in the past.
One would have thought that after the spate of riots by the far-right over the summer months, these were completely home grown demonstrations. But an investigation by Sky News has revealed that much of the mis-information spread onto the internet came from a continental source. In a business park on the edge of town of Strasbourg, Silvano Trotter runs a successful telecoms business but he spends much of his time posting online. He came to prominence during COVID, publishing anti-vax posts, and getting banned from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, before subsequently being reinstated on Elon Musk's rebranded X, where he posts mainly about immigration. When the Southport stabbings happened on 29 July, he posted false information to the messaging app Telegram that they were carried out by an immigrant who had arrived on a small boat and gave the false name Ali Al Shakati. Our investigation shows that his post was one of the most influential of any of those making similar misleading claims on Telegram. Silvano Trotta's post spread misinformation about the Southport suspect's names and he shrugs it off when I point out that this was entirely false. He has worked with Prose, an open-source intelligence start-up, to understand the online conversation around Southport on Telegram, the app where the stabbings were discussed, the narrative was developed, and the riots were organised. Prose monitors more than 10,000 extremist and conspiracist groups on Telegram, every day collecting and archiving everything they post. Together, we looked at how active those groups were around Southport, starting on the day of the stabbings and for two weeks afterwards, looking at 11,051 total messages from 1,496 different chats and channels. And what we found belies the idea that this was just a British reaction to a British issue. Out of the top 20 most influential accounts, in terms of reach, views and interaction, only six were from the UK. The rest were based abroad. Out of the top 20 most influential accounts, in terms of reach, views and interaction, only six were from the UK. 'While all the action is happening on the ground and people in Britain are dealing with the consequences of this misinformation,' says Al Baker, managing director of Prose, 'the people stoking the violence, the people flooding Telegram and other platforms of misinformation are largely based outside the UK.' What it shows is the nature of the new far-right - not a tightly organised hierarchy based in a specific location, but an international network of influencers and followers, working together almost like a swarm to stir up trouble. And it is extremely worrying for the security services. The head of MI5 Ken McCallum last week told Sky News that, compared to traditional radicalisation, the extreme right instead relies on a 'pick and mix ideology' where people pull on hatred and misinformation from mostly online sources. Rather than specific organisations, it is, he said, a 'crowd-sourced model'.
We are now just three weeks away from the American presidential election and it looks as though the already close race is tightening still further. The poll of polls still puts Harris marginally ahead of Trump by about 2.4 percentage points but this seems to be down compared with a lead of about 3.5 percentage points about a week ago. All of this is within sampling error as well because historically these presidential polls could be 'off' by as much as 4%. In the seven swing states, it appears that Harris is marginally ahead in four of them but Trump in the other three. One gets the feeling that the final result will be decided by just a few voters in a handful of electoral districts in one of the seven swing states.The abortion issue still sways voters in the Harris direction whilst the general state of the economy and feelings about the economy incline voters towards Trump. It looks as though economic issues may be losing Harris some voters amongst the young Hispanic and Black male populations where Trump seems to convince voters that he has a better handle on economic issues. This whole election is filling me with a certain degree of foreboding. As the result gets tighter and tighter, then the number of contested decisions and appeals against the result will grow and grow. This may mean that the actual outcome of the election will not be known for several days as recounts and retabulations take place. Even if Trump were to lose by the narrowest of margins, this would never be accepted by the Trump 'shock troops' on the ground who would cry 'foul' with the loudest of voices and it is not inconceivable that some of the election officials, more and more drawn from the ranks of the Republican party, may attempt to 'bend' the result in Trump's direction. In the last three weeks of the election campaign all kinds of unpredictable things might happen. For example the recent hurricanes sweeping across Florida might just play out in Trump's direction if some voters believe his claim that hurricane relief funds are being diverted towards recently arrived migrants.
© Mike Hart [2024]