The right has created a false reality – fuelled by toxic images delivered straight to your phone
After a week of violence and discord, this is clear: some politicians know images supersede inconvenient facts. And Labour has no good response
TL;DR
- Social media consistently feeds the public a stream of exceptional images and videos of crime, which has become normalized.
- Graphic footage of real incidents, like the Belfast knife attack, is circulated by far-right figures to fuel narratives of ethnic violence and national decline.
- The 'Yookay' meme and other online content selectively highlight crime clips and AI-generated images to portray the UK as besieged by migrants.
- Politicians like Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe use these images to claim betrayal by the state and advocate for extreme policies.
- The far-right's visual politics allows them to present a simple, emotionally resonant story that bypasses complex explanations and statistics.
- Liberal politicians struggle to counter this strategy, finding it difficult to explain context and complexity against the power of a single, evocative image.
- Politicians like Andy Burnham are adapting their stances on immigration, recognizing the difficulty of winning against visual politics in an 'image-saturated hate economy.'