Why pay a vetting company? The newspapers will do it for free
Plus some lovely AI films, and bad news on Nazis
Because I am hashtag blessed, I happen to live in a constituency where one of the would-be Reform Party candidates has had to disavow their party affiliations due to the discovery of unsavoury associations or remarks in the past.
OK, maybe I need to narrow it down a bit. (Thank you, Drop The Dead Donkey.)
This week splash1 on the front page of the little local paper where I live carried what, for it, was a hard-hitting political interview with said Reform candidate.
Grant StClair-Armstrong, 71, lamented how the internet and social media can give a wildly misleading impression of a person’s character by dragging up a few ill-chosen words written long ago. [‘Nearly 20 years ago’, the interview specifies.]
He is reported to have written ‘I could weep now, every time I pick up a British newspaper and read the latest about the state of the UK. No doubt, Enoch Powell would be doing the same if he was alive. My solution… vote BNP!2”
He also made a remark about race and gender that could be seen as particularly inappropriate in today’s climate.
But he says he was being ironic at a time when he had moved to Turkey to cope with a life crisis that had made him ‘angry and frustrated’.
I mean, who among us can’t say that we haven’t espoused the views of the BNP and Enoch Powell? Er, pretty much all of us. You have to love the suggestion that writing encouraging words about two of the UK’s racist touchpoints was in some way just a youthful aberration, or, even better, that favourite touchstone of the alt-right: “I was being ironic”. Which you did when you were, let’s do the maths, somewhere around your 50th year.
I’m meant to say that it gives me no pleasure to see my predictions from earlier in the election be fulfilled, but actually it pleases me a lot. To remind you, what I forecast was that in this election we would see, inter alia
• Candidates being revealed as having terrible social media histories. This already happened to Reform during the local council elections. Oh man.
And now it’s happening to Reform in the general election. But it wasn’t meant to! At least, that’s what the latest Reform Party leader Nigel Farage said when a number of examples similar to (and including) Mr StClair-Armstrong were held up by the national media as evidence of the utter fruit-loopery of a number of Reform candidates:
ITV News found what appears to be offensive messages posted by the accounts of two current Reform candidates.
In 2016, one candidate posted on X that "Hitler founded Israel".
He has also posted an image describing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as a "traitor to the UK" and compared American businessman Bill Gates to Satan.
Another candidate standing for election posted a picture parodying the TV series Only Fools and Horses with a picture of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and London Mayor Sadiq Khan with the title "Dahl Boy".
So whose fault was this? Obviously, someone else’s: Farage said that Reform had paid £144,000 to vet the social media posts of its candidates who—sorry, just a little more:
In May, one candidate liked a post on X describing British Muslims as "foreigners living in Britain".
Another candidate has repeatedly shared posts by English Defence League founder and far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson, most recently on June 11.
When approached by ITV News, this particular candidate gave the following statement: "I do not support Tommy Robinson, neither does the Reform party. The tweets are retweets only and express views that are open to debate."
Just asking questions, OK? Anyway, Farage was furious and claimed it was an “establishment stitch-up” because Vetting.com was founded by a former adviser to Boris Johnson. However:
A spokesman for the firm told ITV News that Vetting.com approached "all the major UK political parties" "some months ago" to offer their "automated background screening services".
"We were delighted to be asked to help Reform. Everyone’s working assumption was that the election would be in the Autumn, giving us the Summer to complete this work," the company said in a statement.
"Given the explicit need for candidate consent, as well as our systems needing basic personal data like dates of birth, our automated software was not able process Reform’s candidates with the data that was provided when it was provided.”
The hilarity to be had in a vetting company complaining it was caught off-guard by an election which everyone knew was due within months (so you might have given a bit more priority to your six-figure contract? Perhaps?) is only matched by the hilarity to be had in an organisation which claims it will reduce NHS waiting lists to zero and net migration to zero—both impossibilities—proving itself incapable of spending a comparatively tiny amount of money responsibly.
But the big, staringly obvious question is: how was the media better at doing this than the Reform Party itself? Simple: the media is motivated to find the flaws, and journalists know that there’s no nonsense about “consent” for publicly posted content, and if you’re capable of working a search engine and/or the search box in a social media platform, you’re off to the racists.
On that basis, one could look askance at what Vetting.com claims to be offering—personally I’d hire a bunch of former Fleet Street journalists and set them off like a pack of dogs. (Possibly that’s what the company does, but given its flunking this, I suspect not.) Modern journalists swim in the seas of social networks like dolphins, or perhaps sharks: they can spot the ones who stand out and deserve closer attention almost without thinking about it. So of course they’re going to zero in on the ridiculous BNP-supporting things that would-be candidates have said.
(Not that this is limited to Reform; the Greens’ deputy leader Zack Polanski has had to admit that in 2013, when at a clinic in Harley Street, he would perform hypnotherapy to persuade women their breasts were bigger. “It does not represent my work, it does not represent me,” he told LBC. Though you have to think it represented him pretty well at the time, given the £222 per 90-minute session he charged.)
The particular phenomenon of “ah dear I did a racism” is remarkably common as an elephant trap for would-be political candidates, as noted above. And I’ve observed before that a good strategy is not to use social media (though I envy beyond measure the strength of will of people who don’t). But of course for those who have strong feelings on a topic, social media is the perfect temptation: you’ll find people who have the same—or stronger!—views as you, and will approve of what you say. That makes it especially dangerous for the unwary who might subsequently want to go into politics, or publicly visible jobs. Naturally, the easy solution is to delete all your accounts, but even that doesn’t get past the possibility of them being archived. And journalists know how to search those archives too (or other people with the knowledge will, and will broadcast the results. You’re snookered, pretty much for sure.
Of course, there’s quite a simple way out of this: use social media, but don’t wish for Enoch Powell or the BNP, or suggest the UK should have been neutral towards Hitler, or that multitude of other things that millions of other human beings manage again and again every single day not to do. But this is the thing about social media: it will, eventually, unwrap your soul and bare it to the world, unless some other human being interposes themselves between you and the keyboard. (This is why almost all the big names have social media managers to, hopefully, prevent calamities.)
Anyhoo, I am enjoying the election enormously, from the social media perspective. Two more weeks! And even better, the expected meltdown of election night comes just before the next-after-one is due.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• Neo-Nazis are all in on AI, says Wired. Which isn’t surprising: of course they’d exploit an industry that can generate huge amounts of believable material.
• UMG signs deal to let artists create voice clones. Rather like auto-tune, this is surely going to take over the industry (somehow).
• Ashton Kutcher says you’ll soon be able to render a movie with AI. Which feels worrying?
• Famous album cover art put into Luma Labs AI and turned into short GIFs. Dreamy. The Dark Side of the Moon one isn’t bad, though the Abbey Road one is weird.
• Finally, a wonderful very short film made with AI by Nathan Boey, a tribute to his father.
The biggest story on the page; what’s often called by those who aren’t in the news business “the lead”, not to be confused with what Americans call “the lede”, which should of course be called “the intro” and is the first paragraph of a news story.
BNP = British National Party, a far-right nationalist party which in the UK is a byword for racism, along with some of the smaller and newer far-right parties.
“you’re off to the racists” - wonderful, just wonderful. Worth a subscription for that phrase alone. Thank you!