What happened when I met my Islamophobic troll

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/23/what-happened-when-i-met-my-islamophobic-troll

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In 2017, I started to receive messages from a Twitter user who called themself True Brit, telling me that my religion was “Satanic”, “barbaric” and “evil”. Bearing a profile image of the St George’s cross and a biography that simply read “Anti-Islam, stop Islamic immigration now”, True Brit often spammed me with pictures taken from anti-Muslim websites, blogs and Facebook groups. Sometimes they would be cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant. Other times, I would be sent memes I had seen circulating in rightwing communities online, depicting groups of south Asian men who had been arrested for child sexual grooming, or alleged Syrian refugees who were, supposedly, secret members of Isis. One meme showed a man with a long beard, in battle camouflage, brandishing a pistol in one hand and holding the hand of a woman wearing niqab. In bold white writing below the image were the words “EUROPE IN 2020”.

True Brit never said anything directly to me to begin with. I had seen social media profiles like this one, and much worse, for years. Like those accounts, True Brit had few followers – 65 in total. Their activity on Twitter predominantly consisted of retweets from rightwing news sites such as Breitbart and Fox News. They frequently posted videos of online celebrities who were popular on anti-Muslim forums and Facebook groups, including Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing “provocateur” who has referred to Islam as “the real rape culture”, and Paul Joseph Watson, a UK-based YouTuber and editor of the conspiracy-theory website Infowars.com, who produces weekly videos about the “dangers of Islam” in the west, with titles such as The Truth About Islamophobia and Dear Gays: The Left Betrayed You For Islam. True Brit was also a fan of the British rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, who in 2015 likened Syrian refugees to cockroaches, and who until recently produced anti-Islam videos for Canadian far-right outlet The Rebel Media.

True Brit was a very active Twitter user. They would post at least 10 times a day, often attacking members of the Labour party, in particular the shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, branding her a “disgusting bitch”, and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, accusing him of being “anti-white” and “pro-Sharia law”. Accounts like True Brit’s aren’t uncommon on Twitter. There are thousands of them, with names like Patriot Princess, FREEDOM OF SPEECH UK and THE GREAT AWAKENING: MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN. Although there is no exact figure for how many accounts on the platform could be classified as anti-Muslim, the cross-party thinktank Demos recorded 215,246 Islamophobic tweets sent in English in July 2016 – almost 7,000 a day. In an analysis of over 100,000 tweets sent between March 2016 and August 2018 from 45 rightwing Twitter accounts, researchers at Oxford University found that nearly half contained Islamophobic ideas.

When True Brit first messaged me on Twitter, I assumed it was an automated “bot” account. Bots have long been a common feature of social media, and are estimated to number in the tens of millions on Twitter. They are programmed to like tweets, and to retweet and follow other accounts, and are often used by commercial brands to share their adverts with real users on Twitter. Social media companies tend to consider bots harmless, and do relatively little to regulate them.

Bots can, however, be used in more sinister ways. In 2017, the Observer reported that popular rightwing and far-right figures were actively employing bots to retweet and boost their anti-Muslim content. A study of Islamophobic content on Twitter by the anti-racist thinktank Hope Not Hate had found that Pamela Geller, whose blog The Geller Report regularly posts anti-Muslim news and warns about the “Shariafication of the west”, had more than 100 accounts that automatically retweeted every one of her posts, on top of her audience of hundreds of thousands of loyal readers. “The growth among Twitter accounts and websites spreading anti-Muslim hate is alarming,” said Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at Hope Not Hate. “In such a key area of public interest, it is an indication of increased interest in these views and, as each account or site grows, more people are exposed to deeply prejudiced anti-Muslim views.”

By late June 2017, the direct messages from True Brit had become incessant. What started as a few random stabs of abuse had become a regular onslaught of DMs twice a day, asking why I was part of an “evil religion” and whether I really wanted to follow the prophet Muhammad – “the worst person history has ever known” – who had “killed, enslaved and raped”. True Brit sent me links from the anti-Islam website The Religion of Peace, which posts articles, blogs and how-to guides for debating Islam online and “proving the evil roots” of Muhammad. When True Brit tired of me not replying to their private messages, they made them public. Under tweets I posted – most of which had nothing to do with Islam or Muslims at all – they relentlessly posted anti-Muslim memes and shared links to videos of Muslim preachers in Pakistan calling for gays and lesbians to be killed. It was when they replied to one of my tweets with an Isis video, showing jihadist fighters publicly hanging a man they accused of being a thief, that I finally responded.

“Why do you keep posting this shit to me?” I wrote. “Why do you think any of this would change my mind about anything?”

Half an hour later, True Brit responded. “It’s not just you,” they said. “I send it to everyone who follows Islam that I see.”

“Why?” I asked. “Have you convinced anyone to turn away from Islam because of it?”

After a while, True Brit responded. “No … I believe Islam is an evil cult, and people should turn away from it. I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam.”

“Don’t you think that by hating Islam you also hate the followers of the religion?” I asked. “How can you convince someone they are following something evil when you attack the things that make them who they are?”

“No,” they responded. “I just want them to know they are following evil.”

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After our first back-and-forth, I started speaking to True Brit on a near-daily basis. Most of our conversations tended to tread similar ground, covering topics that were popular on rightwing social media. We talked about what True Brit referred to as “Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs” and how they were, in True Brit’s words, “just following the commands of their prophet”. True Brit talked to me about how Muslims were taking over towns and schools and encouraging non-Muslim children to wear headscarves, information they had gleaned from a Breitbart article about schoolchildren in Leicester visiting a mosque. And although True Brit evaded my questions about who they were, they were keen to ask me personal questions: why wasn’t I married yet? Did I intend to circumcise my future children? Would I kill my future child if they were gay?

But our conversations weren’t just about religion. True Brit supported Aston Villa, and they would often talk about the team’s performance against rival teams. We would talk about which Netflix series we were watching and whether the British version of House of Cards was better than the US one. True Brit even tried to get me into their favourite band, AC/DC.

After weeks of talking, True Brit agreed to meet me at their home.

I stood in front of a house on a quiet, suburban road just a few miles outside of Birmingham city centre, finally about to meet my anonymous online interlocutor. A middle-aged man opened the door, wearing a pair of three-quarter-length khaki shorts and a plain blue T-shirt with two yellow stains on the front.

True Brit immediately shook my hand and welcomed me into his home, warning me not to take off my shoes in case I accidentally stepped in cat poo. He introduced himself as Phil. He was short, with broad shoulders that rolled forward as he moved into his default slouch. In harsh light, a slight paunch was visible. He had thin wisps of light brown hair that barely covered his receding hairline and uneven stubble covering his face.

Phil lived on his own. On his kitchen walls were drawings by his young daughter and photographs of them together at theme parks, restaurants and outside Cardiff Castle. Since Phil’s divorce a year earlier, his daughter had moved to a different area of Birmingham with her mother. Phil said that the end of his marriage “broke me emotionally”.

He didn’t want to talk about it much, but told me that since then, he had spent most of his time alone and at his computer, watching YouTube videos, reading articles and browsing message boards. “I started off just wanting to read about politics,” he said as he made us tea. “I voted for Brexit – the first time I’d ever properly voted – so I used to spend my time reading about the whole process, how the government would negotiate with the EU. I wasn’t really that political, but it was just seeing everything that happened during the referendum. All the fighting, name-calling and the hypocrisy from the media – how they were insulting anyone who voted leave, but they just don’t understand what we go through.”

Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories

Phil told me how he had been let go from a steady, decently paid job a couple of years earlier, and had struggled to get back on his feet as a self-employed handyman. At one stage he was claiming benefits, which had made him embarrassed, as if he “had lost all dignity”, being made to fill out endless forms at the local jobcentre and attend countless interviews for jobs he didn’t want, just so he could claim the little money he was eligible to receive.

Around the same time, amid his marital trouble, Phil began spending more and more of his free time browsing websites that “weren’t the mainstream media or the biased BBC”. He started off reading obscure blogs he found on Google, including Truthseekers.org, which posted about the Illuminati and accused “elites” – politicians, celebrities and journalists – of having secret meetings where they ultimately planned to control the British population. From these blogs, Phil moved on to reading about the “great replacement”, a rightwing conspiracy theory claiming that white British people are being discouraged from getting married and having children, as part of a sinister plot to replace them with non-white Muslim migrants and refugees.

It wasn’t long before Phil switched from blogs to more active communities on Facebook and YouTube, where he found abundant videos about the great replacement from YouTubers such as Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Phil told me that he spent hours on YouTube, “researching the imminent demographic change”. From these videos, he had learned that “Islam is taking over the UK by stealth”, and that “their followers are being encouraged to have lots of children and outbreed non-Muslims”. They were all statements I had heard before on conspiracy websites and rightwing YouTube channels.

What was strange to me was just how much time Phil was spending online. He spent most of the day in his bedroom, where the paint was peeling off the wall and a thin sheet lay crumpled on his single bed. On his table lay several cups of days-old tea, one of which was beginning to show white spots of mould. But what immediately caught my eye when I entered his room was an unfurled union jack flag taped to the edge of his desk.

This was the table where Phil, under his True Brit alias, would sit at his computer and write to me. Now, as I sat with him, he showed me that he spent his time messaging scores of others on Twitter with the same kind of content. I saw that his direct messages had all been sent to notable Muslim and leftwing figures. It was clear that he used Twitter for little else. “Most of the time, they just block me,” he said. “Some of them swear at me, call me names or accuse me of being a troll.” Phil retweeted almost every anti-Islam post he saw, often without even reading their contents. He said retweeting “doesn’t mean I agree with it”, but rather that he wanted “to make the debate about Islam open to the public”. He also found that as he continued to retweet anti-Muslim accounts, he would amass more followers, especially if a big rightwing figure retweeted him in turn. “One of my tweets was favourited by Katie Hopkins a while back,” he told me. “I ended up getting 20 new followers off that – imagine if she had retweeted it to her followers!”

When I asked Phil if anyone had influenced him while he was developing his views about Islam, he claimed that he had come up with his “own views based on my own research”, and that he wasn’t against Muslims. Nor was he racist, because “Islam isn’t a race – it’s a set of ideas”. He said he hadn’t deliberately searched for material on Islam. Rather, he said, “I’d go on YouTube, and I would just see a new video every day showing [male] Muslim migrants attacking women, or robbing a shop, or burning a car. It happens all the time, and you can find it quite easily.” He showed me his YouTube homepage, replete with recommendations – based on what he had watched previously – of footage from EDL marches, clips from the rightwing US programme The Alex Jones Show and videos from alt-right YouTube personalities. These videos appeared in YouTube’s recommended sidebar too; Phil had autoplay on, so they would run on from each other. On the whole, he estimated that he watched at least an hour of these videos every morning, “just because they were there”.

YouTube’s algorithm for recommended videos has come under fire, particularly after the election of Donald Trump, when it was accused of promoting content that incited racial and religious hatred and even violence. In the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci called YouTube “the Great Radicalizer”, after finding that simply watching a few Trump rallies led the site to recommend to her videos that denied the Holocaust and called for Muslims to be forcibly deported from the west. Tufekci argued that though YouTube was not deliberately directing its users to extremist material, its recommendations algorithm, designed to keep users on the site for as long as possible, naturally brought up more graphic material. “What keeps people glued to YouTube?” she asked. “Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with – or to incendiary content in general.” And this didn’t just go for Trump supporters. Tufekci cited an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, which found that even users who watched mainstream news on YouTube were “fed far-right or far-left videos”.

In a number of public statements since the 2016 US presidential election, Google has claimed to be clamping down on extremist material on YouTube. But critics have accused it and other social media companies of acting too late and doing too little. Even when extremist accounts do get restricted or banned, users often just set up a new account, upload their old videos and quickly get their followers back.

One such person was a YouTuber called World2Awaken, whose channel Phil had subscribed to. When I contacted World2Awaken, he told me his name was Mike, but wouldn’t tell me his age or where he lived. He told me that two of his previous YouTube accounts had been deleted after he had posted material deemed harmful by the site’s standards. Mike’s YouTube following was modest, but he uploaded videos at least once a week. All his videos were anti-Islam and anti-Muslim, with titles such as “Muslims demand Sharia law in Britain!” and “Muslims attack Christians in UK streets”. Most of his content was ripped from other, larger YouTube channels, such as Infowars, RT (formerly Russia Today) and The Rebel Media.

Mike also posted old videos of speakers who were well known for saying negative things about Islam, and who sometimes appeared on mainstream news channels: Tommy Robinson, for example, or the prominent critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her husband, the historian Niall Ferguson. “Usually,” he told me by email, “I upload videos of Douglas Murray because I know they will get a lot of views.” Shortly before his channel was shut down by YouTube, World2Awaken shared a video of Murray, a political commentator and columnist for the Spectator, talking at an Intelligence Squared debate about how “Islam is not a religion of peace”. The original video has had more than 1m views on YouTube since it was first broadcast in 2011.

“I was getting a good thousand views a day at least,” Mike recounted with pride. “Usually from people who would search for names of particular speakers and come across my videos.” He told me that people had emailed him after coming across his channel to “thank me for opening their eyes to the problem”, and said that he had amassed more than 2,000 subscribers in a year – a sizeable number for a channel that didn’t produce original content.

Mike’s explanation for this was that people were coming to YouTube to find out “the truth” about immigration and Islam in their country. “You can listen to a video when you’re at work, on your way home, you don’t have to read anything – that’s one reason we are more effective at spreading our message than lefty newspapers,” Mike explained. He also argued that YouTube was more transparent than other forms of media, because “you can’t lie when you’re making a video”. Mike did admit that he sometimes uploaded videos he found without knowing the full context of the clip.

Once, he uploaded a video of predominantly black football fans in Paris shouting after a match in 2014, titling it “Muslims attack bus after Ramadan”. Another time, he posted a clip of Abu Haleema, a UK-based Muslim vlogger whose passport was seized by the Home Office under suspicion of plans to engage in terrorism. Mike had taken the video from a Channel 4 documentary about countering fringe extremists online and reposted it with the title “UK Imam says Sharia will take over Britain by force”, despite the fact that Abu Haleema wasn’t an imam.

Mike dismissed these inaccuracies as unimportant. “Even if it was wrong that time,” he said, “there is plenty of evidence that shows Muslims are causing problems everywhere they immigrate. They only respect Sharia law and will not stop until Sharia takes over.” Mike then went offline and refused to answer any more of my questions.

When I asked Phil about YouTube videos that were uploaded either with a false synopsis or without context, he brushed it off and told me: “The news lies all the time, and you don’t call them up on that.” He wasn’t convinced that videos falsely depicting Muslims as criminals, rapists and violent attackers perpetuated a narrative that could be destructive and alienating for Muslims living in the UK, including those he had worked with, and the small Muslim community that lived only a stone’s throw away from his house. “I don’t think all Muslims are evil,” he repeated. “I only think their ideology is evil.”

One man’s (very polite) fight against media Islamophobia

For Phil, the veracity of individual incidents was irrelevant. “You don’t know what’s true or not these days anyway,” he shrugged. “But I know that whenever I see a terrorist attack or a shooting happen, the culprit always has a Muslim name … I know the problem is bigger.”

He paused and scrolled through Twitter on his phone. Sadiq Khan had just tweeted about reducing hate crime – the kind of tweet that trolls routinely respond to with hundreds of abusive, anti-Muslim comments. “I’ve got a meme for this,” Phil sniggered, showing me a picture of a poorly drawn caricature of Khan’s head transplanted on to the body of a pig, the Arabic word “haram” written on its side.

“Mayor Khan wants to ban this,” Phil tweeted. “Would be a shame if it got retweeted.”

Reaching Phil a year later proved difficult. His original True Brit Twitter account had been removed for violating the platform’s terms and conditions. Because Phil’s followers were all anonymous troll accounts like his, it was also difficult to figure out if he was tweeting from another account, or whether he was still active on social media at all. When I tried to call him, it went directly to voicemail. I left a message asking if I could speak to him again, to talk about his ban and to ask if he thought – like some other more well-known rightwing provocateurs who had also been banned, such as Milo Yiannopoulos – that the platform was deliberately restricting his free speech, or if he felt they were scared of his words.

After I left him a third voicemail message, I put down my phone and logged into Twitter. I had received a message in my “others” inbox, where people I don’t follow can send me messages. The message came from an account with 60 followers and a profile picture of a union flag, using the name “David Brexit”.

“Islam out of the UK!” they wrote.

Adapted from Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims by Hussein Kesvani, published by Hurst and available at guardianbookshop.com

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