You hear talk of ‘algorithms’ and if you’re an old, mid 20th century boy like me, you get the idea that they work pretty much the way crude car insurance does, a computer programme scans the statistics for individuals according to age, gender, occupation, vehicle, mileage, postcode, plus various other variables and spits out a ridiculously expensive premium at the other end.

But that, like me, is so last century. Modern algorithms, the really clever ones you hear about on the news, push contentious posts into your feed because the zeros and ones under the hood of X or FB understand that there’s nothing like aggressively conflicting opinions to create, and more importantly, to sustain engagement.

I kind of understood how it works in principle and I was sure that if I was motivated purely by monetary motives (like the short-arse would be hard man on the right), it would be easy enough to generate simple click bait like the image above that would guarantee a steady stream of angry engagement and the financial gain that accompanies it.

I saw this illustrated perfectly last week – albeit entirely unintentionally. I returned from taking my 95 year old father-in-law for a blood test at our local hospital (gentle, considerate service from a skilled foreign nurse whose command of English was less than perfect, but, experience would suggest, infinitely better than 99% of flag-shaggers in the unlikely event they should ever attempt to communicate in anything other than their native tongue); I turned my computer on and discovered that a comparatively innocuous post (by my standards) I’d shared the previous day highlighting Rupert Lowe’s scummy, shit-stirring speech in the House of Commons defaming immigrants, had gone viral in the worst possible way. It felt like I’d picked up a particularly nasty STD because I’d entered into an argument with the kind of people who regard the likes of Lowe, Farage and Lee as the new messiahs of an imaginary AI Britain featuring wall to wall St George’s flags and a noticeable absence of brown people.

The first few new comments were similar to the ones I’d responded to the day before from the usual suspects among my FB friends and their friends, who had repeated all the usual arguments in a manner that implied they were irrefutable facts; because their authors found it impossible to see beyond the Islamophobic and in many cases downright racist assumptions that underpinned their ‘logic’.

So much so everyday FB, but then I begin to see comments from people who had no obvious association with me or anyone I know. None of them added anything to the conversation beyond standing up and being counted as part of the “90% of the population who 100% agree with everything Rupert said” (except for the occasional Tommeh fan who thought he didn’t go anywhere near far enough). By the time I saw those comments, I didn’t need to respond to them because reasonable friends had already dismissed them in a manner that would have embarrassed the individuals who’d written them if they’d possessed the intellectual wherewithal to do so.

However, I did notice that the ‘likes’ below comments supporting Lowe’s bigoted bilge, far outweighed those in support of the sensible comments rebutting them. Looking down the list of ‘likes’ I noticed that aside from the aforementioned two or three ‘usual suspects’ very few of the others had any association whatsoever with me or anyone I ‘knew’ on FB. In fact the one thing that a whole load of them did have in common – aside from St George’s crosses – was only having a single FB friend, which I took as a pretty sure sign that they were bots, designed to draw the pro Nigel and Co, anti-woke hordes in.

And did they ever turn up! Suddenly the conversation was filled with the kind of English flag waving, Nazi saluting, bother boys -and girls – who give the police so much trouble whenever they spill out of Spoons to join a patriotic demonstration shouting at hotels or any other time there’s a possibility of some serious aggro.

Talk about a pea-brained pile in. Every one of their silly comments, stock insults and simplistic memes could have been produced by a halfway bright 8 year old with a potty-mouth. There’s no room for racism and bigotry to fester in a well-developed, emotionally intelligent, fully-functioning mind; but it was immediately obvious that that wasn’t what I was being confronted with. I mean nobody expects intellectual acuity from Reform supporters, but this was pure unadulterated silliness. Childish abuse that didn’t even merit a “fuck you too”.

I told my wife that it was akin to walking into a swarm of nasty, Nazi midges; except that they weren’t even capable of biting, or at least not in any way that was likely to trouble me beyond the annoyance of their infernal infantile buzzing.

So I Googled ‘limit who can comment on FB’ and discovered there was an easy three dots top right solution, whereby I could specify that only ‘Friends of friends’ would be able to join the conversation and just as suddenly as it started, the tedious tinnitus disappeared.

I’d already started to write about this experience, when a couple of days later I shared a post about the flag-shagerati losing their shit about Tommeh Ten Names being declined service in a boozer in Bedford and yet another blow-in with zero connection to anyone I know, a gentleman by the name of Tony Tungate joined the conversation. He had nothing to say about matter in hand; i.e. Tommeh the Tosser and his mindless melts going into meltdown; instead he said “I note Mr. Gurman that you do not allow comments on some of your posts. I wonder what that is. Also it would be very interesting to know please, which political party you have allied yourself too”.

Which was slightly nonsensical and a bit of a damn cheek according to my good buddies John Leo and Naomi, but ever the epitome of politeness (at least until vicious verbal evisceration becomes the only reasonable response), I replied with:

“Thank you for asking Tony, I have started writing something about my experience with the Rupert Lowe post and the way FB’s algorithm promotes mindless adversity. Watch this space.

“My politics would best be described as anarcho-syndicalist.”

It’s fascinating what you can discover if you take the trouble to check out FB’s insights, which are designed to facilitate turning rage bait into a well paying business. Personally I’ve never been interested in any of that nonsense; nonetheless it was revealing to see how efficiently FB’s algorithms are designed to promote angry conflict.

The first insight ‘Views over time’ shows how quickly the post escalated once the bots weighed in (it’s interesting to note that my ‘usual content’ doesn’t even register). I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that no less than 98.7% of the people who’d viewed this post had no previous connection to me; or that 64% of them were aged over 55, the majority of them angry old men apparently.

So Mr. Tungate, to answer your rather impertinent questions, I limited who could comment on that thread – and I can be sure that we are both talking about the same post because it is the only time I have ever needed to exercise that option – because I was confident that there wasn’t any danger of restricting intelligent contributions to the conversation by preventing a veritable army of brainless bigots, racists and flag-shaggers from posting mindless memes and cretinous permutations of ‘bald, old, commie, cunt, leftie, woke, wanker, snowflake’ and half a dozen equally pathetic insults, invariably accompanied by a mass of emojis and flags  🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 .

I could counter by asking which party you have allied yourself to, but having checked the photos on your profile and seen you proudly declaring “I have always been a supporter of Brexit and Nigel Farage. I am also an ardent supporter of my MP Rupert Lowe”, I’d have to be dumb enough to buy Reform’s divisive dribble not to work that one out for myself.

So putting the bleedin’ obvious to one side Tone, perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me how you feel about being manipulated and dragged all over the internet by an algorithm that doesn’t give a damn about your hateful politics, that’s only interested in spreading engaging discord?