BEN HARVEY: Helen Haines attack exposes how algorithms, rage & conspiracy culture are fuelling division

A very long time ago I worked at the Sunday Mirror newspaper in England. After a couple of years of writing about whatever Posh and Becks were doing at any given hour of any given day, I was given the lofty title of foreign editor.

It sounded very important and I looked forward to writing about something that didn’t involve British celebrities embroiled in sex scandals.

I quickly realised that the reality of being a foreign editor at a British redtop is you were writing about British celebrities embroiled in sex scandals while they were on holiday in Spain.

Part of my job was coming up with a pithy headline for each story. British sub-editors do pith better than anyone, so it was an intimidating task.

Zip me up before you go go (after George Michael was sprung in a compromised position in a public toilet in 1998).

Freddie Starr ate my hamster (after the comedian was said to have put the pet between two slices of bread as a snack in 1986).

If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights (published in 1992 as a warning to voters considering putting Labour leader Neil Kinnock in power).

I’m only here for De Beers (in the wake of a plot to steal the De Beers 203-carat Millennium Star diamond from an exhibition in London).

L’ambush (after French criminals hijacked British lorries loaded with 40,000 worth of fresh lamb).

One of the first stories I wrote in London concerned the propensity for some women’s clothing stores to showcase their wares on storefront mannequins adorned with conspicuously erect nipples.

The headline? Mannekinky.

Brilliant.

Newspaper headlines are the original clickbait. Good ones are clever, funny, controversial or inflammatory. Really good ones are all those things.

They are there to drag the reader into the story in the same way a television news promo makes a viewer keep their eyes on the screen.

Traditional media (“traditional” being a nicer adjective than “legacy”) still uses promos and headlines as an audience tractor beam but social media has changed the impact they have.

The frenetic pace of the average social media feed means fewer people are reading or watching the actual story. They consume the headline or promo and that’s it.

As a result, fewer people get the full context of a particular parcel of media content.

I was thinking about the trend in the days after Helen Haines was struck by a car this week.

Much was said about how algorithms are feeding the prejudiced views some people harbour. We are less likely to get dissenting perspectives and so many people are chasing crazy rabbits down the burrows of the internet.

We won’t go into details of the case against the man who was allegedly behind the wheel on Monday afternoon because he is before the courts.

But it seems clear from Brendan Nugent’s social media profile that we are dealing with a man who was particularly agitated by the situation in Palestine.

I will bet you London to a brick that his feed was littered with headlines and reels viewed without context.

How else could we have arrived at a situation where a man in Tarrawingee is so incensed by a religious war happening 14,000km away, he allegedly runs over a woman who, as an independent MP has absolutely no influence over Australian foreign policy much less Israel’s, and whose last prominent comments on Palestine urged “an end to the bloodshed in Gaza through an enduring peace deal”.

Nugent agreed with her. God only knows what might have happened had he not.

Media (all media) bears some responsibility for the hyper-emotional state of the world but people like me aren’t completely to blame for society contorting itself into such an angry beast.

Many observers believe the pandemic marked a social step-change.

It turns out long-COVID doesn’t just refer to ongoing physical repercussions from the virus; there are enduring mental effects also in the form of an unhinged distrust of government and the institutions of State that for generations have ensured society doesn’t tear itself apart.

Extreme cases manifest in the form of sovereign citizenry and delusional conspiracies about the so-called deep state.

These maniacs used to be easy to spot but they’ve got good at disguising themselves publicly and so the first time we hear about the lone wolves is when they do something stupid.

We’ve always been cynical about government in this country but Australia’s top cop is dealing with thousands of one-person Rum Rebellions and Eureka Stockades being incubated on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Australian Federal Police boss Krissy Barrett encapsulated perfectly the sad state of play.

“The current criminal threat environment is febrile, and when it comes to Federal parliamentarians, the AFP continues to record the growing volume of online abuse, threatening rhetoric and intimidation, increasing political polarisation and anti-government sentiment, conspiracy-driven and grievance-based behaviours, lone actors motivated by a convergence of personal grievance, mental health vulnerabilities and ideological concerns.”

Social media is breaking the social contract.