It starts with a ‘back in my day’ nostalgic meme – then suddenly your elders are sharing AI-generated ‘boomerslop’ and repeating conspiracy theories …
G
raham doesn’t remember his mother ever sharing her political views. He’s not certain she even voted until she met his father, who was a big Labour supporter. She went along with that, only once voting Tory as an act of spite towards the end of their relationship. She later married a farmer who was more conservative, and leaned towards leave in the Brexit referendum. “But, honestly, beyond that, she would never even speak of politics. She just wasn’t interested.”
Graham, who works in the transport industry in the Midlands, noticed a big change in his mother during the Covid pandemic. “I remember walking home from work one day and I got this phone call and all of a sudden she was listing off these conspiracy theories at me.” He now realises how much time she was spending online, on her phone and iPad, cut off from friends, family and the church life that had always been so important to her.
Five years later, Graham’s mother, who is retired and in her 60s, supports the hard-right agitator and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson with what her son describes as a religious fervour. She has told him Keir Starmer is a communist trying to “replace us all with Muslims” and Covid was a hoax. He says she spends hours on social media and uses her TV only to stream YouTube videos.
