Offence archaeology and the future of elections

At the time of writing, candidates and parties are getting into the swing of the campaign for the Makerfield by-election. With Rupert Lowe’s Restore getting fully stuck in — albeit with a largely cloistered candidate — and the Greens apparently cooling the engines on their own campaign, Andy Burnham’s supporters sense that the psephological arithmetic is moving in Labour’s favour, and that they may have Reform UK’s candidate on the ropes. 

Rob Kenyon is, on paper, perfect by-election material. A thoroughly local boy, with enough campaigning experience from the last general election and council elections that he knows what he’s doing, but without any whiff of the Westminster swamp. Bright enough to think on his feet but no policy egg-head, Kenyon is a political outsider who evidently has a thick skin and ample training from the school of hard knocks. However, his campaign has been dogged by the continual release of things that he posted on social media over the course of many years.  

This issue was covered in detail in these pages in his interview with David Shipley, in which Kenyon addressed questions around his social media activity with the retort that he wasn’t perfect and wasn’t polished, and that he didn’t pretend to be. Essentially, he invited voters to take him as they found him. Kenyon addressed the charge that he was “friends” on Facebook with a fascist campaigner named Gary Raikes more directly, stating that he had set up a new campaigning account on the social media platform in the lead up to the 2024 general election, and had accepted friend requests from large numbers of people he had no real life connection with. 

The Raikes issue was one of the first complaints about Kenyon’s online activity to have surfaced, prior to the calling of the present by-election. The connection was originally publicised by “Hope not Hate” — a campaigning charity that exists to oppose extremism, and whose ambiguous relationship with a limited company of a similar name which disseminated content designed to inconvenience political opponents of the Labour Party led to an intervention from the Charity Commission. Hope Not Hate, along with the “anti-fascist” publication Searchlight, have devoted considerable energy to scrutiny of candidates’ social media accounts; in 2024 they enjoyed a number of high profile successes in spooking the leadership of Reform UK into disowning and de-selecting candidates who had posted things that were considered beyond the pale. Having paid the Danegeld, Reform’s skittishness created a cottage industry of social media sleuths. 

Whilst Reform’s collective spine has steadily stiffened as they have grown in confidence and popularity, it is no overstatement to say that the party has become obsessed with its prospective candidates’ social media history. And when we look at Kenyon’s case, it isn’t difficult to see why.  Shipley’s piece concluded by noting that a fresh scandal had been uncovered since the interview was concluded; that Kenyon had been found to have left a partly supportive, 12 year-old reply to a post — apparently on a discussion forum on a Rugby League website — which justified Russia’s then recent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Subsequently, it has also been reported that he made a comment on another social media platform in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 to the effect that US foreign policy was responsible for the rise of ISIS and by extension the wave of terrorism that was unfolding in Europe at that time. 

This is in addition to the comments that he has been reported to have posted concerning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 — as well as a light-hearted response he gave, again in 2021, to a vulgar, anatomically graphic post made by another random social media user about performing a sex act on the former Countdown presenter Carol Vorderman. As I write, dozens and quite possibly hundreds of professionally employed journalists, researchers and activists will be combing through Kenyon’s entire online footprint since the dawn of Web 2.0 for anything vaguely controversial that can then be “reported”.  

So far, Reform UK are standing firmly behind their candidate and insisting it is all irrelevant, and Kenyon himself is sticking with his line that he isn’t perfect, and that the fact he has put things on the internet over the years that are a bit embarrassing to look back on now isn’t a big deal. The response to this from the media and from his rivals is simply to highlight another comment from years ago. We have already heard his twelve year-old musings on geopolitics from a Rugby League forum and his five year-old thoughts on pharmaceuticals from Facebook. Presumably we can look forward to sensational reporting of a heterodox take on monetary policy from the comments of the “One Pound Fish” video on YouTube in 2012. 

Social media archeology is cheaper and easier than proper investigative journalism

It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as a bit of a joke, but there are serious outlets reporting this stuff, and there are serious people who expect us to take it deadly seriously. Kenyon’s comments from the Rugby League Forum about the Crimea annexation were revealed by the Telegraph, and the paper’s veteran home affairs editor Charles Hymas’ name was put to it. I really cannot bring myself to imagine Hymas trawling through despairing post-mortems of Wigan Warriors’ upset at the hands of the Huddersfield Giants in the Superleague XIX while hunting for incriminating takes about Post-Soviet politics from a guy who at the time was just a random member of the public. Though I note that Hymas shared the byline with a poor young lobby correspondent, and I suspect it was the latter who ended his working day with a surprisingly enhanced knowledge of the RFL’s 2014 Magic Weekend. 

Partially, this has come about because social media archeology is cheaper and easier than proper investigative journalism, in a news environment with rapidly diminishing resources and capacity. But it is also because Reform UK’s leadership made a rod for their own backs by taking this stuff seriously for a while. The party has fought a fierce rearguard action over the last 18 months, applying ever more rigorous checks to candidates’ social media history, but the truth is that there is pretty well nobody who used the internet in a normal way since about 2008 who could possibly stand up to this level of scrutiny. 

Over the last 20 years, the overwhelming majority of the population have become internet users, with the big platforms encouraging us to submit our own content and engage with that submitted by others. It became almost as easy to make a comment on a social media website as it was to say something verbally — in fact most people became far less guarded, more aggressive and more controversial on the web than they’d ever dream of being in real life.  Multiple generations became used to posting without really thinking. It certainly wasn’t like writing a letter, or even a postcard, where something about the ritual of putting pen to paper made people stop and take a moment to consider the message they wanted to convey and the ways in which it might be interpreted. 

Those born in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s came of age on web 2.0 — on discussion boards, on the earlier social networks and then on Facebook. The internet was a place for edgy humour, showing off — and then, later, for thinking aloud. In its earlier phases, it inculcated an atmosphere of genuine freedom of speech in which people putting in their two penn’orth was seen as a virtue in itself, and getting something wrong was consequence free. 

In the 2010s, politicians began engaging seriously on Facebook and Twitter, and political debate became a staple of those platforms over the course of the decade. Prominent elected officials and candidates always had to think carefully about what they posted, and their comments online were expected to represent an honest reflection of their own or their party’s official position. But normal people, and especially those cohorts that had grown up online in the 2000s, continued quite happily to post whatever happened to pop into their heads, be it a half-thought through gut reaction to conflict that they didn’t really know much about, or a light-hearted reaction to a rude comment about a celebrity. These comments were the product of a few seconds’ thought, and were forgotten about as quickly. 

The result was that the vast majority of us spent about a decade posting things that, if properly thought about, were actually inconsiderate, inane, or just downright stupid. What we were more wary of at the time was pictures (and later, videos) of foolish or drunken behaviour that might later have been discovered by potential employers. We could remember the story of the young trainee teacher who lost her job in 2009 after a newspaper carried a picture of her on a night out with a pair of novelty underwear around her ankles. But other than a tiny and rather unappealing subset of people who always intended to go into politics from a young age, an entire generation engaged in this sort of conversational conjecture on the internet, without any thought that they might have been called to account for it years or decades later.

For the typical internet user who was under the age of about 30 when Facebook was launched in the UK in October 2005, it will simply be impossible to withstand this level of archaeological internet scrutiny without significant embarrassment. I certainly wouldn’t, and neither would any member of my cohort from school or university with whom I interacted online in those days, including many who have gone on to highly respectable careers and become pillars of their communities. Neither, I strongly suspect, would many of the younger journalists and researchers currently unearthing the “evidence” being lobbed at Robert Kenyon.  

Tedious as it is to say, it has to be noted that this is absolutely not being applied evenly. To think of just one example off the top of my head, the former Health Secretary and potential future Labour leader Wes Streeting had a prominent history of posting crude, explicit comments fantasising about carrying out acts of violence against people he didn’t like, particularly the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir. Despite the fact that he did this well into his mid-twenties, and while he already enjoyed growing prominence as a rising Labour student leader, nobody has ever taken this online activity particularly seriously, or thought that it might act as a limitation to Streeting’s vast ambition. That was just how young Labour activists talked on social media at the time. 

However, the Hope Not Hate model of social media scrutiny, initially presented as a reasonable prophylactic against encroaching extremism, has now become the norm for the entire media as far as Reform UK’s candidates are concerned. And as we’ve seen, this has gone far beyond questions relating to potential political extremism,  on to general uncouthness, as well as deviations from current political orthodoxy, without any reference to the context of the time. Kenyon’s comments about the Crimea annexation were made only two years after Barack Obama had wrung a laugh out of Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as the primary threat to America in a 2012 presidential debate, and at a time when hawkishness on Russia was only just losing its association with right-wing warmongering. And his comments about the relationship between Islamic terrorism and US foreign policy were absolutely standard in The Guardian’s comment pages for years and years. 

We have to be completely unashamed in our dismissal of Facebook archeology in all its forms

There will be thousands of young or young-ish people across the country who are watching this spectacle, and quietly shelving whatever plans they may have had to run for political office at some stage in the future. An even younger cohort will learn the lesson that any departure from the prevailing consensus will entail reputational risk that may dog them for the rest of their lives. If you are the sort of person who regards people being rude to politicians and celebrities on the internet as the number one threat society faces (and this seems to include almost the entire media and governing class of Britain today), then enhanced accountability is presumably for the better. Even if it does only apply to one hue of the political spectrum.

For the rest of us, if we are to stop this descent into blandness, we have to be completely unashamed in our dismissal of Facebook archeology in all its forms — even in the unlikely event that it gets turned on a Liberal Democrat. This is not the same as giving a free pass to absolutely anything said online — clearly if somebody has posted something that calls their basic integrity or sanity into account in the last few months or weeks, or which states a clear view on a particular issue that is opposed to our own, we are justified in taking that into account when deciding who to vote for. But the exhuming of years-old tittle-tattle farted out onto the internet years before the author ever considered putting themselves forward as a public figure ought to be considered beneath the standards of respectable commentary.