The pitfalls of epistemic snobbery

Last year, a video went viral on X which showed a young Scottish teenager brandishing an axe and a knife at a foreign man, who was filming the encounter, and warning him not to approach her and her friends.

Depending on people’s interpretations, this showed a brave young girl defending herself from an aggressive adult male, or an antisocial teenager foolishly threatening someone with deadly weapons. Thousands of online right-wingers valourised the girl as some kind of Boudicca-like heroine. Left-wingers, and some heterodox liberals, often claimed or implied that she had been in some way responsible for the situation. 

This was especially the case when the Daily Mail published an article which portrayed the migrant man on the side of the argument as being a humble Christian father from Bulgaria. The police also intervened to condemn “misinformation” and claim that the girl and her friends had “approached” the man. The girl was charged with possessing illegal weapons.

But the case didn’t end there. Last week, the purveyors of “misinformation” appear to have been vindicated. A judge ruled that the Bulgarian man had made sexual comments to the young girl and her friends, and had subsequently assaulted them — throwing one of them to the ground — along with his sister.

I can’t claim to have been vindicated here. At the time, I — rather piously — warned people not to draw firm conclusions from a snippet of film. It was certainly possible that the man had instigated the situation, I wrote, but I didn’t think one could assume that the person with two deadly weapons had done nothing wrong. (I still think it is not being sufficiently addressed that the girl was carrying two deadly weapons, but with the qualification that if she was indeed propositioned and assaulted by an adult male, she was not being wholly irrational. Why young girls would feel compelled to arm themselves demands more investigation.)

A lot of people online have been saying they knew from the girl’s expression and tone of voice that she was the victim. Of course, I knew she wasn’t merely an aggressor. (Something bad must have happened in a young girl’s life to make her carry an axe). But I do wonder if I should have seen more clearly, in her eyes, what had happened to provoke a defensive response. Perhaps I missed some sense in which I should have been more empathetic. I’ll certainly think about it.

Still, whatever the rights and wrongs of a kind of stubborn agnosticism, the people who seem to have really erred in the case of “Sophie of Dundee”, as she became known, are the people whose scepticism towards the initial presentation of the video led them to draw the opposite conclusion — that the girl was definitely in the wrong. Right-wing critics have blamed classism here, and an element of class-based disdain might have been a factor, but I think a more significant bias was a bias against the kind of right-wingers who spread such viral videos. 

Certainly, such accounts do spread a lot of nonsense. Major “influencers” have claimed, or at least implied, that random dark-skinned men are murderers or predators on the basis of no evidence at all. As I wrote last year: “these days you can find thousands of people sharing a clip that claims to show a Frenchman setting his dogs on a Pakistani paedophile when the “Frenchman” is clearly speaking with an English accent, the “Pakistani” is clearly white and there’s no way of knowing what has happened to provoke this incident.” 

Those of us who like to think that we have higher standards when it comes to truth and justice feel compelled to put some distance between such people and ourselves. But to think that we have high epistemic standards does not mean that we do. At the very least, heterodox liberals and contrarian conservatives should have remembered the old phrase about a stopped clock. I was not, again, one of the commentators who assumed that the girl was in the wrong, but I wonder if she would have seemed more obviously right if I hadn’t had a preexisting prejudice against what I called “news by viral video”. I’m not sure. Again, it’s something I will think about.

But the most sinister element of the story, as far as I can tell, is how the police rushed to condemn “misinformation” and imply that the girl had been the aggressor. Why were they so sure? Did they have good evidence — beyond the viral video — or were they also assuming that the online provocateurs had to be wrong. 

Allegedly, the police also wanted to release a statement blaming Henry Nowak for the situation where an unhinged Sikh man had stabbed him to death. Often — as Sebastian Milbank wrote so excellently for The Critic at the weekend — it seems very much like the authorities care more about managing the social media reaction to an event than they do about the event itself. “Misinformation” has to be stopped, you see — whether or not it is actually wrong.

Those of us who get annoyed by online bullshit artists — and there is, it must be said, a lot to be annoyed by — have to always remember that “misinformation” can come from the establishment too. As the authorities seek to impose new and broader restrictions on what can be said online, it is especially important to emphasise that while, yes, you can’t believe everything you read on X, you also can’t believe everything that you are told by the police, “public health” authorities, government ministers et cetera.

Those of us who warn people not to draw firm conclusions in the absence of proper investigation, meanwhile, should draw one final lesson. Yes, I will maintain that we should be very, very careful before judging people’s guilt or innocence based on snippets of media. It’s the least that we would expect for ourselves, so it’s the least that we should offer to other people. But the fact is that when the authorities can be so evasive and disingenuous, the viral spread of snippets of media can be the only reason some events ever see the light of day. That “proper investigation” might not take place at all without people causing a massive stink online. 

So, for all the virtues of scepticism, scepticism might get nothing done. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it might make it inadequate. “Angry mobs” have a bad name for a reason, but “useless cynics” don’t sound so great either.