Speculating about crimes while investigations are ongoing, we have heard time and again, is the height of irresponsibility. “Police again very clear,” the journalist Dan Hodges lectured us recently, “No suggestion Ann Widdecombe’s death terror related. Or that it is politically motivated. And that speculation on motive is unhelpful to their investigation.”
Well, now the police are saying that it was indeed a targeted attack — albeit that the motive remains unclear. Many of us have been vindicated in raising an eyebrow at the initial “nothing to see here” claims — if not because of the circumstances of Ms Widdecombe’s murder then because of the Hodges Principle (whatever Dan Hodges says or predicts will almost inevitably turn out to look foolish).
But it is true that we should be very, very careful when it comes to speculating about unsolved crimes. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug, and it is easy to jump to premature conclusions. For example, Lucy Powell MP has said in Parliament, after paying tribute to Ms Widdecombe, that we must “tackle … online algorithms and business models”.
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To be fair, Mrs Powell did not explicitly blame social media for Ms Widdecombe’s death. But the context would have made it very easy to infer that there was a connection — an idea for which there is precisely no evidence. Perhaps the murderer was radicalised on social media. But we have no way of knowing this — knowing, as we do, almost nothing about him.
Politicians love blaming social media for things. Under-performance in schools? Social media. Terrorism? Social media. If an asteroid was hurtling towards the Earth, the Labour Party would find an excuse to bring the mainstream discourse back to irresponsible speculation on social media.
The fact that social media is full of people being rude about politicians is presumably coincidental.
This has happened before. The murder of David Amess MP should have been an opportunity to talk about Islamic radicalism in the UK. Actually, politicians and journalists talked about civility in politics and online anonymity.
To be fair, it is true that the internet had had a lot to do with Ali Harbi Ali’s descent into theo-ideological madness. But in the 21st century, blaming social media qua social media makes about as much sense as blaming the Oklahoma bombings on books. With most people under the age of 60 getting their news from online sources, it would be difficult for social media not to be involved in someone’s radicalisation. But that does not mean that social media can be blamed in broad terms. Ali Harbi Ali was not radicalised by Facebook algorithms but by seeking out jihadist content on encrypted apps like Telegram.
Of course, there is no denying that social media can be a stew of unhinged spite. When Mrs Widdecombe’s death was announced, Bluesky was full of people celebrating — like the former Labour MSP candidate and uni worker who publicly expressed the hope that Widdecombe’s death had been “extremely painful”. (Just a few weeks ago, incidentally, the shambling corpse of Private Eye was saying that Bluesky was defined by “polite conversation” and “genial chat”.)
Social media as a whole has become a reductionist catch-all explanation for criminal behaviour
Yet as disgusting as this is, there is a difference between people being horrible and people being murderous. There is absolutely some extent to which elements of social media enable criminality — see, for example, my recent article about online school shooter fetishism — and the implications of this can be discussed, but social media as a whole has become a reductionist catch-all explanation for criminal behaviour, even when there is no publicly available evidence of its being an even marginal factor in a criminal event.
Just this month, Lucy Powell was saying that social media platforms should be regulated during elections to control what “opaque algorithms” can “amplify and share”. Wedging “online algorithms” into the discussion of Ann Widdecombe’s death, then, before we know anything about how her murderer came to murder her, bears the whiff of opportunism. There are a lot of problems with social media, for sure, but the fact that it gives us all a place from which to criticise such grubby politics is certainly valuable.
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