‘We all need to get off our high horses and start a dialogue’

A model’s theory on how to halt terrorism attracted immediate troll-like bullying that achieves little, says Ciara O’Connor

LAST week, in an article entitled ‘Internment camps are grim necessity’ (right), model Vogue Williams espoused her ideas about how to stop terrorism, recommending that thousands of extremists be locked up in new internment camps to keep the public safe.

The backlash was immediate and vitriolic. Williams was labelled an “absolute gobshite” who “should be shot”. She was repeatedly told to get back in her box; how dare she, a mere model, talk politics.

People pretended they were outraged because a B-list celebrity had the gall to comment on something serious, but actually they were outraged because they didn’t like what she said.

Celebrities talk about politics all the time, and not always knowledgeably. We hold them up as heroes when we like what we hear, but if we don’t, the take-down can be brutal.

The reaction is telling. This is the kind of troll culture where we don’t actually engage with opinions we disagree with: it’s a competition to see who could come up with the wittiest retort, the punchiest gif, the most re-tweetable meme. The discussion doesn’t move forward. No one has learnt anything. To paraphrase a detractor of Williams, it’s hard to describe how ineffably crude, stupid and pointless this approach is.

More young people can probably pick out Vogue Williams from a line-up than any Cabinet minister. It is incredibly alienating for those young girls to see her being patronised and treated like a stupid child.

They won’t ask ‘what is an internment camp?’ or ‘if it keeps people safe, how can it be wrong?’ or ‘don’t they deserve it?’ These are the questions they should have been asking, these are the conversations we should have been having. Because this is how we engage people in politics: this is how we strengthen democracy.

Instead, it was competitive insult show-boating. Kids who follow reality TV, but not the intricacies of counter-terrorism policy (which is most of them) will have learnt only to sit down and shut up.

I think the idea of internment camps is gross. I find the juxtaposition of those ideas with a big picture of a girl in a bikini (as we saw in Williams’s column) to be in poor taste.

However, I’m not in love with self-indulgently shutting down a conversation that needs to be had. I’m not mad about the sexist and frenzied bulldozing of a frightened young woman.

It was an opportunity for a generation who did not live through the IRA internments to learn about internment camps and come to an informed and reasoned conclusion that would have helped them think and talk about security policy. Instead, what we got was a lesson in how to humiliate and bully someone into silence. Vogue Williams is no Katie Hopkins, she was not deliberately inciting hatred. There is a difference between real criticism (which is what I believe she deserved) and abuse, which is what she got.

The fact that Williams’s Twitter-mob would like to ignore is that hers is not a lone, dissenting voice that can be written off as stupid. Many agree with her. Many are scared. Many see desperate measures as the only option. Vogue wrote what many people are saying in pubs, supermarkets and on the street. Look at the anonymous comments agreeing with her on news websites. She was, wittingly or not, the voice of thousands of people who are terrified after the attacks.

Tearing down Vogue Williams won’t change these people’s minds, it will just keep them quiet.

I think we’ve forgotten how to engage with opinions that are not our own: so much political ‘discussion’ happens on social media, where we’ve all built blissful little bubbles of people who parrot our own thoughts back to us.

The internet does not democratise information. Instead, it tricks us into believing that everyone thinks the same way. It has created a dysfunctional politics, which has been thrown into sharp global focus this past year.

I was living in London at the time of the Brexit referendum. As far as I know, I didn’t have a single ‘leave’ supporter on my Facebook, so I genuinely could not comprehend it when it transpired that the majority of the country wanted out of the EU. I thought leave voters were mythical political unicorns. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t confronted with any dissenting views or forced to engage or defend my convictions.

This echo-chamber is partly created by us when we befriend people who are like us, and push content we agree with on to our feeds by ‘liking’ it. It is also helped along by Facebook’s algorithms, which tend not to show users links to news sources they may find objectionable. After all, the more comfortable you feel on Facebook, the more likely you are to use it. That’s good business.

So our social media is nice and cosy, which is lovely — but it’s made us complacent and lazy. It means we can’t handle it when someone young and hitherto unobjectionable (like Vogue) comes along and says something we don’t like.

The biggest challenge we’ll face over the coming years is how to speak to people we disagree with — it could have fended off Brexit, it could have nipped Trump in the bud.

Ultimately, it’s the only way we’ ll be able to defeat extremism and terrorism. We need to get off our high horses and slapping each others’ backs, congratulating ourselves on a burn well administered like a load of geed-up frat-boys.

If we actually care about any of this stuff, we must take our fingers out of our ears and learn how to start a dialogue. Yes, even with Vogue Williams. Our future depends on it.