Social media

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

Belle Delphine lives in a mock Tudor house in a gated community in Hove. It’s necrotic, and soothing. You could be anywhere, and this is apt. Belle lives on the internet, where she entertains her subscribers, who pay $35 a month through the website OnlyFans. She is 21, and she grew up on the internet. ‘It raised me,’ she says. I watch one of her films before we meet. It shows her dressed as a Disney princess in a long pink wig and small clothes. She attacks herself with paint and rides a fluffy unicorn while shouting. Is the unicorn the internet? Is she the unicorn? I hate the film

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media companies which fail to ‘stamp out dangerous anti-vaccine content’ can face financial and criminal penalties. ‘The government has a pitiful track record on taking action against online platforms that are facilitating the spread of disinformation,’ said Jo Stevens, Labour’s shadow culture secretary. ‘This is literally a matter of life and death and anyone who is dissuaded from being vaccinated because of this is one person too many.’ My first thought on hearing this was how pitifully out of touch the Labour party is. Does Keir Starmer not realise how zealous

New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as just another statistic. The know-nothings on social media, who express utter drivel on a daily basis, will have pretty much ignored it, but a dreaded pro-Biden sheet actually published the full story. A young Japanese man came over to the Bagel from Tokyo to make it as a jazz pianist, and that he did. He started a trio of his own and toured with several bands until the fateful night of 27 September, when he rode the New York subway after a video shoot. Tadataka Unno is now 40, and

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate

Worth a shot? How worried should we be about people refusing to have a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed? In a YouGov poll for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate this week, 6% said they would definitely refuse a vaccination, a further 10% said they would probably refuse and a further 15% said they weren’t sure. A better guide, perhaps, is how many allow their children to be vaccinated. According to government statistics, the rate of vaccination among children varies from 86.5% for the MMR2 vaccination at five years to 94.2% for the DTaP/IPV/Hib at two years. Poor third The rapper Kanye West launched his campaign for the US

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’. Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming. For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way

Since posting some of my research into the RSPCA on Facebook, I now better understand the way social networking works. Social networking is local as well as global. So if you live in Surrey and ride horses you can join a Facebook group full of people in the same area doing the same thing. Only because these people are not speaking face to face, they can be tremendously rude to each other. The upshot of my spending a couple of days on one of these sites plugging my investigations into the RSPCA, including its role in the seizure of 123 horses from a farm down the road from my home,

It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to find an item in the UK Press Gazette saying that Decca Aitkenhead had just been appointed chief interviewer at the Sunday Times, and an email from the Sunday Times magazine editor, Eleanor Mills, saying we needed to meet. It was not difficult to put two and two together. Eleanor suggested we meet at the Flask in Highgate — which was kind because it’s near my home — and when I arrived she was already sitting there with a glass of red wine lined up for me. Such unprecedented thoughtfulness made

New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era of transparency and knowledgable bliss? This technology makes George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four redundant: no longer science fiction; more Knights of the Round Table. Big Brother is more powerful and more all-knowing than ever before, and we have that Errol Flynn lookalike Mark Zuckerberg to thank. There is no such thing as privacy any longer, unless of course one writes letters by hand and does not possess a smart telephone. (Include me out — I own a mobile but use it only when on board a sailing boat.) Yes, the world

After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense, but as virtual reality is more important than physical reality nowadays, this is pretty heavy stuff. Specifically, I want to cease to exist on Facebook, Twitter and all other social networking platforms, where I barely exist anyway because they frighten me so much, but where I have what is known as ‘a presence’. Do not scoff. I have reason to believe it may well be possible to do this. A few weeks ago, I faked my own iPhone death. People said it couldn’t be done. But I managed it by