I searched ‘Trump’ and ‘golf’. Now the algorithms think I’m a white supremacist

3 weeks ago 9

My social media algorithm thinks I’m a white supremacist, but that’s all right. It thinks I want to attend Sunday’s “March for Australia: Nationwide Marches against Mass Migration”, which I won’t do, but that’s all right too.

The algorithm measures the time you spend inquiring – your curiosity, not necessarily your preferences. I’m more keen on exploring the lives of others, even when it’s as superficial as glimpsing them from a speeding bus, than I am on looking into a mirror. But my algorithm has decided that I am the other. It’s turned me into a kind of digital fifth-columnist.

So: watching clips of Donald Trump cheating at golf leads me to Trump cabinet meetings and proclamations of Trump achievements such as all the jobs he’s created and all the wars he’s stopped. It also leads to lots of golf instructional videos. Watching Hitler videos tells the algorithm I’m a neo-Nazi, or, to be honest, just a Nazi. Inquiring what a “sovereign citizen” is tells the algorithm that that’s what I want to be. Asking about the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle good jeans/good genes controversy has outed me as a white incel obsessed with buxom models who don’t exist in real life.

Interest in climate change leads to clips of tsunamis and collapsing ice shelves which lead to clips of fighting lions and bears which lead to clips of violent street assaults which lead to antisemitism which leads to anti-antisemitism which leads to cities ruined by multiculturalism and suggestions for how to “reclaim” Australia. Together, they lead to Sunday’s march.

My algorithm wants to give me a flyer for the march. It’s a manifesto of five “ideas” which don’t follow traditional political party lines. It’s anti-big business and pro-environment, but heavily pro-law and order and anti-Palestine. It’s a workers’ movement, libertarian, and against the Liberal-Labor “uniparty”, but quotes Bob Hawke in support.

Its unifying theme is hostility to immigration, the cause of all ills. “Mass migration” is taking away jobs and driving up housing and energy prices. “Whether you’re concerned for our Culture, Wages, Traffic, Housing Safety, Environmental Destruction, Infrastructure, Hospitals, Crime or Loss of Community, we are stronger together. Don’t leave this work to be done by your children.”

To show that it’s grounded in solid research, the manifesto quotes a Lowy Institute study finding that 53 per cent of Australians believe the immigration rate is “too high”. So far, so populist. “Make Your Voice Heard” is the slogan: this is a voice that has been ignored (except in the Voice referendum).

Then it gets as screwy as a Trump three-iron.

The March for Australia travels under one flag, but it’s an immigrant flag, representing the national group that has, from 1788 until today, been the number-one source of “mass migration”. It also travels under a second flag, the Southern Cross, which has drifted a long way from its origin as a flag conceived in direct opposition to the Union Jack.

MPs, my social media feed is telling me, have a “constitutional obligation” to hand out free Australian flags, but they’re refusing to do so, an unevidenced claim that ignores the fact that supermarkets (big business, boo), thanks to a campaign led by Peter Dutton (uniparty guy), sell them for $2.

Flags are at the centre of this picture; the March for Australia is a statement against other marches where people have rallied behind the “PLO”, “terrorist” and other “un-Australian” symbols.

The Australian and Southern Cross flags have been weirdly prominent at pro-Israel rallies since October 2023, and were proudly waved alongside the Star of David at rallies where Dutton received standing ovations from Jewish communities. Does this mean immigrants from Israel, or Jewish immigrants from other countries, are not the bad immigrants the March for Australia is trying to keep out? Are Jewish business leaders not the bad big businesspeople pushing for more bad migration? Where exactly does the far right, the natural home of antisemitism, stand on Gaza? Is it just that their Islamophobia and hatred for left causes is, for today at least, a more motivating hatred than their historical phobia of Jewish people?

But wait – the March for Australia isn’t scapegoating Semitic migrants. It’s scapegoating Indian migrants. As the flyer’s fifth and final defining principle says, Australia has taken in “More Indians in 5 years than Greeks and Italians in 100”. We are looking at “replacement plain and simple”. Greek and Italian immigrants, once bad, are now good. British migrants, who brought Big Business and Environmental Destruction, are also good (as long as they’re not British immigrants with Indian ancestry). It’s Indian immigrants who are now “replacing” white Australians and, presumably, driving up rents and using all the electricity. But watch this space. Four legs good, two legs bad. At some point in the future, older migrant groups will have been here long enough to rally against a new “replacement”.

There is no point trying to blend this hot curry of ideas into a cogent whole, just as there’s no point trying to figure out how cheating at golf, Sydney Sweeney, black bears and collapsing ice shelves add up to a united “voice”. Of course it doesn’t make sense: that’s the point of it. Confused people, being spun one way and then the other, are most easily manipulated by symbols of unity. Peace doesn’t sell. Whether it’s flogging scapegoats or illusions of community, the algorithm has us exactly where it wants us: ready to buy.

The symbol of unity – the Australian flag, yours for $2 – is the rope in this tug of war. The prime minister and immigration minister have called the March for Australia “un-Australian”. Listen to Anthony Albanese’s speech on election night, and nine-tenths of it is a refreshed but vague claim on what “Australian” means. A core value is, we presume, the freedom to march under flags of any colour. This is the “progressive” that goes with Albanese’s “patriotism”. For the Australians marching on Sunday, this does their head in. It does not comply with their visual literalism (white skin, blue ensign) of what Australia means.

Emotion is the complexity that the algorithm cannot compute but can exploit. We mightn’t like to admit it, but the emotional disturbance driving the March for Australia – frustration at being unrepresented, pessimism about the planet we’re leaving for our children, fear of oligarchic power – has a common ground with the anti-war marches of the past two years. If there is a unifying spirit in the air, it’s despair and confusion, and it takes to the streets to reassure itself that it’s real and not a figment of the digital imagination. Like them or not, marches are a democratic expression. (Oh no, does that make me a white supremacist again?) If we don’t allow each other that flesh-and-blood expression, then our democracy is only a $2 commodity.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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