Framed by social control media: Alex Belfield, Voice of Reason

Tech platforms enable a level of conflict that is disproportionate to the ability of individual participants to cope.

If Alex Belfield, a former BBC presenter who promotes himself as the Voice of Reason, was hit by a bus there are ten more characters waiting to replace him.

Even more significant is the rise of AI generated impersonation. In other words, a deep-fake Belfield conjured up by software.

Belfield was sent to prison for accusations of stalking. He was recently released on parole. During the two years he was put away, has the Internet become safer or has it become worse?

If the Internet has only become worse anyway, what was the point of spending taxpayer's money putting him in prison? The BBC is also funded by taxpayers. It seems that there are a lot of these disputes in the BBC's orbit. Most organizations try to resolve problems like this without going to trial and without publicly denouncing their former employees.

Nonetheless, I was curious to know what was the alleged act of stalking that prompted the prosecution. Trying to access news reports, I felt that I was being stalked by the BBC web site trying to force their cookies on to my computer:

 

The cookies are not made in the oven. The cookies in your browser were mostly put there by men. What makes the men at Google any different from Alex Belfield?

When people talk about a " Code of Conduct" in open source software, what they really men is they don't want independent professionals to talk about the men at Google, Facebook and their ilk.

Nonetheless, after getting past the cookie warnings, I couldn't see any examples of what Belfield actually did.

The alleged victims mostly work in the media. In terms of physical stalking, they face a much higher risk than most of us. They are apprehensive about somebody coming to their home uninvited. There is no evidence that Belfield ever engaged in this type of physical stalking and any accusations to that effect only arise after people elevated the conflict online.

Yet in terms of social control media and online stalking, people have a right to engage with public figures on those platforms. If you go to a celebrity's house then it can very easily be described as stalking but if you engage with them on social control media every day, that doesn't cross the threshold of a crime.

Moreover, social control media tends to groom people to become stalkers. The algorithms create a connection between Belfield and the people he engages with. As outsider observers, we may think that Belfield has commented about those people spontaneously and without any provocation whatsoever. The accusers rightly claim they did nothing to provoke Belfield. But we are missing the big picture.

As the saying goes, you can't understand a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. If you wore Belfield's shoes for a day and if you had his phone for a day you would see all the things that algorithms are showing him. If Facebook is spontaneously showing him every post from Jeremy Vine and encouraging Belfield to comment on Vine's posts then Belfield may legitimately feel like the algorithms had created a relationship between him and Vine. It doesn't seem fair that Belfield was alone in the dock on trial. Should Facebook be on the hook for winding him up?

Looking through the statements people made about mental health impact, if we really care about those people and the impact on their health then we need to look past Belfield and look at the technology and the way society has given Silicon Valley free reign over our minds.

Another key fact in the case is the distinction between the eight victims. The jury accepted that four men were victims but the jury did not accept the four female victims.

Looking more closely, we find one of the women had distributed pictures of Belfield to her neighbors and asked them to look out for him in the street. There is no evidence that he ever visited any of the accusers at their homes. The distribution of these pictures was an act of vilification that may have undermined the stories these women told.

Imagine if the roles were reversed, a male BBC employee distributing pictures of a female colleague to his neighbors. Why do we tolerate women spreading rumors like this but we find it abhorrent when a man does exactly the same thing?

Yet when women shared pictures of Belfield with their neighbors, it looks like they were hoping to trigger some negative reaction towards Belfield. There simply isn't any other justification for them to focus their neighbors' attention on Belfield. They are using him as a kind of sport, in other words, they may have done exactly the same thing they accused him of doing.

Yet I suspect the women didn't do things like this spontaneously. Social media bosses measure their success in terms of attention share, in other words, how many minutes per day each woman spends on the platform. The platforms deliberately feed womens' fears and encourage them to go on these witch hunts.

Therefore, just as the algorithms may have prompted Belfield to make regular comments about his media colleagues, the same algorithms have also milked the negative reactions for all they're worth.

One of the news reports goes into some detail about Belfield's attempts to set up a streaming service outside Youtube. It appears he was making far more money on Youtube than asking people to pay a subscription. This situation also reveals a lot about the tech platforms. If Youtube was able to pay Belfield so much money then they are also making a lot of money themselves from the very same content and conflict.

What is it that makes Google's Youtube so much more successful at monetizing Belfield than any other website? Ironically, it is the cookies in web browsers, the technology enabling men at Google Analytics to stalk the browsing habits of Internet users far and wide.

Read more about the perils of social control media and what you can do about it.