6 days ago
Social media sites are being used to squeeze more benefits from our useless state
The British state acts as if the world has not changed in thirty years. Its calculations on productivity, crime, growth (or its lack), its thinking on race – all of them are based on the idea that if we just stay the course, the country will somehow magically return to normal circa 1995. Before September 11, before the 2008 financial crisis, before the current decade's pestilence and war.
It's bad enough that the ruling regime is so deluded. But in the long run, something else may be worse. The state does not understand the internet and social media.
When it is not censoring political speech under rules those implementing them do not understand, and putting British users' data at inevitable new risk from attackers, the state is misunderstanding, on quite an epic scale, how fast information can travel within online groups. And what those groups contain.
When a good number of Australian retirees realised they might be able to claim a British state pension, despite having worked in this county for only a handful of years decades ago, they swiftly mobilised online to line up with their hands out for free money. Australian websites and newspapers made guides about how to get the money their readers were owed. Many of those explanatory pieces began with phrases like 'this may sound like a scam' or 'it may appear too good to be true.'
The British state is analogue, ancient. The modern world is fast moving and online. People make communities about all kinds of things: it would be strange, in a way, if some did not form communities around getting every penny you possibly could from the British taxpayer.
Take, for instance, the ballooning numbers of people shifted from unemployment benefits into the labyrinthine world of incapacity benefits, personal independence payments and the like. Many of the particular schemes and subsidies offered to people who get PIP are essentially without parallel in the developed world.
The very complexity of the system – its bizarre illogicality – might have appealed to a genius in the treasury a decade ago. The more complex it is, the fewer people can claim. But of course, in the modern world, that is not true.
Instead, the more complex the system, the better a given claimant could be coached by supportive Facebook groups and personalities on TikTok. Savvy benefit claimants and asylum seekers use online communities and their abundant free time to generate and refine scripts for getting ever more out of the state.
It has been known for years that anyone arriving in Britain on a small boat or claiming asylum will have at least glanced at a checklist prepared either by people smugglers themselves, or by law firms and charities acting apparently in their interests.
They will have watched the TikToks; they will have been in the Facebook or Telegram groups.
How else would they all know what to say? I am a member of a banned political party; I'm an ethnic or religious minority; I am gay and my sexuality will get me killed back home; and so on.
If you yourself want free money, tell someone working for the British state that you are suicidally depressed, suffer regular attacks of anxiety, and that you can barely leave the house. You may not get any cash but, as the Facebook groups will tell you, there's no harm in trying.
The state is completely helpless in the face of YouTube, TikTok, Reddit communities and Facebook and Telegram groups. The people who want free money have access to Google and ChatGPT; the clever ones will get the free money. Now that's happening at scale, there really isn't a social contract any more.
