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Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions.

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French philosopher

Historian of ideas

Social theorist

Power knowledge together makes social control

Institutions

Political violence under these institutions

Powers co exits but one becomes more dominant

Panopticon- seeing all

Foucaudian

Discipline works through surveillance and regulations

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Internalisation / power

Technologies of the self

Managing yourself - self care and self management

Characterised as the art of existence dominated by the principal that you should take care of yourself

Where there is power there is resistance

Control replaces disciplinary power

Covid vaccine or pay to fly out

CCTV

Figure out what you’re interested in doing and go more in depth use resources

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJTeNTZtGU

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault

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Why is Michel Foucault important?

Where was Michel Foucault educated?

What did Michel Foucault write?

What was Michel Foucault's occupation?

Michel Foucault (born October 15, 1926, Poitiers, France-died June 25, 1984, Paris) French philosopher and historian, one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post- World War II period.

Education and career

The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his native country, and his career was marked by frequent sojourns abroad. A distinguished but sometimes erratic student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant, and eccentric student.

After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955-60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany). Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l'âge classique ("Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classical Age"), it won critical praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.) His other early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960-66), had much the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les choses ("Words and Things"; Eng. trans. The Order of Things) in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance-at the University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966-68)-and was still in Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of 1968. In 1969 he published L'Archéologie du savoir ( The Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France, France's most prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.

Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works, including Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), a monograph on the emergence of the modern prison; three volumes of a history of Western sexuality; and numerous essays. Foucault continued to travel widely, and as his reputation grew he spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada, and the United States. He became particularly attached to Berkeley, California, and the San Francisco Bay area and was a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley for several years. Foucault died of a septicemia typical of AIDS in 1984, the fourth volume of his history of sexuality still incomplete.

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Michel Foucault | French Philosopher, Historian & Social Theorist

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Michel Foucault French philosopher and historian, one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period. The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antonio-Gramsci

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Antonio Gramsci, (born Jan. 23, 1891, Ales, Sardinia, Italy-died April 27, 1937, Rome), intellectual and politician, a founder of the Italian Communist Party whose ideas greatly influenced Italian communism.

In 1911 Gramsci began a brilliant scholastic career at the University of Turin, where he came in contact with the Socialist Youth Federation and joined the Socialist Party (1914). During World War I he studied Marxist thought and became a leading theoretician. He formed a leftist group within the Socialist Party and founded the newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo (May 1919; "The New Order"). Gramsci encouraged the development of factory councils (democratic bodies elected directly by industrial workers), which undercut the control of trade unions. The councils participated in a general strike in Turin (1920), in which Gramsci played a key role.

Gramsci led a leftist walkout at the Socialist congress at Livorno (January 1921) to found the Italian Communist Party ( see Democrats of the Left) and then spent two years in the Soviet Union. Back in Italy, he became head of his party (April 1924) and was elected to the country's Chamber of Deputies. After his party was outlawed by Benito Mussolini's fascists, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned (1926). At his trial the fascist prosecutor argued, "We must stop his brain from working for 20 years." In prison, despite rigorous censorship, Gramsci carried out an extraordinary and wide-ranging historical and theoretical study of Italian society and possible strategies for change. Plagued with poor health in the 1930s, he died not long after being released from prison for medical care.

Extracts of Gramsci's prison writings were published for the first time in the mid-20th century; the complete Quaderni del carcere ( Prison Notebooks) appeared in 1975. Many of his propositions became a fundamental part of Western Marxist thought and influenced the post-World War II strategies of communist parties in the West. His reflections on the cultural and political concept of hegemony (notably in southern Italy), on the Italian Communist Party itself, and on the Roman Catholic Church were particularly important. The letters he wrote from prison also were published posthumously as Lettere dal carcere (1947; Letters from Prison).

Heather Campbell.

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Antonio Gramsci, intellectual and politician, a founder of the Italian Communist Party whose ideas greatly influenced Italian communism. In 1911 Gramsci began a brilliant scholastic career at the University of Turin, where he came in contact with the Socialist Youth Federation and joined the

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFQrV8UxpVA

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What is Hegemony?  Antonio Gramsci and the Prison Notebooks

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBkBTIdLlsc

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Populist movement

Social movement when anti elite people take the clown as leader and symbol and protest in the street, they’re not wealthy not elite people

Research populism and the joker

Jstor login through rave login

Access to articles

Google scholar

University library website

Libsearch.rave.ac.uk

Libgen.is

Kanopy- films

British library

How power works in the digital world

Social media

Cookies (accept cookies)

Student answer -

Digital involvement is more powerful than speech or hand written power because people can take the advantage of technology

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Gramsi and foucalts ideas can be used in relation to digital realm - social media

Governed by invisible rules and systems of  regulations

Control replaces disciplinary power

Power and the internet

Algorithms and discrimination as control

school algorithms using history so they reject female names and non white names

Prehistory of the cloud - BOOK

Soshana zoobona information ponopictan

Surveillance isn’t just in workplace and prisons A- surveillance capitalism is all around us in society

Paulo gerbado- tweets and the streets

Social media equivalent to the newspaper - brings people together but it can also be used for authoritarian

Too much data to be properly sifted through and understood - overwhelming everyone are we actually being controlled or is there just too much data

Cop26

Climate gate - thousands of documents stole and spread misinformation about climate science

Attention - social media wants your attention. Who’s actually in control. Is it you. Is it your phone. Is it social media

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Influencer culture-

Attention economy -

Digital surveillance and panopticon

Populism

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https://www.theweek.co.uk/social-media/952891/social-media-influencer-rise

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Where did influencers come from?

Ever since the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991, like-minded users have gathered together, first on web forums and bulletin boards, then on blogging sites, and more recently on social media. In the early 2000s, canny marketers started approaching influential bloggers and forum moderators, asking them to promote products in return for freebies, and later for cash. This process became supercharged with the founding of YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, and in 2010, Instagram - which is now most influencers' platform of choice. Today, there is an army of influencers: social media users - mostly women - with a large, devoted following, who give their followers access to a carefully curated version of their lives. In this "authentic" context, sponsored content, known as "sponcon", has proved a potent tool for selling products.

Who are these people?

There's a bewildering range, from fashion, lifestyle and "mommy influencers" on Instagram to gamers, beauty vloggers and "toy influencers" on YouTube, to teenagers lip-synching to songs on TikTok. Some of the biggest are famous from another field: last week, the rapper Nicki Minaj wore a pair of bejewelled pink Croc shoes on Instagram, where she has 136 million followers; demand for pink Crocs spiked by 4,900% in hours.

Many of the most famous influencers, such as Kim Kardashian (who has 221 million Instagram followers) graduated from reality TV - another carefully crafted version of "real life". Then there are people who made themselves famous entirely by posting content on social media: the likes of Logan Paul, PewDiePie or Zoë Sugg, who each speak to tens of millions of people. Marketers now divide them up into nano influencers (1,000-10,000 followers), micro influencers (10,000-100,000), macro influencers (100,000- 1 million) and mega or celebrity influencers (more than 1 million).

How big is the industry?

Very. By the end of 2019, the influencer marketing industry was worth some $8bn a year. One recent report by Insider Intelligence predicted that it would grow to $15bn globally by the end of 2022. The tech consultant SignalFire thinks that "the creator economy" - built by those who post and monetise content online - employs more than 50 million people, and is the fastest-growing sector for small businesses in the world.

There is now a UK union for influencers, The Creator Union; andaUS trade association, the American Influencer Council. Mega influencers such as Kylie Jenner (233 million followers on Instagram) can earn as much as $1m per post. Even the Government uses them: last year it paid influencers including Love Island stars to promote the NHS Test and Trace service.

What is life like for influencers?

The idea of making thousands of pounds a month by sharing a few selfies may sound cushy - but the reality can be hard. There are the endless hours spent preparing for photo shoots, arranging photographers, changing outfits in cramped "pop-up tents", editing photos and thinking up envy-inducing captions and hashtags. Demanding clients often force them to endlessly re-shoot photos or videos until they come out just right. There's the pressure of always seeking to increase your follower count to drive up revenues. But arguably the toughest part, says Amy Hart (1.1 million followers), is negotiating payment in a crowded market. After all, she says, "there are a lot of me. If I turn around and say, 'No, I want this', they'll say, 'Okay, cool, we'll go to one of the other 1,500 people who'd be happy to do this'."

How do businesses judge an influencer's worth?

In theory, everything online is quantifiable: "engagement" can be recorded, in the form of follower counts, "likes" and views. However, nowadays "engagement fraud" is a big problem: bogus followers can be purchased online, from people who operate fake accounts and bots. An arms race has begun between fraudsters with fake followers and the software developed to detect them. A whole industry has emerged to negotiate it: agencies such as BrandConnect, owned by YouTube, connect influencers with large followings to companies who want to buy "sponcon".

Do the followers not mind "sponcon"?

Apparently not. "A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now it's a sign of success," noted Taylor Lorenz, who writes about internet culture for The New York Times. Some fledgling influencers even put out fake sponcon, on the grounds that the more sponsors you have, the more credibility it gives. An influencer culture has developed - or more accurately a series of cultures. The prevailing Instagram culture mixes rampant consumerism with inspirational bromides about self-worth, personal growth and "wellness". It has also been accused of propagating an unrealistic version of beauty.

What version of beauty?

The New Yorker 's Jia Tolentino noted the gradual emergence, among "professionally beautiful women" today, of a look known as "Instagram face". It's "a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones", long lashes and full lips - generally white but with a hint of "rootless exoticism": you see it among the Kardashian family, and the models Bella Hadid (42 million followers), and Emily Ratajkowski (27 million followers). It is thought to owe its existence partly to the growth of cosmetic procedures, but also to the popularity of Instagram filters such as Facetune, which tweaks images to give a thinner face, bigger lips, smoother skin, larger eyes, and slimmer legs. Professional photos have long been airbrushed; now aspiring influencers can do it at home too.

Dubai: the planet's influencer capital

Dubai is now "a global hub of influencer culture", says Ruth Michaelson in The Guardian, "a magnet for social media stars desperate to tweak their image in what has become the ideal Instagram city". With its reliable sunshine, crystal-clear seas, and a series of signature constructions - the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel, the Palm, and the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa - Dubai is perfect as a backdrop for influencers' idealised lifestyles.

The city's authorities have actively encouraged this: there is "The Frame", a 150-metre gold rectangle through which, at the right angle, the Burj Khalifa can be framed; free helicopter tours are available for those with enough followers. Instagram's Middle East headquarters are, of course, based there. Dubai has also benefited because it lifted lockdown restrictions for visitors; dubbed the "Covid Casablanca", it allowed some bars, cinemas and clubs to open. Many UK influencers bypassed travel bans on the basis that they were making "essential work trips". James Lock, star of The Only Way Is Essex, told his followers he was "still grafting" in Dubai. His then-girlfriend, Yazmin Oukhellou, added: "We are here for work purposes, for business... Obviously, we'll make the most of it while we're here as well."
This article was corrected on May 27 to reflect that Dubai lifted its lockdown restrictions to allow visitors

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The rise of the social media influencer | The Week UK

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Where did influencers come from? Ever since the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991, like-minded users have gathered together, first on web forums and bulletin boards, then on blogging sites, and more recently on social media.

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https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1126/influencer-culture/

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No upcoming events scheduled

Contact us

We can't usually help you with an individual problem or a specific complaint.

Email: dcmscom@parliament.uk

Phone: (General Enquiries) 020 7219 6188 / (Media Enquiries) 020 7219 6832

Address: DCMS Committee, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

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Influencer culture - Committees - UK Parliament

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The inquiry will examine the power of influencers on social media, how influencer culture operates, and will consider the absence of regulation on the promotion of products or services, aside from the existing policies of individual platforms. Research showed that more than three-quarters of influencers "buried their disclosures within their posts".

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https://www.nngroup.com/articles/attention-economy/

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Attention is one of the most valuable resources of the digital age. For most of human history, access to information was limited. Centuries ago many people could not read and education was a luxury. Today we have access to information on a massive scale. Facts, literature, and art are available (often for free) to anyone with an internet connection.

We are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same in every day. Today attention, not information, is the limiting factor.

What Is Attention?

Before diving into a discussion of the attention economy, let's clarify the definition of attention. The formal psychological definition of attention and the way most people think of the concept overlap.

Attention: a selective focus on some of the stimuli that we are currently perceiving while ignoring other stimuli from the environment

In ordinary conversation, we often say "pay attention." This expression implies two important characteristics of attention: that it is limited and that it is valuable. When we "pay" attention to one thing, we deplete our budget of mental resources so that we have less attention available to spend elsewhere. Theories of human attention all agree that it is limited in capacity. Psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon described attention as a "bottleneck" in human thought. He also noted that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

The conceit of multitasking is a canard: people can't attend fully to multiple things simultaneously. Yes, people may have their phone out while they watch television, but if they divert attention to, say, a social media stream, they will miss some of what happened in the show.

The Market for Our Attention

Attention is a valuable resource to us as individuals. This resource is also valued by businesses, political campaigns, nonprofits, and countless other organizations that try to entice us to spend money or volunteer our time. In 1997, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote that the global economy is shifting from a material-based economy to one based on the capacity of human attention. Many services online are offered for free. In the attention economy, attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention.

Today, the dynamics of the attention economy incentivize companies to draw users in to spend more and more time on apps and sites. Designers who create sites and apps understand that their products vie for the limited resource of users' attention in a highly competitive market. The hope of attracting attention has led to the popularity of many different design trends (that mainly degrade the user experience) such as:

Eye-catching animations to call attention to a piece of content

Busy, crowded designs where a large amount of information is shown at once in hopes that one of the many images or phrases will attract users' notice

Advertising campaigns that entice or force users to dedicate their attention to the ad. Some free games offered on the iPhone's GameCenter include advertisements. The close icon does not appear on the advertisement until the ad has displayed for a certain length of time. This design forces users to watch the full advertisement before returning to the game that they were playing.

How the Attention Economy Affects Users

Often, designers ignore the many different stimuli users need to pay attention to at any moment while using their systems and can inadvertently create designs that require too much attention than users can realistically offer.

In our recent studies on voice assistants, we found that people often used phone-based assistants while driving, when their hands and eyes were busy. One common complaint was that Siri or Google Assistant displayed results on the phone's screen instead of reading them out loud. For example, even the simple and common task of asking for directions may require the driver to divide her attention between the output of the assistant and the road.

Similarly, the attention of a smartphone user is often divided between the app or website currently used and a TV show or another external stimulus. That is why sessions tend to be shorter on mobile than on the desktop: the chance of an interruption is high.

To understand whether a design overwhelms users' attentional capacities, it needs to be studied in context. Field studies, diary studies, and interviews can all be used to understand how people are using the system in real life.

Many users are aware that sites and apps are trying to keep their attention. In a recent usability test, a user watched a video on how to prepare pancakes on AllRecipes.com. After the video had finished, the site automatically queued a related video in the playlist. Our participant did not see an option to pause the video. The only options that appeared on the video player were to rewatch the video or to start watching the next video in the playlist.

As the playlist queued, the user observed "it seems like this is keeping me tethered to the computer for longer than I need to be." The playlist showed an advertisement before each recipe video - the site had a clear financial incentive to keep visitors' attention fixed on the successive videos.

Some users feel helpless when it comes to controlling the amount of time that they spend on their devices. Digital products are designed to be more and more engaging, often keeping users hooked. The impact of too much time spent engaging with technology is particularly concerning for the parents. Engaging and attention-grabbing designs can become so habit-forming for young people that they may experience "withdrawal" when devices are taken away.

Other users adapt their behavior. Some of these adaptations are conscious and deliberate actions taken to limit time online. Deliberate adaptations include setting a time limit on time spent online, uninstalling certain applications, or use of parental controls.

Users also learn to conserve their attention in subtle ways. Banner blindness, the tendency to ignore advertisements when placed in the right rail or at the top of the page, is an example of adaptation that appeared in response to a wealth of information. Users have also adapted to the barrage of notifications common on mobile devices: they have learned to ignore many of them. During a recent usability testing session, I watched a woman browse for new podcasts on her iPhone. When the first notification of the session went off, she apologized to me and asked "Can you still use this recording for your research?" After I assured her that this was not a problem, she continued with the task. Several more notifications pinged this user's phone throughout the session and none of them appeared to interrupt her train of thought.

The Future of the Attention Economy

We anticipate that the trends we now observe in designing for attention will continue to evolve. Many companies will choose to create even more attention-grabbing advertisements. Automatically playing videos and unskippable advertisements are almost universally unpopular among users, but designs continue to feature them. Ads may soon become even more immersive in an arms race for users' attention. Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snap are all testing augmented-reality advertisements.

Some companies will continue to produce habit-forming designs that entice users to dedicate more and more of their attention. An optimistic future of the attention economy is also possible: recent developments offer hope for a more equitable attention economy. Rising adoption of a split-revenue model for advertising allows customers to pay with their attention (viewing advertisements) or with money (conserving their attention).

Some companies have responded to their customers' complaints about distraction and attention-grabbing design. Apple recently changed the design of its notifications to remove multiple notifications in quick succession on iPhones and also introduced screen-time statistics that allow users to monitor their usage of electronic devices.

Conclusion

Certain facts of the digital economy may not change. Advertising will fund some free content for the foreseeable future, apps will compete for new users' attention, and people will still only have so much attention to dedicate. However, designers have a choice in this economy of attention: they can balance business needs - such as the need for new subscribers, advertising revenue, and profit - with respect for the best interests of their users.

References

Goldhaber, Michael H. (1997) "Attention Shoppers!" Wired Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/

Simon, Herbert A. (1992) "The Bottleneck of Attention: Connecting Human Thought with Motivation." Retrieved from: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c47f/a1729198a8062715423c8d07767f8897f6f8.pdf

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Digital products are competing for users' limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.

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https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/digital-surveillance/60120

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What is Digital Surveillance | IGI Global

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What is Digital Surveillance? Definition of Digital Surveillance: The use of digital technology to control others, citizens, and the life of a nation.

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https://www.governmenttechnology.co.uk/features/digital-surveillance

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In recent years we have witnessed the widespread adoption of powerful digital video recording systems as the world of surveillance parallels the digitalisation of all aspects of our lives - from the television we watch to the music we listen to. This step change in technology has opened up tremendous opportunities in terms of the capabilities of digital solutions compared to older analogue systems to deal with a wide range of criminal and terrorist threats.

Thankfully the practical experience amongst police officers, and others, gathering video evidence from recording systems has moved on since the days when the pictures gathered from CCTV cameras were frequently discovered to be in a poor state. A combination of insufficient cleaning and maintenance, overuse of VCR tapes, inadequate lighting and lax operational procedures often led to problems in identifying potential crime culprits.

Shifting expectations
Of course this is not to say that the move to digital has been smooth sailing. It has also thrown-up some challenges, most notably, ensuring that end users, the judicial system and the police appreciate that digital video evidence is not the same as a tape based recording, which they had grown so accustomed to.

Historically, with a standard VCR tape, there was the reassurance for security managers and the police of being able to physically touch the original as this was the medium directly recorded to. Not so with digital, as images have to be taken off the hard drive of a unit, where the original evidence is stored, and copied onto removable media. Bearing this in mind, for cases where digital images are being used for evidential purposes, it is imperative that proper consideration is given to securing the integrity of this material and, in particular, whether the digital video recording systems comply with the latest British Standards and best practice.

In response to the pressing need to ensure that the proper procedures are being followed, and that adequate weight could be given to digital video evidence in the criminal justice system, at the BSIA we produced a Code of Practice for 'Digital Recording' systems. This process involved extensive consultation with interested bodies in the UK including the Association of British Insurers, the Law Society, and the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, plus input from police forensic experts. Moving on from this document, which was positively received by stakeholders, we assisted in the development of the new British Standard, BS8495, which also focuses on this critical area and takes on board many of the elements in our original Code of Practice.

Published at the end of 2007, the landmark British Standard, BS8495, was ratified by BSI less than a year after our Code of Practice. BS8495 delivers invaluable recommendations for the specification, selection, installation and operation of digital CCTV recording systems that generate CCTV images that may be used in a court of law. It is aimed at assisting specifiers, installers, users, insurance companies, police, authorities and purchasing organisations to ensure systems are used more effectively to gather vital evidence.

As a starting point BS8495 underlines the necessity of looking at the operational requirements of the CCTV solution before evaluating the clarity of the recording images as the judgement on this will to a large extent be dependent on what the CCTV has been deployed for.

When it comes to the quality of digital CCTV images recorded there are a number of factors that can have an impact on the outcome such as the size of the subject in the field of view, lighting, maintenance, image transmission and specification of the camera/lens.

Other key areas covered by BS8495 to ensure that digital video evidence stands-up in court include the fitness for purpose of recorded images, the importance of a detailed audit trail, the need to maintain image integrity by preventing unauthorised access, the role of time and date integrity, the considerations associated with effective storage and the export and replay of exported images.

Looking at these elements in more detail, with regards to the fitness of purpose of recorded images this basically means that the digital CCTV recording solution should meet the operational requirements of each camera, specifically when it comes to the recorded image resolution, compression and per second record rate.

Audit trail
When dealing with digital video evidence a vital concern is the ability to provide a robust audit trail. This should be verifiable and fully documented all the way from the recording of reference images to its presentation in court. Without such a process the validity of the evidence could be called into question. It is advisable that an audit trail be retained for at least six months. Information which may form part of this trail includes user log on and log off details, time and date changes, when recording is actually started or stopped alongside the ID of the user, whether any enhancements have been applied to the image and by whom and details regarding the export of images.

Another key point to consider is image integrity. There is a need to ensure that the integrity of the stored reference image remains by preventing any unauthorised access, this can be by physical or electronic means, while at the same time enabling images to be provided to legitimate third parties such as the police. It is also advisable that the time and date of recording is logged as part of an image's metadata.

Focusing on storage, to maximise the benefits of the latest digital video surveillance solutions, it is vital that sufficient storage capacity is available for the task at hand. Users should, for instance, have access to information regarding the number of days/hours of recording stored - or the time of the earliest recording - and how long this can be kept of the system.

Another area, addressed within BS8495, is that of the process of image export. From an evidential point of view there is certainly a need to ensure that the stored reference image remains unchanged even when, for example, an enhanced version of the image is created, for example, by zooming in on a specific area, and that an appropriate audit trial can be provided. Another consideration for image export is that viewing software be included on any export media so, if necessary, it can be replayed on a PC. This is especially useful for the police to avoid unnecessary delays in evidence gathering.

Caught on camera
With CCTV playing an increasingly important role in crime prevention and detection, and the uptake of digital images for evidential purposes in high profile cases becoming widespread, certainly the importance of an independent benchmark like BS8495 has never been greater.

In recent times the advantages of effective digital video evidence have been amply demonstrated, through high profile events such as the Tonbridge depot robbery convictions and, particularly, during the London bombings investigation, which saw the gathering of footage from 28,000 CCTV cameras cut-down to seven hours of relevant footage. This massive intelligence exercise by London's Metropolitan Police and surrounding forces was significantly aided by the presence of surveillance systems covering the streets, Tube stations and buses targeted in the attacks, as well as transport links elsewhere in the capital and surrounding counties. The pictures subsequently produced, such as those taken at Luton rail station of the 7/7 bombers on the way to their suicide missions, showed clear, identifiable images of the perpetrators and underlined the value of this monitoring method.

Digital video evidence is also playing a key role in dealing with a wide range of law enforcement issues including trouble caused by so-called football fans in towns and city centres. A case in point is how Cumbria Police recently applied mobile CCTV to deal with 20 plus Newcastle and Carlisle supporters who had arranged to meet up to fight outside a pub. With the digital CCTV footage officers from Cumbria Police were able to provide evidence to Northumbria Police so they could confirm the identities of the Newcastle supporters. The CCTV evidence led to a number of successful convictions - which included football banning orders, fines and community service.

Technological change
The benefit of guidance and Codes of Practice, such as BS8495, when it comes to the collection and storage of CCTV images, is underlined by the dramatic and sometime bewildering changes in available CCTV technology. We have seen the move from analogue to digital allowing more powerful and flexible systems to be rolled out for commercial and public space surveillance, the ability to record more pictures per second, cheaper storage, mobile systems in community partnership vehicles and on public transport, the increasing application of CCTV in a networked environment and new ways to automatically analyse images -from automatic number plate recognition to patterns of behaviour - and associate images with data captured elsewhere.

To reiterate, there is a pressing need for a verifiable, documented, audit trail from the recording of the reference images to its presentation in court and facilities at this juncture for media playback. A serious concern is that unless these audit trails and operator procedures can hold-up under scrutiny in court, the Crown Prosecution Service may not be able to use the image in the first place or defence lawyers will later be able to pick holes in the evidence, potentially jeopardising the case and undermining a significant part of the raison d'etre of the system, not to mention wasting police time spent putting the case together in the first place.

Ultimately, we want to see the same confidence in the validity of digital media in the criminal justice system as there is in VHS tape from a traditional VCR, and there is little doubt that BS8495 standard is a significant step towards realising this goal.

The British Security Industry Association is the trade association covering all aspects of the professional security industry in the UK. Its members provide over 70 per cent of UK security products and services and adhere to strict quality standards.

For more information
Tel: 0845 389 3889
E-mail: info@bsia.co.uk
Web: www.bsia.co.uk

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Proper procedures must be followed to secure the integrity of digital evidence, says Pauline Norstrom, of BSIA CCTV Section

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/populism

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Populism, political program or movement that champions, or claims to champion, the common person, usually by favourable contrast with a real or perceived elite or establishment. Populism usually combines elements of the left and the right, opposing large business and financial interests but also frequently being hostile to established socialist and labour parties.

William Jennings Bryan: presidential campaign poster Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 3g02112u)

The term populism can designate either democratic or authoritarian movements. Populism is typically critical of political representation and anything that mediates the relation between the people and their leader or government. In its most democratic form, populism seeks to defend the interests and maximize the power of ordinary citizens, through reform rather than revolution. In the United States the term was applied to the program of the Populist Movement, which gave rise to the Populist, or People's, Party in 1892. Many of the party's demands were later adopted as laws or constitutional amendments (e.g., a progressive tax system). The populist demand for direct democracy through popular initiatives and referenda also become a reality in a number of U.S. states.

In its contemporary understanding, however, populism is most often associated with an authoritarian form of politics. Populist politics, following this definition, revolves around a charismatic leader who appeals to and claims to embody the will of the people in order to consolidate his own power. In this personalized form of politics, political parties lose their importance, and elections serve to confirm the leader's authority rather than to reflect the different allegiances of the people. Some forms of authoritarian populism have been characterized by extreme nationalism, racism, conspiracy mongering, and scapegoating of marginalized groups, each of which served to consolidate the leader's power, to distract public attention from the leader's failures, or to conceal from the people the nature of the leader's rule or the real causes of economic or social problems. In the second half of the 20th century, populism came to be identified with the political style and program of Latin American leaders such as Juan Perón, Getúlio Vargas, and Hugo Chávez. In the early 21st century, populist authoritarian regimes arose in Turkey, Poland, and Hungary, among other countries.

Juan Perón and Eva Perón Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com

The term populist is often used pejoratively to criticize a politician for pandering to a people's fear and enthusiasm. Depending on one's view of populism, a populist economic program can therefore signify either a platform that promotes the interests of common citizens and the country as a whole or a platform that seeks to redistribute wealth to gain popularity, without regard to the consequences for the country such as inflation or debt.

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André Munro The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

key people

related topics

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Populism, political program or movement that champions, or claims to champion, the common person, by contrast with a real or perceived elite. It combines elements of the left and the right, opposing large business and financial interests but also frequently being hostile to established socialist and labor parties.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-43301423

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What do Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, and Rodrigo Duterte have in common?

Despite their differences, each man has been labelled a populist.

Populism is on the rise - especially among Europe's right, and in the US, where it helped crown Mr Trump.

Italy's populist Five Star Movement and anti-immigrant League parties have emerged as two major players in the latest elections - the most recent of several such results in Europe.

But there's a difference between being popular and being populist.

The pure people

In political science, populism is the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another - "the pure people" and "the corrupt elite", according to Cas Mudde, author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction.

The term is often used as a kind of shorthand political insult. Britain's Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been accused of populism over his party's slogan "for the many, not the few" - but that's not quite the same thing.

The word "is generally misused, especially in a European context," according to Benjamin Moffitt, author of The Global Rise of Populism.

The true populist leader claims to represent the unified "will of the people". He stands in opposition to an enemy, often embodied by the current system - aiming to "drain the swamp" or tackle the "liberal elite".

"It generally attaches itself to the right in a European context... but that's not an iron rule," Dr Moffitt said.

Rise of the Right

Populist parties can be anywhere on the political spectrum. In Latin America, there was Venezuela's late President Chávez. In Spain, there is the Podemos party, and in Greece the label has also been applied to Syriza. All these are on the left.

But "most successful populists today are on the right, particularly the radical right," Prof Mudde said.

Politicians "like Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Donald Trump in the US, combine populism with [anti-immigrant] nativism and authoritarianism," he added.

Commentators - from Time magazine to the President of the European Commission - have been warning about the rise of right-wing populism for years.

But in reality, it's nothing new.

"Political scientists have been catching on to this for the last 25-30 years," Dr Moffitt says - but admits "there's been an acceleration."

Experts point to both societal changes like multiculturalism and globalism, and more concrete crises as behind the rise of populist parties in Europe.

Martin Bull, Director of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR), says the emergence of populist parties in Europe could be seen in the early 2000s - but they remained small for several years.

The swell in support seemed to happen "from 2008 - and particularly in 2011, when the banking crisis turned into a sovereign debt crisis", he said.

It was a rare occasion when an elite class - the wealthy bankers - could be identified as more or less directly responsible for a crisis which affected the majority of society.

'I am the people'

In his book The Global Rise of Populism, Dr Moffitt argues that there are other traits associated with the typical populist leader.

One is "bad manners", or behaving in a way that's not typical of politicians - a tactic employed by President Trump and the Philippines' President Duterte.

The other, he says, is "perpetuating a state of crisis" - and always seeming to be on the offensive.

"A populist leader who gets into power is 'forced' to be in a permanent campaign to convince his people that he is not establishment - and never will be," according to Prof Nadia Urbinati from Columbia University.

She argues that populist content is "made of negatives" - whether it is anti-politics, anti-intellectualism, or anti-elite. Here lies one of the populism's strengths - it is versatile.

It is "extraordinarily powerful because it can adapt to all situations," she said.

Another common thread among populist leaders is they tend to dislike the "complicated democratic systems" of modern government - preferring direct democracy like referendums instead, according to Prof Bull.

That also ties in to its links to authoritarianism, he argues - a lack of trust in the established system gives rise to "strongman" leaders.

"Ultimately, the leader makes the decision in a way that just isn't possible in traditional democracies," he says.

That sentiment is perhaps best embodied by the late left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who once said: "I am not an individual - I am the people".

Such thinking "can lead to people thinking they're infallible," Dr Moffitt said. "It restructures the political space in a new and scary way".

After all, if you're not with "the people" - then you must be against us.

That is why populist leaders are often viewed with suspicion - and why the term is often used as a type of insult for a politician who promises too much.

It's what Prof Bull says is called "irresponsible bidding".

"In order to garner support, they're quicker than the establishment party to make offers, or to promise to change things... that on closer inspection may not turn out to be feasible," he said.

"You might question how good that is for democracy," he added.

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We're told that populism is on the rise - but what exactly does that mean?

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Aljazeera video summarised. - historical landmarks 0 confederate states being takes down- different views on them. Som people think it. S symbol of historical greatness whereas others believe that it is actually just a symbol of ‘losers’. People think th BLM movement start this, so if black lives matter why are we honouring people who didnt believe this others think its a prt of their community so they do not want to change it and don’t see the relation to slavery. Its an argument of ignorance and honesty. The statues are slave owners and that’s not something that needs to be glorified. If the statues come down people are worried about the public response.

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Frantz fanon - psychiatrist and political philosopher. Looked at effects of colonisation.

Read these extracts of black skin white masks and summarise main arguments

How does he describe racism and what kind of language does he use, what is the relationship between people and objects. What does it mean to be seen as an object. How does this relate to racism. How does it make you feel

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In crowds people leave the fear of being touched, becomes the opposite, no longer notice who is pressing themselves against you, you loose the fear of touch whereas by yourself if someone was to touch you the same way you would see it is as inappropriate.

How covid has changed this text:

The world has become the opposite and we fear crowds and large groups of people more. Instead of the belief that “only in a crowd one can become free” we are more aware of who is around us and who is touching us and we instead feel consumed by this crowd as we’ve been told that we need our space. Not being around crowds for months and even years on ends redefines the purpose and exhilaration that comes with it, its viewed more like a punishment and instead of “fear changing to its opposite” it is what the new meaning of fear is. A simple touch of the shoulder is cause for a panic whereas Elias says “he no longer notices who it is that presses against him” we are now more alert and aware of all the people surrounding us and how what they do impacts us.

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This was rebranded during the mask movement, it was originally for avortion rights and culture around consent. The phrase has been appropriated by anti mask protestors and these contexts are not comparable.

Since 1969- the beginning of 2nd wave feminism particularly around the female bodily autonomy. Feminism see patriarchy as a structural way of treating women like objects; objectifying women. They have been treated like property and decisions around their body have been made by others, mainly men and structures of society around them (laws).

Patricahy is a system of domination by which men dominate women.

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Pink pussy hat - cultural artefact

Becoming more conscious of how power operates in gender terms. The hashtag worked because fo the network mass collectivity such as tweets.

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Mask - cultural artefact

“Its muzzling yourself.It looks weak, especially for men” - keeps you quiet and stops you from speaking, anti freedom of speech. Gender problems, people see it as weak as ‘men’ aren’t easily stopped or made quiet.

Protest demand freedom and resistance, my body my choice in this context ignores the fact that wearing the mask doesn’t just effect the individual wearing the mask but effects other people around them as well.

Mask has become a political symbol

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Investigating a piece of research into a cultural artefact ]

A cultural artefact is something made by people as a part of their culture/ way of life (meme).

1. Start by describing it as much as you can

2. Explain how it produces meaning

- eg where the statue is, museum or street, different narratives that its a part of, or platform that eg a meme originates from

3. Look at it as a thing that communicates in some way

- eg the use of visual language in a image or film

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Brainstorm power and resistance

Brainstorm each topic

Look into how Israeli colonisers are overtaking Palestine. How

Topics I could look into

Collect resources- cultural artefacts, popular and academic sources (write with a sentence summary)

What im writing about and why

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How does how children are treated in school affect them in the future

How does the lack of POCs in media affect children view on society and themselves

To what extent does the media negatively portray islam

How does the medias image of islam affect the muslim community

To what extent are the connotations around hijab stigmatised/demonised in the media.

To what extent does media negatively portray islam -

how does the way in which the media portrays islam affect the wider community

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Influencer culture- read article - summarise main arguments and give my opinions

Attention economy - what is this, how do companies profit from it, what’s your screen time, who’s in control you or your social media

Find academic sources for both of the above

Digital surveillance and panopticon

Populism

Gramsi and foucalts ideas can be used in relation to digital realm - social media

Governed by invisible rules and systems of  regulations

Control replaces disciplinary power

Power and the internet

Paulo gerbado- tweets and the streets

Social media equivalent to the newspaper - brings people together but it can also be used for authoritarian

Attention - social media wants your attention. Who’s actually in control. Is it you. Is it your phone. Is it social media

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In 2019, the government rejected the definition of Islamophobia. Which was defined in the Oxford dictionary as “Intense dislike or fear of Islam, especially as a political force”. In 2019 a group of MPs published their own definition of Islamophobia. They defined Islamophobia as being a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. A working definition may help in differentiating hate speech from freedom of expression.

The definitions of Islamophobia are somewhat confusing, there is not one working definition that is relied upon universally.

Islamophobia is an issue that is still very much prevalent in today’s society. In 2015, Islamophobia increased by 200% in the UK, while Anti-Muslim attacks in the US grew by 78%.  It is not only Muslims that are victims of Islamophobia, a diverse range of different ethnic and religious minorities are also subjected to Islamophobia as a result of the assumption being made that they are Muslim.

Islamophobia is strongly linked to political events that take place around the world. Events such as 9/11, the 2005 London bombing, the more recent terror attacks in London, such as in Borough Market. Statistics show that experiences of Islamophobia increase after these events. Additionally, the mainstream medias portrayal of these events add to the negative stereotype of Muslims.

Islamophobia takes place in many different forms, on many different platforms. More recently, there has been an incline in Islamophobia taking place on social media. It raises the question as to whether hate speech is policed actively enough to ensure that there is a clear distinction between free speech and hate speech.

Government institution and key members of government can reinforce, promote and reproduce islamophobia through their statements and initiatives.

Social media outlets, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have developed systems that allow them to filter and tackle general hate speech within a timely manner. This allows them to filter content based on whether or not it is hateful. Having said this, detecting Islamophobic hate speech is a challenge not only for social media outlets, but also for governments and academics.

Having said this, Islamophobia is still very much a prevalent issue.

Experts are now calling for a distinction between freedom of expression and hate speech against all religions, including Islam, and for laws that criminalise anti Islamism.

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“Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country” – Emmanuel Macron

"I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.”– Boris Johnson

“Absolutely. I mean, I don’t notice Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center. There is a Muslim problem in the world, and you know it and I know it.” – Donald Trump

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Social media’s impact on freedom of expression

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Social media’s impact on freedom of expression

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YouTube, in its community guidelines, describes ‘hate speech’ as: “content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes, such as: race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/ gender identity.”

Twitter’s mission is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information, and to express their opinions and beliefs without barriers. Free expression is a human right – we believe that everyone has a voice, and the right to use it. Our role is to serve the public conversation, which requires representation of a diverse range of perspectives.

Facebook: The goal of our Community Standards is to create a place for expression and give people a voice. The Facebook company wants people to be able to talk openly about the issues that matter to them, even if some may disagree or find them objectionable. In some cases, we allow content – which would otherwise go against our standards – if it's newsworthy and in the public interest. We do this only after weighing the public interest value against the risk of harm, and we look to international human rights standards to make these judgments. Our commitment to

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58990330

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/24/frances-haugen-i-never-wanted-to-be-a-whistleblower-but-lives-were-in-danger

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•Experts are calling for a distinction between freedom of expression and hate speech against all religions, including Islam, and for laws that criminalize anti-Islamism.

•"While anti-Semitism is banned, I cannot understand that Islamophobia is considered freedom of opinion," Amr Moussa, a former Arab League Secretary-General, said on Facebook

•Law Commission recommends reforms to the communications offences to target serious harms arising from online abuse, while more effectively protecting the right to freedom of expression

•Current laws that govern both freedom of expression and hate speech are not working as well as they should be.

•In 2019, the government rejected the definition of Islamophobia. A working definition may help in differentiating hate speech from freedom of expression.

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Hijab, niqab

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Academicians  and

activists are gaining their benefits of political affiliation through academic freedom and

curricular activism  and  use  their  academic  freedom  for  spreading hate  and  prejudice

against Muslims. The political affiliations make them active, they are also capitalized on

particular form of  islamophobia.  Such  groups  have  gained  more  attraction after  9/11

and also transforming their motivation to public not only  through print media but also

using internet for their purpose to show their reaction against Islam and Muslims. Like

David  Horowitz’s  enterprises  in  the  form  of  JihadWatch.org,  Discover  the  Networks,

Front  Page  Magazine,  as  well  as  Campus  Watch,  and  Islamist  Watch  are  found  very

active  on  internet.  With  their  detailed  description  it  is  summarized  that  they  have

succeed in changing the perception about Islam and Arab people (Salaita, 2008).

To  spread  the  hate  against  Muslims  through  social  media  has  become  the  major

factor  for  destroying  the  peace  and  harmony  among  society.  In  the  study  about

Islamophobia on Twitter Awan (2014) has argued that “online Islamophobia must be

given the same level of attention as street level Islamophobia” (Awan, 2014, p. 133).

Media reports after 9/11 presented the negative image of Islam to

the world and various negative discourses have started in world media outlets. Muslims

were presented  as terrorists, and Islam  as a threat to  world peace. As Ahmed (2007)

has evaluated that pre-9/11 Muslims and Islam were dominantly framed with religious

conflict of Jerusalem, between Palestinians and Israelis, and soon after 9/11 Islam was

employed in  the  context  of violence  and  Muslims were shown  around  patriotism  and

tolerance. (Ahmed, 2007)

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Larsson (2007) has evaluated that the latest technology can be used for spreading

and  combating  islamophobia.  With  the  analysis  of  Wiki-Islam  he  has  finalized  that

observed material that published on Wiki-Islam, can easily be perceived as expression

of  Islamophobia  (Larsson,  2007,  p.  53).

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Western Muslim women are often presented either as passive victims of male power imposed upon them, or as strong feminists who oppose this power by fighting it from a disadvantaged position. Media sometimes criticizes Islam for marginalizing women and for providing a disproportionate amount of power to men [3]. Acceptance of Islam is equated with women giving up equality and women’s rights are represented as being incompatible with freedom of religion [4]. As a result of these portrayals, the most common words used to describe Muslim women by journalists and politicians are ‘segregated’, ‘beaten’, ‘insults’, ‘veil’, ‘freedom’, ‘religion’, ‘hatred’, ‘human rights’ and ‘extremism’ [5]. In crime dramas such as CSI or Criminal Minds, Muslim women are almost always represented as victims of male domestic violence; women’s appearances in police films or television shows are often cut short by a male who asserts that he is in charge

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Asking 5-10 year old

What comes to your mind when you think of islam

# data[].attributes.body
Scary

Weird

Different

Interesting

Arab

Odd

Pakistan

Mosque

Building

Beard

Scarf

Crazy

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How did Boris Johnson letterbox remark effect you?

I still get called racial slurs from a letterbox to a bomber

What do you think of news reporters?

Educated people

If you do wear hijab how does it make you feel ?

Empowered and strong

What are your sterotypes of muslims ?

Misinterpreted

How does being a muslim make you feel ?

Privileged

What are you first impressions of niqabs if you’re a non-muslim?

Interesting and empowering almost like role models

Do you think islamophobia is real in media?

So real and people don’t talk about it enough

# data[].attributes.body
How did Boris Johnson letterbox remark effect you?

It doesn’t affect me but he was very rude to say that

What do you think of news reporters?

People who are educated and know what they are talking about

If you do wear hijab how does it make you feel ?

I don’t

What are your sterotypes of muslims ?

They are all smart and want to be doctors

How does being a muslim make you feel ?

Im not

What are you first impressions of niqabs if you’re a non-muslim?

Are they not feeling hot, its a bit much

Do you think islamophobia is real in media?

Not as bad as people make it seem

# data[].attributes.body
How did Boris Johnson letterbox remark effect you?

It was out of hand and he should not be prime minister

What do you think of news reporters?

Individuals who get told to create fake news

If you do wear hijab how does it make you feel ?

I feel powerful in my hijab

What are your sterotypes of muslims ?

We just want to be seen as normal people. The stereotype is that islam is a violent religion

How does being a muslim make you feel ?

I feel amazing and privileged

What are you first impressions of niqabs if you’re a non-muslim?

I am inspired by them

Do you think islamophobia is real in media?

Its traumatic and brothers and sisters around the world deal with it daily

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https://twitter.com/zarahsultana/status/1435998064095936516?lang=en

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http://theconversation.com/conservative-party-is-in-complete-denial-about-its-islamophobia-problem-just-look-at-boris-johnson-if-you-need-proof-119674

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Conservative Party is in complete denial about its Islamophobia problem – just look at Boris Johnson if you need proof

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The favourite to become the next prime minister has never felt the need to apologise for his offensive remarks about Muslim women.

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.10400.pdf

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http://theconversation.com/how-we-built-a-tool-that-detects-the-strength-of-islamophobic-hate-speech-on-twitter-102536

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Finding, and measuring Islamophobia hate speech on social media. John Gomez/Shutterstock

In a landmark move, a group of MPs recently published a working definition of the term Islamophobia. They defined it as "rooted in racism", and as "a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness".

In our latest working paper, we wanted to better understand the prevalence and severity of such Islamophobic hate speech on social media. Such speech harms targeted victims, creates a sense of fear among Muslim communities, and contravenes fundamental principles of fairness. But we faced a key challenge: while extremely harmful, Islamophobic hate speech is actually quite rare.

Billions of posts are sent on social media every day, and only a very small number of them contain any sort of hate. So we set about creating a classification tool using machine learning which automatically detects whether or not tweets contain Islamophobia.

Detecting Islamophobic hate speech

Huge strides have been made in using machine learning to classify more general hate speech robustly, at scale and in a timely manner. In particular, a lot of progress has been made to categorise content based on whether it is hateful or not.

But Islamophobic hate speech is much more nuanced and complex than this. It runs the gamut from verbally attacking, abusing and insulting Muslims to ignoring them; from highlighting how they are perceived to be "different" to suggesting they are not legitimate members of society; from aggression to dismissal. We wanted to take this nuance into account with our tool so that we could categorise whether or not content is Islamophobic and whether the Islamophobia is strong or weak.

We defined Islamophobic hate speech as "any content which is produced or shared which expresses indiscriminate negativity against Islam or Muslims". This differs from but is well-aligned with MPs' working definition of Islamophobia, outlined above. Under our definitions, strong Islamophobia includes statements such as "all Muslims are barbarians", while weak Islamophobia includes more subtle expressions, such as "Muslims eat such strange food".

Being able to distinguish between weak and strong Islamophobia will not only help us to better detect and remove hate, but also to understand the dynamics of Islamophobia, investigate radicalisation processes where a person becomes progressively more Islamophobic, and provide better support to victims.

Setting the parameters

The tool we created is called a supervised machine learning classifier. The first step in creating one is to create a training or testing dataset - this is how the tool learns to assign tweets to each of the classes: weak Islamophobia, strong Islamophobia and no Islamophobia. Creating this dataset is a difficult and time-consuming process as each tweet has to be manually labelled, so the machine has a foundation to learn from. A further problem is that detecting hate speech is inherently subjective. What I consider strongly Islamophobic, you might think is weak, and vice versa.

We did two things to mitigate this. First, we spent a lot of time creating guidelines for labelling the tweets. Second, we had three experts label each tweet, and used statistical tests to check how much they agreed. We started with 4,000 tweets, sampled from a dataset of 140m tweets that we collected from March 2016 to August 2018. Most of the 4,000 tweets didn't express any Islamophobia, so we removed a lot of them to create a balanced dataset, consisting of 410 strong, 484 weak, and 447 none (in total, 1,341 tweets).

The second step was to build and tune the classifier by engineering features and selecting an algorithm. Features are what the classifier uses to actually assign each tweet to the right class. Our main feature was a word embeddings model, a deep learning model which represents individual words as a vector of numbers, that can then be used to study word similarity and word usage. We also identified some other features from the tweets, such as the grammatical unit, sentiment and the number of mentions of mosques.

Once we'd built our classifier, the final step was to evaluate it, which we did by applying it to a new dataset of completely unseen tweets. We selected 100 tweets assigned to each of the three classes, so 300 in total, and had our three expert coders relabel them. This let us evaluate the classifier's performance, comparing the labels assigned by our classifier with the actual labels.

The classifer's main limitation was that it struggled to identify weak Islamophobic tweets as these often overlapped with both strong and none Islamophobic ones. That said, overall, its performance was strong. Accuracy (the number of correctly identified tweets) was 77% and precision was 78%. Because of our rigorous design and testing process, we can trust that the classifier is likely to perform similarly when it is used at scale "in the wild" on unseen Twitter data.

Using our classifier

We applied the classifier to a dataset of 109,488 tweets produced by 45 far-right accounts during 2017. These were identified by the charity Hope Not Hate in their 2015 and 2017 State of Hate reports. The graph below shows the results.

While most of the tweets - 52.6% - were not Islamophobic, weak Islamophobia was considerably more prevalent (33.8%) than strong Islamophobia (13.6%). This suggests that most of the Islamophobia in these far-right accounts is subtle and indirect, rather than aggressive or overt.

Detecting Islamophobic hate speech is a real and pressing challenge for governments, tech companies and academics. Sadly, this is a problem that will not go away - and there are no simple solutions. But if we are serious about removing hate speech and extremism from online spaces, and making social media platforms safe for all who use them, then we need to start with the appropriate tools. Our work shows it's entirely possible to make these tools - to not only automatically detect hateful content but to also do so in a nuanced and fine-grained manner.

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How we built a tool that detects the strength of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter

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In a landmark move, a group of MPs recently published a working definition of the term Islamophobia. They defined it as "rooted in racism", and as "a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness". In our latest working paper, we wanted to better understand the prevalence and severity of such Islamophobic hate speech on social media.

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https://theconversation.com/islamophobia-in-the-conservative-party-key-points-from-the-inquiry-on-discrimination-161532

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Boris Johnson addresses his party at the 2019 annual conference. Benjamin Wareing/Alamy

The inquiry into discrimination in the Conservative party has published its report. Led by Professor Swaran Singh, a former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the inquiry looked into complaints of discrimination made to the party between 2015 and 2020. The 44,000-word report details multiple troubling examples of Islamophobia but ultimately fails to acknowledge key incidents as such.

The catalyst for the Singh report came in 2018 when the Muslim Council of Britain called for an independent inquiry into Islamophobia in the party. The council had compiled a dossier detailing near-weekly incidents involving various party members and was supported in its call by, among others, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the former party co-chair. Boris Johnson's comments about Muslim women who wear the full face veil as looking like "letterboxes" and "bank robbers" merely added fuel to the fire.

It was the unlikely figure of Sajid Javid a year later, however, who gave the call impetus. During a BBC Conservative leadership debate, the then Home Secretary asked his rivals: "Shall we agree, guys? Shall we have an external investigation into Islamophobia?". All, including Johnson, agreed.

But by the time Johnson was installed as leader and prime minister, he had shifted the focus of the inquiry away from Islamophobia and onto all forms of discrimination. The impact was threefold. First, it distanced the Conservatives from the very reason why an inquiry was deemed necessary: claims of widespread Islamophobia. Second, the party was able to set the parameters of its own inquiry. Finally, by subsuming Islamophobia within a broader topic of interest, the party was not only able to avert an in-depth interrogation of the problem but so too any potentially damning findings.

Hundreds of complaints

Despite Johnsons's shift, the report says that two-thirds of all discrimination complaints analysed were anti-Muslim. In total, the party's central database recorded 1,418 complaints between 2015 and 2020. Of these, 727 incidents were of alleged discrimination - of which 496 related to Muslims and Islam. Approximately three quarters of these involved the use of social media.

Of the third of cases that resulted in a sanction, 50% culminated in suspension and 29% expulsion from the party.

The problem, however, is likely to be far bigger than the inquiry found given that it only focused on formal complaints. Doing so is likely to have failed to take into account the regular and routine forms of Islamophobia that take place in everyday life. We know that experiences of hate and discrimination are notoriously under-reported and that Warsi has claimed that Islamophobia is "widespread [in the party] ... from the grassroots, all the way up to the top".

Zac Goldsmith's mayoral campaign

During the inquiry, Zac Goldsmith's 2016 London mayoral campaign was investigated. Branded "disgusting" at the time, Goldsmith published a piece in the Mail on Sunday with the headline, "Are we really going to hand the world's greatest city to a Labour Party that thinks terrorists are its friends?". Alongside it was a photo of the 7/7 bombings.

Goldsmith went on to paint rival Sadiq Khan as a security risk, claiming he had links with extremists prior to becoming a member of parliament and continued to support Islamic State to the present day. According to the report, only one complaint had been made about Goldsmith's campaign: it was subsequently dismissed as unsubstantiated.

From speaking to Goldsmith, the report claimed he now "accepts poor judgment in the way his campaign was conducted". It added that Goldsmith "forcefully denies harbouring anti-Muslim sentiments or using such sentiments for political advantage". Accordingly, Goldsmith has nothing to be accountable for.

Without wanting to resort to petty "whataboutery", it is unlikely that "poor judgment" and a "forceful denial" would suffice - and rightly so - as regards other discriminatory phenomena. While there should be no hierarchy of hate or discrimination, again it would seem that Islamophobia does not demand the same level of scrutiny and criticality as other similar phenomena do.

Boris Johnson's comments

The inquiry also investigated Johnson's comments about veiled Muslim women. Splitting opinion, the report claimed those who found Johnson's language to be offensive and in breach of the party's code of conduct were a minority. During the inquiry, Johnson said:

I do know that offence has been taken at things I've said, that people expect a person in my position to get things right, but in journalism you need to use language freely. I am obviously sorry for any offence taken.

Overlooking the fact that Johnson's comments caused a spike in verbal abuse directed at Muslim women - maybe due to no formal complaints being made - the inquiry weakly chastised the prime minister. Describing his words as "insensitive", the inquiry reminded him of the need for "measured and appropriate language". If "insensitive" is now a synonym for "Islamophobic", then the inquiry was right.

Islamophobia and ambivalence

In some ways, the Singh report is similar to that of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published in April. While that report claimed no evidence of "institutional racism" in contemporary Britain, the Singh report failed to contemplate even the merest suggestion the Conservative Party was "institutionally Islamophobic". Given the number of complaints and the senior figures implicated, it was a question that justified being asked. Failing to do so has undoubtedly left the inquiry open to criticism.

Accusations of whitewashing are far from surprising. Islamophobia is politically ambivalent: it can be routinely deployed by political actors for political and personal gain, knowing there will be no recourse or censure whatsoever due to it not being a "vote winner". In essence, few care.

That same message seems to underlie the Singh report: Islamophobia in the Conservative Party is a problem - but so what? Until it is attributed with the importance it demands and on an equal footing with other discriminatory phenomena, insensitivity and poor judgment will continue to be excuses for being Islamophobic.

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Islamophobia in the Conservative party: key points from the inquiry on discrimination

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The inquiry into discrimination in the Conservative party has published its report. Led by Professor Swaran Singh, a former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the inquiry looked into complaints of discrimination made to the party between 2015 and 2020.

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http://theconversation.com/islamophobia-report-reveals-scotland-not-quite-as-tolerant-as-it-would-like-to-think-164828

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Scotland has always considered itself a society that is " open, inclusive and outward-looking" according to its first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. But the nation's popular and persistent belief that it does not have a problem with racism has been contradicted by a study by Tackling Islamophobia, a cross-party group of the Scottish government. This starkly reveals that 75% of Muslims experienced Islamophobia as a regular or everyday issue.

According to race think-tank the Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia is defined as "hatred or fear of Muslims or of their politics or culture" and can include "any distinction, exclusion, or restriction towards, or preference against Muslims". Non-Muslims also find themselves victims of Islamophobia when they are mistakenly identified as Muslims, an all-too-common experience for ethnic minorities in Scotland.

The report highlights that Muslim women are most likely to suffer from discrimination. The majority of respondents believe that Islamophobia is getting worse in Scotland, with Glasgow showing the highest levels. Mainstream print and broadcast media were seen to promote Islamophobia by the majority of the study's respondents. Social media was also cited as an arena where Islamophobic attitudes are circulated in Scotland. However, Islamophobia in Scotland is most often experienced on the street in the form of verbal abuse.

Muslims in Scotland have responded by changing their everyday habits in efforts to hide their Islamic identities. Some choose not to wear a headscarf or speak in a foreign language on public transport, for example.

Scottish exceptionalism

Scotland has largely escaped criticism in public debates on race and racism due to the commonly held attitude that there is no problem to discuss. Scottish political elites have helped to advance the narrative that Scotland is more collectivist in nature and places a higher value on social welfare, making it exceptional in this issue to other parts of the UK, including England.

These arguments have been used to promote a civic brand of Scottish nationalism which has been successful in gaining support from minority ethnic groups, including among young adults. While it is good that Scotland has an inclusive notion of citizenship, we should be wary of making broad generalisations about Scottish exceptionalism.

At the successful Kenmure Street demonstration in Glasgow in May - where protesters halted a UK government immigration raid on two Indian men at a flat - there were numerous anti-UK banners and proclamations of Scotland having a better attitude to race. The demonstration was a significant victory for community resistance, but using it to justify notions of exceptional Scottish tolerance and inclusion is misleading.

There is some evidence to suggest that the Scottish public places a higher value on social welfare, and recent election results highlight a preference to vote for centre-left political parties. It is also true that Scotland has a long history of worker-led social justice campaigns. However, the extent to which Scotland is more open or inclusive to immigrants than other parts of the UK is often over emphasised. For example, survey evidence from YouGov found that public attitudes towards immigration were largely similar north and south of the border.

In the Kenmure Street case, reporting on the news story focused on the hostile approach of the UK immigration services, which were seen to symbolise the cruelty of the Westminster establishment. Despite claims that it would implement a "fair and humane asylum and refugee system", the Scottish government has not been explicit about how it would regulate immigration should it be given the legislative powers to do so (immigration is a reserved matter for Westminster). It is not clear, for example, how it would process asylum claims or respond to failed claimants. So it is easy for the Scottish government to capitalise on this emotive issue in public campaigns and debates.

What can be done?

The Tackling Islamophobia report recommends that political and council leaders should be more vocal in addressing Islamophobia through a no-tolerance position. It advocates the inclusion of Muslims to public boards and senior positions. Additionally, it is suggested that Islamophobia be included in the existing Race Equality Framework.

These formal improvements could help to pave the way for addressing the root causes of Islamophobia in Scotland. But it is equally important for the Scottish public to take heed of this report's worrying findings and acknowledge that in reality, Scotland has a poor reputation when it comes to the treatment of some of its most vulnerable citizens. Proclamations of Scottish exceptionalism and " no problem here " only hinder this process.

Evidence suggests that Scotland has a long way to go to live up to its perception of being open, inclusive and outward-looking, particularly for its Muslim population. The country needs to ditch its complacency and examine its efforts to combat discrimination, and consider how much it actually listens to its Muslim citizens and includes them at all levels of society. This starts with an acceptance of the cold hard facts, which may be a little difficult for some to hear.

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Islamophobia report reveals Scotland not quite as tolerant as it would like to think

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Scotland has always considered itself a society that is " open, inclusive and outward-looking" according to its first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. But the nation's popular and persistent belief that it does not have a problem with racism has been contradicted by a study by Tackling Islamophobia, a cross-party group of the Scottish government.

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http://theconversation.com/how-to-tackle-islamophobia-the-best-strategies-from-around-europe-106092

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A need for different narratives. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

A growing body of research points to the proliferation of Islamophobia across Europe in recent years. In the UK, record numbers of Islamophobic hate crimes were recorded in 2017, and across the continent there have been similar findings on the growth of explicit Islamophobia.

In a new, pan-European research project, my colleagues and I set about to devise a toolkit that can be used to counter Islamophobia. It summarises a range of the best methods and tools we saw being used to challenge Islamophobic thought and actions in Europe.

In any discussion about Islamphobia, a definition is required that acknowledges both direct forms of Islamophobic discrimination and also its more subtle, nuanced manifestations. A definition published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in November 2018, which states "Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness" does precisely this and is a useful starting point.

In our research, we began by examining the most common Islamophobic ideas that circulated in eight countries: France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece and Portugal. While the language and rhetoric of Islamophobia differed in each, we found much of it perceived Muslims, Islamic practices and sites, such as mosques or community centres, as inherently violent, threatening and incompatible with the view of a European way of life. For example, in France, wearing the headscarf and being visibly Muslim is viewed by some as being against French secular values and by extension contrary to being French.

We found many examples of good practice when counteracting Islamophobia. For example, interfaith projects in Germany highlighted conviviality and cultural compatibility between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Art was also used in a number of cases, including Belgium and the UK, to challenge Islamophobic ideas. The Tuffix comic strips by German artist Soufeina, and the 2017 British film, Freesia, highlight the contribution of Muslims in society, and the issues many Muslims face as a result of Islamophobia.

Another narrative

Based on our analysis, our toolkit highlighted some specific strategies that work to counter Islamophobia. Since a great deal of Islamophobia is based on the notion that Muslims threaten the European way of life, values and culture, one way to challenge these ideas is to highlight the many everyday roles Muslims occupy in society. And since we found that Islamophobic perceptions are often based on the idea that Islam and Muslims are sexist, projects that champion Muslim women, their work and their voices will go some way towards breaking down these preconceptions.

Muslim women are disproportionately affected by Islamophobia. They are not only seen as a threat to the West, but they are also paradoxically portrayed as victims of an alleged Islamic sexism. These contorted ideas must be overturned with new narratives, led by Muslim women themselves, presented via art, media and popular culture, to portray the diversity of their lives.

Islamophobia needs to be properly recorded to assess the scope and nature of the phenomenon, and the narratives and flawed logic used in Islamophobic attacks must be effectively deconstructed and challenged. Where misinformed narratives concerning Islam and Muslims circulate these must be broken down. A reconstruction of mainstream ideas surrounding Islam and Muslims is needed, one that is closer to the realities of the faith and its practice. This means that dominant ideas about Muslims and Islam that circulate in popular culture should reflect the diverse everyday experiences of Muslims and their faith.

All this amounts to a four-step approach: first defining, and second documenting Islamophobia, next deconstructing its narratives, and then reconstructing new positive and realistic narratives around Muslims.

Such an approach moves away from misinformed and often reactionary counter-Islamophobia strategies, such as the way Muslims repeatedly condemn terror attacks and seek to dissociate such acts from Islam. In doing so, they often find their comments fall on deaf ears and instead risk contributing to associations between Muslims and violence.

The ultimate goal in countering Islamophobia should be to create a fair and just society for all, one that values and safeguards the citizenship of its members.

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How to tackle Islamophobia - the best strategies from around Europe

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A growing body of research points to the proliferation of Islamophobia across Europe in recent years. In the UK, record numbers of Islamophobic hate crimes were recorded in 2017, and across the continent there have been similar findings on the growth of explicit Islamophobia.

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https://theconversation.com/eight-ways-that-islamophobia-operates-in-everyday-life-64444

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Fear of Islam pervades every corner of modern Muslim life. Fotos583/www.shutterstock.com

But the term "Islamophobia" is somewhat confusing: it supports the idea that there is only one "Islam" and implies a "fear" of it. Some have argued for new, more accurate terms such as anti-Muslimism. Like the word itself, the phenomenon of Islamophobia is equally complex, and cannot be put neatly into a box. Here are some of the ways it affects everyday life.

1) It isn't only experienced by Muslims

Cloud Mine Halloween/www.shutterstock.com

2) It is shaped by geopolitics

In addition, our own research has found that the reporting of such events in the mainstream media contributes to the negative stereotyping of Muslims. We interviewed young people, aged 12 to 26, who claimed that references to Muslims as "extremists" and as a "threat" to British ways of life in the media skew the public's perception of Muslim communities - despite frequent campaigns to challenge such negative associations.

3) It ignores the diversity of Muslim communities

4) It's different for men and women

5) It can make Muslims wary of public places

6) Attacks vary in intensity and nature

The responses to these different forms of Islamophobia by those who experience it are also variable. Our research found that young people demonstrate resilience to so-called banter and name-calling. But for others, Islamophobia may mean subtle forms of avoidance and exclusion, such as being stared at, not having someone sit next to you on the bus or experiencing a general sense of social distance.

7) Islamophobia is reproduced institutionally

Anti-Islamic sentiment is also experienced in the workplace - 100% of participants in a small focus group recently said that they had directly experienced, witnessed, or have family members who had experienced discrimination in the workplace. Some Muslims may be reluctant to challenge such forms of discrimination as a result of what they see as aggressive secularism and feel silenced as a result.

8) Young people build new strategies

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Eight ways that Islamophobia operates in everyday life

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But the term "Islamophobia" is somewhat confusing: it supports the idea that there is only one "Islam" and implies a "fear" of it. Some have argued for new, more accurate terms such as anti-Muslimism. Like the word itself, the phenomenon of Islamophobia is equally complex, and cannot be put neatly into a box.

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http://theconversation.com/why-uks-working-definition-of-islamophobia-as-a-type-of-racism-is-a-historic-step-107657

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MPs have suggested a working definition of Islamophobia for the first time. John Gomez/Shutterstock

The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims has made history by putting forward the first working definition of Islamophobia in the UK. Its report, Islamophobia Defined, states:

Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

The culmination of almost two years of consultation and evidence gathering, the definition takes into account the views of different organisations, politicians, faith leaders, academics and communities from across the country. It also takes into account the views of victims of hate crime.

Islamophobia is still a relatively new word which entered the public and political lexicon little more than two decades ago. Yet, the process of establishing a working definition of Islamophobia has been ongoing and one that I have contributed to in various different ways.

In the hope of bringing about a more consistent and coherent approach to tackling Islamophobia, the drive for a working definition has been underpinned both by the need to help people better understand what Islamophobia is and isn't, and also to record levels of Islamophobic hate crime.

For detractors however, Islamophobia is a problem for a number of reasons. Some, such as the writer Melanie Philips claim that Islamophobia just does not exist, that it is a mere "fiction". Yet data on hate crimes against Muslims from the Metropolitan Police and Tell MAMA among others render such claims wholly unfounded.

Others such as the Quilliam Foundation find the term problematic, suggesting that it shuts down debate. At the most extreme, commentators such as Rod Liddle claim there just isn't enough Islamophobia.

Comparisons with racism

Irrespective of whether the new working definition of Islamophobia has the potential to counter these narratives, it has much to offer. Short and accessible, the new definition is neither too complex nor overly academic, which maximises its potential appeal to both public and political audiences.

Aligning Islamophobia with racism is also likely to be helpful, because people intuitively "get" racism, and the majority deem it to be unwanted and unnecessary in today's Britain. The same needs to be true for Islamophobia where people "get" that a Muslim woman being physically assaulted is equally unwanted and unnecessary.

Drawing comparisons with racism does have the potential for some confusion, not least in conflating religion with "race". While religion has the potential to be changed and chosen, race is largely fixed and unchanging. This means it will be important to explain clearly that the comparison with racism is made to highlight similarities between the functions and processes of Islamophobia, rather than suggesting Muslims constitute a race. In this way, the new definition emphasises how Islamophobia targets markers of "Muslimness" and Muslim identity - evident in how perpetrators of Islamophobic hate crime disproportionately target visibly Muslim women - in the same way that racism often targets people for the colour of their skin.

Read more: What does Islamophobia feel like? We dressed visibly as Muslims for a month to find out

Given the new definition's emphasis on Muslimness and Muslims, this should go some way to allaying fears that it's Islamophobic to not share the same beliefs as Muslims or disagree with some of their practices. Clearly it is not. Nor is it Islamophobic to appropriately criticise Muslims or condemn atrocities committed by any group or person who might claim to be acting in "the name of Allah" (or similar). But, as the new definition rightfully infers, if disagreements, criticisms or condemnations are used to demonise or vilify all Muslims without differentiation, then it's likely at least some Islamophobic views will be underpinning such an approach.

The new working definition goes beyond merely replicating the working definition of antisemitism that was put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance before being adopted by the British government in 2016. While I've previously advocated substituting Islamophobia for antisemitism as a quick and easy solution to the ongoing definition problem, the complexity and fallout from recent allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party highlight the weaknesses and deficiencies of such an approach. Having two separate definitions for Islamophobia and antisemitism ensures that critical - and necessary - distance between the two phenomena is maintained.

What people do and say

While the working definition is a welcome development, it's worth remembering that it is only a recommendation. Whether the government intends to adopt it or not is unclear at this stage.

As a catalyst for change, however, the definition is right to be more concerned with what people do and what they say, rather than laying claim to what or who they are. Using the definition to merely call out potential Islamophobes has the very real potential to be wholly counter-productive. Instead, it must be used to build new constituencies and alliances that can work together to advocate for change.

While the working definition is unlikely to appease those who ultimately deny Islamophobia's existence, if it draws attention to Islamophobia and its negative consequences, that can only be a good thing. My hope is that it will also draw attention to how Islamophobia impacts the lives of many ordinary Muslims going about their lives in today's Britain. This should neither be dismissed nor underestimated.

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Why UK's working definition of Islamophobia as a 'type of racism' is a historic step

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The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims has made history by putting forward the first working definition of Islamophobia in the UK. Its report, Islamophobia Defined, states: Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

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http://theconversation.com/islamophobia-in-the-labour-and-conservative-parties-when-will-this-problem-be-taken-seriously-150673

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More than a quarter of Muslim members and supporters of the Labour Party have experienced Islamophobia within the ranks of the party, a report from the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) claims. With some members or supporters being referred to as "terrorists" or "foreigners", others have been accused of plotting to "takeover" the party. Some have even been subjected to stereotypes about "grooming gangs".

Coming so soon after the Equality and Human Rights Commission's (EHRC) damning investigation into Antisemitism, these findings not only raise further questions about the Labour party's rank and file but also the extent to which Islamophobia is being taken seriously. Given the dossier of allegations of Islamophobia that the Conservative Party is yet to respond to, the same questions may well be asked there.

The LMN report makes for uneasy reading. As well as the 29% of Muslim members claiming to have experienced Islamophobia within the Labour party, more than one in three claim to have witnessed it (37%). The report claims that nearly half of Muslim members (44%) do not believe the Labour Party takes the issue of Islamophobia seriously. Nearly half (48%) of those asked said they have no confidence in the party's procedure for dealing with complaints of Islamophobia effectively.

Having already seen large numbers of Jewish supporters turn away from the party, it is possible the same might happen with Muslim voters if the leadership is not seen to act fast and effectively. Even then, that may not be enough. As the LMN research shows, more than half of Muslim members (55%) do not trust the party leadership to tackle Islamophobia effectively.

Part of that problem may be that Muslims do not feel represented in the leadership and shadow cabinet.

Islamophobia in the Conservative party

While the current spotlight is on the Labour party, we should not forget that allegations of widespread Islamophobia in the Conservative party emerged more than two years ago. Back then, Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi, former co-chair of the party, said Islamophobia was: "very widespread ... from the grassroots, all the way up to the top". She added that it was "something the leadership feels can be easily ignored".

Her comments came in the wake of the Muslim Council of Britain's (MCB) call for an independent inquiry into the party. Citing evidence of weekly Islamophobic incidents involving party representatives and candidates, the MCB sent an open letter to Brandon Lewis, the then chair of the party, to ask him to investigate the issue.

The MCB's list of incidents makes for equally uncomfortable reading. They included a Conservative party member posting a picture of slices of bacon on a door handle as "protection from terrorism", and a member referring to Islam as the new Nazism. Another retweeted posts by former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and another shared an article describing Muslims as parasites who live off the state and breed like rabbits.

During the last party leadership contest, all the candidates pledged to investigate Islamophobia if they were elected. However, the eventual winner, Boris Johnson, has failed to uphold his pledge. He has, instead, commissioned an inquiry into how the party deals with discrimination cases more generally. An inquiry is welcome but this approach fails to address the precise reason why an inquiry into Islamophobia was deemed necessary and lumps all forms of discrimination together, thereby deflecting attention away from the specific matter of Islamophobia. The MCB claims the Conservatives' approach to Islamophobia being one of denial, dismissal and deceit.

Getting away with it

From my ongoing research into Islamophobia in the political mainstream, a number of arguments can be put forward to explain why Islamophobia remains a problem for both Labour and the Conservatives alike. The first is that few mainstream political actors truly care about Islamophobia, thereby rendering it quite unimportant. Despite regularly paying lip-service to the matter, it always quickly disappears from the political agenda.

We've also seen that mainstream political actors can actively deploy and espouse Islamophobia for personal and political gain without fear of recourse or censure. There is no better illustration than Johnson referring to Muslim women who wear the niqab looking like "letterboxes" or "bank robbers". David Cameron, who was prime minister at the time these remarks were made, reportedly told Johnson to apologise. He appears to have refused. Not only that, but he soon went on to become the party leader. What better way to show someone that there are no consequences for such rhetoric?

What's more, the mainstream media's attitude towards Islamophobia is worryingly different in comparison to other forms of bigotry and hate. Within 24 hours of Johnson's comments about "letterboxes", some media outlets were encouraging debate about whether some forms of Muslim dress should be banned, rather than focusing on holding him accountable.

The final argument was evident in a recent report from thinktank the Woolf Institute, which found that nearly a quarter of people surveyed did not believe that religious diversity has been good for the country. Drill down a little deeper and it's Islam and Muslims as opposed to religion that is seen to be the problem. Clearly the general public are akin to their political representatives.

Which culminates in the question: who cares about Islamophobia? Despite the Runnymede Trust claiming more than three decades ago that Islamophobia was a challenge for us all, the same does not seem to ring true in 2020.

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Islamophobia in the Labour and Conservative parties: when will this problem be taken seriously?

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More than a quarter of Muslim members and supporters of the Labour Party have experienced Islamophobia within the ranks of the party, a report from the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) claims. With some members or supporters being referred to as "terrorists" or "foreigners", others have been accused of plotting to "takeover" the party.

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http://theconversation.com/schools-need-to-step-up-to-address-islamophobia-169937

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Schools need to step up to address Islamophobia

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Tackling Islamophobia as a form of racism even when Muslims aren’t visible is key.

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https://theconversation.com/uk/search?adapter=pg3&date=all&language=en&page=2&q=islamophobia&sort=relevancy

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Some commentators argue Islamophobia does not exist. It does, and it's deadly.

And it's not just Muslims who need to start them.

For some time, my research has shown that Muslim women who wear the hijab or other types of Muslim attire are the most likely to become victims of street-level Islamophobia. The explanation is simple...

Fed by the far-right, Islamophobia continues to make it into the mainstream - where it's eagerly received by some.

Two researchers were subjected to harassment and intimidation when they adopted Islamic attire in public.

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Some commentators argue Islamophobia does not exist. It does, and it's deadly. And it's not just Muslims who need to start them. For some time, my research has shown that Muslim women who wear the hijab or other types of Muslim attire are the most likely to become victims of street-level Islamophobia.

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https://www.oberlo.co.uk/statistics/most-popular-social-media-platforms

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwpiI18TBdE

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/uk-charity-tackles-muslim-stereotypes-on-screen

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https://www.ted.com/talks/karla_monterroso_tech_race_and_power

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In this talk, Karla Monterroso , the CEO of Code2040 frames the way that technology is changng the way we experience the economy and in the absence of a diverse set of arcchitects is ruining our opportunity to redefine the economy in an equitable way.

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Paul Rucker: The symbols of systemic racism -- and how to take away their power

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Multidisciplinary artist and TED Fellow Paul Rucker is unstitching the legacy of systemic racism in the United States. A collector of artifacts connected to the history of slavery -- from branding irons and shackles to postcards depicting lynchings -- Rucker couldn't find an undamaged Ku Klux Klan robe for his collection, so he began making his own.

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https://www.amdigital.co.uk/about/blog/item/historical-memory

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This post was written by guest blogger Dr John Giggie. Dr John Giggie is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South. He served on the editorial board for the Adam Matthew resource Race Relations in America, and his research specialises in the American South, African American history, and American religious history.
Publicity material for the 1969 Race Relations Institute, available in Race Relations in America. Image © Amistad Research Center, further reproduction prohibited without permission. To see this document in the collection, click the image.

Recently the issue of race and public memory has ignited long-simmering passions in American cities and states over how to properly record and represent the past. On May 18, 2017, the mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu, finally achieved his goal - the removal of the 80-foot statue of General Robert E. Lee from a downtown site; the last of four towering monuments to the Confederacy that had stabbed the skyline for over 130 years. All now gone, the other three included Confederate president Jefferson Davis, General P. G. T. Beauregard, who was in charge of the first shots fired in the war, and a general commemorative statue to the 1873 bloody overthrow of the post-war bi-racial government by white supremacists. The workers removing the statues had received death threats, and so operated under the cover of darkness, wore bulletproof vests, and were protected by police. Shouts of support and anger filled the air as protest groups gathered to voice their opinions. Mayor Landrieu defended his actions by arguing that "these monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for." How Americans literally remembered the truth about the past was at stake. As Landrieu argued, putting "the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past." [1]

At the same time, the neighboring state of Alabama passed a law forbidding such events. The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act prohibits any governmental entity from removing historical monuments older than 40 years, including but not limited to Confederate ones, as well as from renaming a building or street. On the occasion of the bill's signing, its chief sponsor, State Senator Gerald Allen of Tuscaloosa, stressed that the Act "is intended to preserve all of Alabama's history ― the good and the bad ― so our children and grandchildren can learn from the past to create a better future."[2] Earlier he had said that he hoped that the Act would end the "wave of political correctness" engulfing the nation.

These two dramatically different views of how the past should be interpreted bring me to the Race Relations Department, founded in 1942 by the American Missionary Association as a response to rising racial tensions in mid-twentieth America. The records of the Department have been digitized for Adam Matthew's resource, Race Relations in America. A central mission of the Department was to fundamentally change how citizens understood the place of race and black Americans in the nation's history. It recognized that history itself - or rather an honest portrayal of the struggle and successes of all Americans - was a powerful antidote to currents of racism that flowed through the public. To that end, it regularly hosted the Institute of Race Relations at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and offered coursework and lectures aimed at demonstrating the ill effects of racism on America's past and the need to remember it more accurately. In this brochure advertising the Institute's annual session for 1969, the "Purpose" section testifies to the historical need to "create a society free from 'the sins of caste.'" Participants would confront "the growing struggle to achieve power and pride by Black Americans, Spanish-speaking Americans, and Indian Americans."

Central to this task was to teach about the racial sins of the past. The Race Relations Department and its Institute eventually became the Amistad Research Center in 1966, among the very first organizations dedicated to preserving the history and memory of the African American past. Its mission of teaching about the variety of American experiences is as vital today as at its founding, as we struggle to accurately represent historical truth and fact in our public lives.

Race Relations in America is available now. Full access to this resource is restricted to authenticated institutions who have purchased a licence. For more information, including trial access and price enquiries, please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Endnotes

[1] The full speech can be found here: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/mayor_landrieu_speech_confeder.html [Accessed 4 July 2017]

[2] Senator Allen's words can be read here: http://uk.businessinsider.com/alabama-confederate-memorials-bill-2017-5?r=US&IR=T [Accessed 4 July 2017]

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Historical Memory and the Race Relations Institute

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This post was written by guest blogger Dr John Giggie. Dr John Giggie is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMiB9A3iJY

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The Power of Consumerism: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | Daniel Dubois | TEDxSFU

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https://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/what-messes-with-your-head/2019/08/06/the-power-of-consumerism/

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In the very first episode of Mad Men, advertising prodigy Don Draper explains that his line of work 'is based on one thing: happiness.' Seasons later, he expands on this idea. 'What is happiness?' he muses. 'It's the moment before you need more happiness.'

I don't think it will come as a surprise to any of us that, particularly in the west, we live in a society that encourages and serves consumerism. I understood this to be true even before Don Draper explained consumer culture to me, but ultimately, no explanation will single-handedly destabilise these deeply-rooted behaviours. It just helps us to understand them. The allure of buying and spending is strong and incessant, because as Draper says, that buzz you feel when you consume is fleeting, merely the pre-cursor to more happiness.

The funny thing is, even though I know that spending money on things won't make me a happier, better, more attractive, or more successful person, I continue to consume on the basis that it just might. Despite myself, a part of me still likes to believe that I'm just a few steps away from that mythical land of permanent happiness, that if I have just a few more things, then I'll finally silence that seemingly constant hunger for more. Now, as we draw nearer to spring, my inbox is being flooded with emails from various brands promoting their new seasonal releases: grainy film photos of models in white linen dresses strolling the Italian coastline, or in chic 'model-off-duty' looks roaming the streets of London. Coupled with poetic ad-copy, the effect of these images is two-fold: they are made to speak to your deepest sense of longing and inadequacy and also to your memories of happier times-no, of the happiest- times; all the moments and memories and places that are there whenever you close your eyes. All these ads need to do to is plant the seed. We, the experienced and imaginative consumer, will do the rest.

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In the very first episode of Mad Men, advertising prodigy Don Draper explains that his line of work 'is based on one thing: happiness.' Seasons later, he expands on this idea. 'What is happiness?' he muses. 'It's the moment before you need more happiness.'

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https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcargocollective.com%2Frevathi%2Ffilter%2FPoster%2FThe-Culture-Of-Want&psig=AOvVaw3bN_5MFXjdqFxTdXBlUiNd&ust=1639181056285000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCKCR-bf31_QCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kruger-who-owns-what-p80569/consumerism-power-everyday

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How can art reflect the power of branding and advertising in the everyday? Barbara Kruger's Who Own's What?, 2012, blurs the boundaries between art and commerce. Watch Jessye from Tate Collective Producers presents her perspective on this bold artwork, then find out more about the print and the artist on our collection pages.

Who Owns What? is currently on display at Tate Modern as part of Media Networks.

Our Tate Collective Producers are a team of 15-25 year olds based in London, Liverpool and St Ives who program and run lots of the free events, workshops and talks on offer to Tate Collective.

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Consumerism, Power and the Everyday - Look Closer | Tate

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How can art reflect the power of branding and advertising in the everyday? Barbara Kruger's Who Own's What? , 2012, blurs the boundaries between art and commerce. Watch Jessye from Tate Collective Producers presents her perspective on this bold artwork, then find out more about the print and the artist on our collection pages.

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From its first appearance, the term ‘consumer society’ ‘has been

used to convey condemnation more than to describe; in particular,

instead of being deployed to comprehend what characterised actual

consumer practices, it served to stigmatise what appeared to be a

growing and uncontrolled passion for material things:......... a

continuous and unremitting search for new, fashionable but

superfluous things’

Roberta

Sassatelli

,

Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics

(2004)

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The consumer

•

The commodity

•

The corporation

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Digital Consumption

The ‘information

panopticon

Big data and surveillance

The attention

economy