I'm talking about the rise of the social media influencer and YouTubers and, you know, Twitches and tiktokers and all these people i went back to uh author and commentator van batter and asked her about that specifically

quite honestly phones give you the illusion of being a celebrity when you're not one because you can film yourself and you can create films of yourself and you can style yourself like a celebrity and you can position yourself in the way that what you say matters even when you have no skills no experience you know no worldly contact and no participation in a broader world or broader community.

Like that illusion is available to you and people take that up and the people who are willing to eviscerate more and more and more of themselves, that's the economy that you become part of.

Not every girl makes a million dollars on OnlyFans.

Not every boy becomes a million-dollar Twitch streamer.

That's not how the economics of opportunity work.

Just like not everybody gets to be a pop star, not everybody gets to be a famous actor.

And it deeply concerns me that people knowingly or unknowingly, although I think they have a responsibility to know what the hell they're sharing when they have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, is legitimising some of this absolute mesh of gas.

Information that's wrong and information that's deliberately constructed to be wrong and lead people astray.

Well, yeah.

And look, the 2019 election is important to study because like the Labor Party, I was calling people who I knew were Labor Party people going, this stuff is really getting a big audience.

Like allegations about Bill that were going viral, 8,000 shares in an hour online.

And this is before I was doing the QAnon book.

And I was like, this death tax stuff, it's been copy and pasted.

It's difficult to track.

Where does online hate and the sort of conspiracy stuff... sit in the last two years and what contribution has it made to that? And also all forms of hatred, because we know all forms of hatred are connected, specifically for the Jewish community, where do you see that? You've observed it as a sort of, you know, I want to say removed third party, but you're not because you've got Jewish friends, you live in Australia, you're just as affected as everyone else when you see violence on our shores in the What are your thoughts?

I went to Van and asked her, how can we stop rewarding hate on online platforms?

Well, I think some changes we need to make.

One, um, I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that, um, you get paid per click.

Like full disclosure, um, Facebook has given me money for clicks and views on my Facebook platform.

And I've got to say that that is, I'm really disquieted by that because the idea that you might make yourself, like I'm not economically dependent on Facebook.

Like, um, if you are, if you are in an economic situation where your brand viability or your, you know, economic survival is dependent on, uh, that content relationship, like that's, and there's no oversight.

Like I could, you know, publish, I don't know, pictures of my feet or whatever.

I spoke to her about her experience of activism in left-wing spaces and the antisemitism that she has seen in those spaces since the early days of her activism, and also about how she felt after Bondi

It was not a surprise for lots of reasons and that there has always been like my experience on the left in the student movement, participating in sort of broad left coalitions and doing anti-fascist, anti-racist work meant that I became aware that there was, there, there is a certain kind of campus leftist who then grows into a certain kind of adult leftist who the internet is now calling purity leftists, the people who morally judge everybody but don't seem to do any organizing themselves.

Um, and there was a particular tendency of people who shared a lot of demographics with people in the far right, people who were from quite privileged backgrounds overwhelmingly, who were white overwhelmingly, um, not all men, but mostly men in these particular sort of communities, umWho I, we described as red browns.

We called them red browns because there was an issue with Jews.

And I developed a, a policy called Jew in the Room.

If I was in a broad left forum and there was no Jewish person there, I would consider that forum to be unsafe and to contain red browns, and I would not participate.

And that, I found that very conspicuous when I ... 'Cause I was president of the National Union of Students in New South Wales in 1998, when w- uh, this was when One Nation was, was in its sort of first bloom.

Peruvians