On the last day of July, Emma Monk happened upon a story which claimed that asylum seekers are 24 times more likely to end up in prison than people who are born in Britain. Arching a quizzical eyebrow in the direction of this (ahem) arresting figure, Monk, a 46-year-old scientist from the New Forest, ran the numbers. Mining data and government statistics, with empirical certainty, she discovered the claim was hokum.
“That stat has now stuck,” Monk tells me. “It’s now being repeated regularly in other conversations. [But] when I went and had a look, and did the calculations, it was complete and utter nonsense. How they came to these conclusions was complete and utter rubbish. But it’s stuck because it can be spewed out, and GB News and the Telegraph and the Express can publish it, and then it’s [seen] by all the people on X. And that’s how it sticks.”
Although not the only combatant in the war against agenda-driven media disinformation, Emma Monk’s application of scientific principles to the task of disseminating misleading data makes her one of the country’s most compelling citizen journalists. With a background in molecular biology and genetics, after making her bones as an activist in the wake of the Brexit referendum, she set up camp in the online world during Covid. Evidently, her status as a season ticket holder at St Mary’s, the home of Southampton FC, was in itself an insufficient source of dependable misery.
In reacting to stories that are already sprinting their way from Falmouth to Forfar, by the time she gets her hands on them, Emma Monk is aware that she’s fighting a rearguard action. The true (scarcely reported) ratio of asylum seekers who are in prison compared to their British equivalents, for example, is around two-to-one, rather than two dozen.
But still she persists, running the rule over such topical talking points as unemployment figures for people with autism, the efficacy of net zero, online hate speech, and (even) a two-part dive into the claim that the government is planning to “dim the sun”.
“I’ve done a lot of reflecting over the past five years as to why I do this,” she says. “And my reflection on why I do it… is it just looks more and more like everyone’s divided into their little camps. They’re not accessing the same information and they’re living in completely different realities. And that scares me. I want a society that’s more cohesive.”
She has a Substack, too, the pleasingly titled Monk Debunks: Beyond the Narrative, featuring articles with such headlines as “No, Afghan Refugees Didn’t Take Veterans’ Homes” and “How Misinformation Hides in Plain Sight”. Inevitably, the sleights of hand she uncovers are stubbornly effective.
Suggested Reading
A very British hatred
With stories about uninvited arrivals dominating the summer season, to take just one example, a recent YouGov poll found that almost half (47%) of Britons believe the number of illegal immigrants entering the UK is “much higher” than those arriving through formal channels. In truth, that figure is just FOUR per cent, not 47%.
“Very occasionally I can change people’s minds [online],” she tells me. “There are about three occasions of that happening that I can think of. But what I do get is a lot of people saying ‘thank you for [writing] that. I know the story didn’t sound right. Now I understand. When my mum brings that up at Sunday dinner, because she reads the Daily Mail, I’ll now know how to counter it.’ It’s enabling the people… to have the information, to have a coherent way to come back in face-to-face conversations.”
In terms of redressing the balance, Emma Monk’s work, I think, has value. In what has become a seamless production line, on the other side of the divide there stands a battalion of mysteriously funded “thinktanks”, propagandists and – air quotes – academics who provide headline-hogging material that permeates the opinion sections of right wing news outlets. At stultifying length, GB News and Talk TV can also be relied upon to amplify the outrage.
Seeing as it’s much easier to sell tickets for the ghost train than a speak-your-weight machine, clearly, the deck is stacked. With their giddy warnings that Britain stands on the brink of civilisational collapse, the Chicken Littles of the hyperbolic hard right have learned to their profit that predicting the sky will fall in is a nice little earner.
For her part, Emma Monk says she harvests a “very, very small income” from paid subscribers on her Substack. As she dryly notes, “There’s a lot more money in the world of disinformation than there is for people who try to counter it”.
It’s not as if she works at the coalface, either; in rebutting the spurious and the specious, instead, she beavers away at the slagheap. To my eye at least, it looks like an unenviable task.
Whenever I look at the accounts of people with whom I deeply disagree, and whose motives I regard as being suspect, I can feel the agitation rising within me in real time. For her part, Emma Monk stares at the sun for hours on end. It can take days to pull together her most complex rebuttals.
Her continued presence on X, she explains, is attributable to the site being home to the worst of the action. It’s there that she’ll find Matt Goodwin and Daniel Hannan, Isabel Oakeshott and Ross Clark; quacking away, doing damage. As our enjoyable interview slows to a close, one question comes to mind: I ask Emma Monk if her spirited work in dark corners has had a detrimental effect on her own peace of mind?
“Twitter does have that impact on me… so I set rules for myself that I won’t go on there after 9pm and definitely not last thing before I go to bed,” she says. “I have a two-hour limit on my phone, although I’ll often ignore that if I’m researching or engaging with one of my threads. And when I go away for a week, or with family, I make sure I stay off it completely.”
She continues: “But ultimately, my answer to the anger I feel when I read something on Twitter is to do what I can to debunk or counter the lies. Feeling angry is what spurs me on to do what I do.”
Emma Monk’s work can be found on www.emmamonk.co.uk and monkdebunks.substack.com.
Ian Winwood is the author of Bodies: Life and Death in Music
