The Standard searches for those talking London down

London’s no-longer evening Standard has reported on research from a King’s College academic who has been looking into the provenance of the online bots painting the capital as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

Under the headline ‘’London is not what it was’: How social media accounts are changing the narrative of the capital’, the paper highlighted the work of Dr Mark J Hill looking at how “the number of social media posts promoting the narrative that London is ‘dangerous’ have spiked in the past year, despite a reduction in violent crime”.

“A number of the posts are from new accounts, which use what appears to be AI generated profile pictures and exclusively post this content,” said the Standard. Dr Hill added: “Once a narrative like this gains momentum, it can change how people feel about the city, whether tourists want to visit, how people may behave in public spaces, and even how they vote. Language and framing often travel across borders online.”

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Still, if Dr Hill wanted to further explore who is pushing such narratives about London, he need only leave his office and pick up one of the large piles of unwanted and untouched weekly newspapers stacked up in boxes throughout Zone 1.

It’s the paper which last year ran an op-ed by David Goodhart, an author at the right wing Policy Exchange think tank, suggesting London’s high level of immigration meant it should be stripped of capital status. Goodhart claimed that “London is the capital of blue state Britain – alongside Manchester, Birmingham and the other big cities – and the resentful red state provincials have had enough”.

It’s also the paper which last year ran a fawning interview with Nigel Farage in which he used dogwhistle language like “parts of [London] are unrecognisable as being English”. And the paper which has been supportive of Susan Hall, the Tory candidate for London mayor who really doesn’t like the capital, one campaign video describing it as the “crime capital of the world” and “teetering on the brink of chaos” and mayor Sadiq Khan as having “seized power” (rather than having won three elections), all set to video of… a stampede at New York’s Penn Station in 2017.

That paper is, of course, the Standard.