I suppose, though I couldn't swear to it, families used to sit round the TV together and watch the same news.
Now we all get our news separately, me from Twitter, the kids from TikTok, my Mr from reputable radio and newspaper sources. It means we disregard each other totally. I honestly assumed the young ones know nothing except whatever can be conveyed about slime in 15 seconds or one minute (the two time options for a TikTok). Everything Mr Z says, I tend to have read 24 minutes before. For his part, every time he looks over I'm watching a video of a mischievous goat, or driver and a cyclist having an argument, which he takes as a sign that I've given up on the world. The riots in the US completely capsized all this: for the first two days, the 12s-and-under had a much more precise understanding of the whole thing, not just the details of George Floyd's death, but the searing rage around it and the likely scale of the protests. "He wasn't a stranger, he was a co-worker," they would explain patiently about the police officer videoed kneeling on Floyd's neck, in the hours when traditional news stories were still limited to the most pared-down accounts. This is the job of journalism, to report only what's been verified; I know that, I wouldn't have it otherwise. But the kids were picking up a different frequency, in which the truth was self-evident, and all this plodding, boomer fact-checking was just a way to dampen with delay a crime that could not be minimised. They had a point. Many reputable news sources have an illustrious history of under-reacting to injustice, and, cloaked in a duty of balance, believing any old bilge that corrupt authority feeds them. But that's not what's going on here, I said. It's not because the BBC is institutionally racist that it doesn't have a view on whether this is first, second or third-degree murder. How could I be sure, they wanted to know. I just am. I'm very old. Sometimes you know things when you're old. They looked at me as though that was the weakest argument ever, when in fact it is one of my strongest. And they were scathing when I showed them a video on Twitter of a black CNN reporter getting arrested on live TV. "Black people are getting arrested for no reason all the time," they told me. "It's not more important because it's a journalist." No, but, yes, but … it is. Part of living in a democratic society is being able to bear witness unmolested. "Everyone with a phone is bearing witness," one said, and I thought, sure, OK, if you absolutely insist.Then the conspiracy theories started – not on the BBC, by the way, and not on Twitter (or at least not in my bubble), but on TikTok, where all roads led back to Jeffrey Epstein. "Do you even know who Jeffrey Epstein is?" asked Mr Z, and they didn't as such, but they knew that he was a sex offender, and they knew for absolute certain that he had been killed by some other means than his own hand, by order of Donald Trump. "But how would a president take out a hit on someone? Every squeak that happens in the White House is recorded," the Mr pressed on. But this was the wrong argument. It's not the practicalities that give this rumour the heady whiff of manure, but rather the formulaic neatness, all predatory billionaries intimately connected, like cheap airport fiction. Trump is waging a war on his own soil. In broad daylight, his actions are fascistic in language, imagery and intent. We really don't need a complicated, secretive subplot to make him the bad guy. That's the point of the conspiracy theory: someone, somewhere, floods the territory with unfalsifiable claims, and once nobody knows what's true, everything is contestable. The world has been painted a shade of moral murk, and after that, nobody is good, nobody is bad, everybody simply is. Yet new media do not arrange themselves, conveniently, into platforms that give access to conspiracies, and those that crack open injustices. It's one ecosystem, for real and fake. You cannot tell your children to ignore it all; you can only counsel judgment and scepticism. So it was on TikTok, again, that the offspring first heard about US citizens getting teargassed (though on Twitter, predictably, that I saw the Texan protest-on-horseback) and again, they were not just better informed but more politicised. On the back foot, I tried to share what I know of tear gas, this aspect that nobody ever mentions – it attacks not just your airways but anywhere with any moisture; so in great solidarity, protestors all hand round lemon wedges to squeeze into one another's eyes, and all the women are going: "Thank you so much, but can we prioritise my burning vagina?""You've never been teargassed," said the 10-year-old, with authority. "I have, actually, at the G8 protest in Genoa." "Genoa," said the 12-year-old, "is not a place."
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