An interesting story from the United Kingdom is filling left-wing journalists with horror: Amelia. She’s an Artificial Intelligence creation that has escaped its left-wing government master and been rebadged as a heroine to the anti-mass migrant movement online.
The U.K. is suffering societal backlash and financial pressure due to mass immigration from cultures with little respect for women, yet the Labour Party government is obsessed with patrolling social media to inhibit “far-right” discussion of the migrant problem.
U.K. conservatives have turned the tables, taking an animated character, “Amelia,” the purported purple-haired antagonist of a government-issued left-wing game aimed at U.K. teens, and coding her favorably, not as a font of hate and disinformation, but as a pro-British patriotic meme.
The intent of the “game” -- to warn British teenagers that taking anti-migrant stands may lead to police intervention -- has backfired, with UK residents opposed to mass immigration adopting Amelia as their own mascot.
Social media users are employing AI to make videos putting pungent criticisms of migrant culture into avatar Amelia’s mouth. The reversal is similar to how former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s smear of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was co-opted by MAGA as a badge of honor.
CNN International weighed in on Saturday with its handwringing: “This cute AI-generated schoolgirl is a growing far-right meme.”
Freelance contributor Issy Ronald couldn’t wait to start the hostile labeling.
At first glance, Amelia, with her purple bob and pixie-girl looks, seems an unlikely candidate for the far right to adopt as an increasingly popular meme.
Yet, for the past few weeks, memes and AI-generated videos featuring this fictional British teenager have proliferated across social media, especially on X. In them, Amelia parrots right-wing, often racist, talking points, connecting her celebration of stereotypical British culture with anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes.
She sips pints in pubs, reads “Harry Potter” and goes back in time to fight in some of Britain’s most famous battles. But she also dons an ICE uniform to violently deport migrants and embraces such extreme rhetoric that even British far-right activist Tommy Robinson has posted videos of her. It’s an unlikely life for a schoolgirl.
The problem being that most of the videos (there are many iterations of “Amelia” from many social media accounts) speak facts. Dogs are in fact haram, or forbidden, according to some Muslims. The impunity granted to Pakistani-led grooming gangs responsible for sexual trafficking of young British girls was a decades-long scandal studiously ignored by local authorities. In some cases, the teenage victims were themselves blamed.
(One free-speech bonus: The overbearing UK police can’t issue an arrest warrant for “Amelia” because she’s a cartoon generated by Artificial Intelligence.)
CNN's reporter explains the character was created as part of the British government’s anti-extremist Prevent program. Being "anti-migrant" is "extremist."
The game, called “Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet & Extremism,” was developed by Shout Out UK (SOUK), a nonprofit attempting to improve public understanding of politics, as part of a learning package funded by the UK’s Home Office.
It aimed to educate young people about the dangers of online radicalization, requiring them to navigate six different scenarios using multiple-choice options. Users play as a cartoon character, “Charlie,” who joins a new school and makes friends with “Amelia,” who shares anti-migrant ideas and disinformation before attempting to recruit Charlie to join anti-migrant groups and protests.
Anything that suggested the U.K. used to be a better place before mass migration was portrayed as dangerous disinformation, even in the photo captions:
This video portrays Amelia traveling back in time to the 1960s, the color saturation becoming brighter to portray how some far-right supporters perceive Britain was then.
The videos play into anti-migrant and racist tropes.
The "red pill" is a popular incel meme.
Speaking of "disinformation":
Right-wing outlet GB News picked up the story the next day, wrongly saying that the game “warns children they’ll be treated like terrorists for questioning mass migration.”
Yet that “right-wing” concern is not unjustified, given the vigorous policing of social media for wrong-think in the U.K. (while actual street crime soars), encapsulated by the treatment of Lucy Connolly, who, for an offensive but quickly deleted tweet, was sentenced to a longer term in prison than many actual violent rioters.
