Friend of GB News

It began because Flipboard, that blissfully neutral magpie of an app, kept tossing GB News agitation pieces into my feed. Not because it thinks I am a fan, but because it serves everything from NASA to nutters without discrimination. And since I am pathologically unable to walk past a GB News comment section without sprinkling facts like salt on slugs, I kept clicking. Not once, but repeatedly. Several days of gentle, methodical myth demolition. And that, apparently, was enough for the GB News algorithm to decide I was one of the faithful. Not a critic. Not a saboteur. A friend.

From that point on the absurdity wrote itself. I wander into their comment threads like a bloke inspecting dry rot, drop a statistic here, a legal principle there, and wander out. Anyone paying attention would notice I am busy dismantling the narrative plank by plank. But their algorithm sees a flurry of comments and concludes I must be a devoted disciple. It cannot distinguish applause from arson. To a machine that equates engagement with adoration, an exterminator must look like a rat enthusiast.

So GB News now thinks I am part of the tribe. The irony is almost operatic. I explain that Reform’s deportation wheeze is physically impossible, or that Brexit lined the pockets of hedge funds rather than ordinary people, or that Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for defamation is legal fantasy of the highest order, especially when the BBC is one of GB News’s favourite attack targets. I drop that in for good measure, because nothing delights them more than bellowing about bias while flogging their own. And the system rewards me for my supposed enthusiasm. It files every corrective comment under loyal support, because that is what happens when opinion is given the same status as truth.

The algorithm does not recognise dissent. It just counts clicks and claps its little digital hands. By its logic, telling the barman the beer tastes like pond water means you are a regular.

So yes, after days of calmly dropping facts into their echo chamber, GB News has inducted me as a Friend. I await the badge. Perhaps even a merit certificate for outstanding services to accidental satire.

Meanwhile I will carry on doing what I have been doing all along, turning up in their comments, pointing out reality like a man tapping a cracked window with his finger, while the algorithm beams proudly, convinced I am one of them.

And the crowning irony is this, their presenters are so easily baffled by experts that even the algorithm would blush for them.

I allegedly get some benefits from being a Friend of GB News, but I've yet to determine what they are.