{"id":695,"date":"2016-08-15T21:49:45","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T20:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/?p=695"},"modified":"2016-08-15T21:49:58","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T20:49:58","slug":"katie-hopkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/katie-hopkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Katie Hopkins, Hate Bait, and Free Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

An easy\u00a0way to get clicks to a website is with something controversial. Content that is sick, offensive, distasteful, or\u00a0outright horrible is always appealing to certain people. The sick, the maladjusted, the plain ol’ curious. And it’s for this reason that we saw an interesting trend in online journalism recently: the rise of hate-bait.<\/p>\n

Hate-bait is a form of trolling. It’s posting deliberately sensational things of a negative nature in order to get clicks. Like if I wrote a blog post saying KILL ALL FAT PEOPLE.<\/strong> I don’t believe fat people should be killed. But people would come and read my blog anyway (reckon I could get away with it?). “How could he think such an awful thing<\/em>?”\u00a0<\/em>they might think. Or perhaps they’d whisper secretly to themselves “I actually do believe this, I’d love to read someone else confirming my beliefs<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

One way to do this without exposing yourself to the backlash of liberal online retribution is to couch your headlines in fuzzy language. As per Betteridge’s law of headlines<\/a>, \u00a0“any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” So my headline above might be carefully worded as\u00a0SHOULD ALL FAT PEOPLE BE KILLED?<\/strong> I don’t have to defend\u00a0that proposition in the article, I can even dismiss it outright and argue passionately against it. But you’ve put the question out there, you’ve sparked the interest, you’ve got the click.<\/p>\n

Another strategy is to write about yourself and your own life, but in such a way that people will be outraged by it. A stronger form of the humble brag, this ‘aggro-brag’ is designed to generate sensation via posturing and feigned ignorance about why your opinions are annoying. Applied to our headline, we might see something like\u00a0I DON’T LET MY KIDS PLAY WITH FAT CHILDREN BECAUSE I’M A GOOD MOTHER<\/strong>. The best ever example of this is Samantha ‘don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ Brick.<\/p>\n

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Do you remember Twitter on the day that ‘the brick’ dropped? It was anarchy. An early example of a Tweetstorm. Basically everyone hated this awful lady for writing about how pretty she thinks she is, and how life is hard for her because of it. (I don’t mean to pick women for my examples, there are also plenty of men who engage in similar hate bait behaviour: Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan, and Rod Liddle have all made careers out of this). I don’t really think Brick was desperately burning to tell her story, that the injustices she’d suffered needed to be told to the world, because that would be insane if true. The only rational explanation (assuming everyone involved is a rational agent…) is that either she or the Mail thought it’d be a good way to generate some page views. It worked.<\/p>\n

Katie Hopkins is a journalist who never needed to resort to such tactics. Her realm is that of the unobfuscated hate bait, the purest form where even the headline is wrought with bile\u00a0and dripping with offence. But who is Katie Hopkins and where did she come from?<\/p>\n

I first heard about KH as a contestant on The Apprentice. Remember The Apprentice? I think it’s still on TV, but we all stopped watching it ages ago didn’t we? Katie was on it around the time it was already starting to unceremoniously slide from being a sort-of good business show, to horrible sell-out reality TV garbage, of which Hopkins was undoubtedly a harbinger. What she later did for online journalism, she arguably was a kingpin of for The Apprentice.<\/p>\n

She made it through to the final but turned down a place in order to look after her kids, an issue which later caused a bit of a legal fracas between her and Lord Sugar. On her time on the show, she was notable for making controversial remarks about fellow contestants and generally people she didn’t like in society.<\/p>\n

Then she went away for a while.<\/p>\n

I first recall her coming back when she made an appearance on This Morning, moaning about people who give their children silly names.<\/p>\n