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Radicalisation. We tend to think of it only in terms of young Muslim men, don’t we? It’s almost funny that the biggest radicalisation threat turned out to be old white people on the internet.

It wasn’t shady plots whispered in the corners of dark mosques that damaged the very fabric of society.

It was your old mum, sitting there on Facebook with her coffee and biscuits.

This is how your nice granny turned into a neo-Nazi sympathiser.

Now my mum doesn’t do social media , bless her. But like anyone in her 70s, she has her worries and her fears.

(Image: Getty)

Let’s imagine a fictional version of my mum who has been on Facebook a lot in the past few years.

Fictional Gran goes down to the high street to do the shopping and sees – as you do these days – a couple of brown-skinned people begging or selling The Big Issue.

She thinks to herself about how you never used to see that. And you didn’t – 50 years ago. She goes home and logs on to Facebook. While she’s looking at photos of wee Jeannie’s christening, a video-clip pops up on her timeline. It doesn’t look like an advert. It’s called something like “breaking news”.

She clicks on it to see hundreds, thousands, of refugees at Calais, fighting to get on to lorries coming to Britain. There follows an alarming report about how Britain is at breaking point and millions of immigrants are on the verge of swamping our country.

Now, it doesn’t matter that this clip wasn’t from Channel 4 or the BBC or CNN. It was, we will learn, not “news” at all – just a pack of lies put together for political purposes.

Fictional Gran doesn’t know this. She just thinks it’s “the news” in some way. Now imagine she’s seeing dozens of these kind of clips every month, sometimes just a few seconds of them.

It won’t matter later when you argue with her that net migration figures to the UK are manageable. Or that we urgently need immigrants to keep the NHS staffed.

She’s seen a couple of immigrant beggars with her own eyes and she’s seen “the news” telling her that thousands more of them will soon be swamping her high street. The work is done.

Or imagine an American equivalent to this person. One who was on the fence about the 2016 election, who really wasn’t wild about Hillary Clinton but would probably have voted for her. A gran who then spent months getting bombarded by “news-style clips” reporting that Hillary was the actual devil.

Inch by inch, they get nudged towards a position they might not otherwise have held. This isn’t “campaigning”, is it? It’s brainwashing.

It’s more extreme in America, as everything is. Because over there, in addition to Facebook, there’s that other tool of far-right indoctrination: Fox News.

(Image: Getty)

Incredibly, Fox is the most popular “news” channel in the US. When you travel in America and meet liberal-minded people, you will hear the stories. Stories of family members – in-laws, parents, brothers and sisters – who, after several years of living in the Fox News/Facebook matrix, have turned from mildly conservative people to ultra-far-right lunatics.

Who believe that “liberalism” (as the American right call anyone who doesn’t believe in Guns-God-and-Zero-Taxes) is a mental disorder. Who believe that the Clintons ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlour. Who believe that there is no such thing as global warming. Who believe Obama isn’t an American. And so on.

This isn’t “news”. It’s brainwashing. And so Fictional American Gran watches Fox News and then posts a clip of some racist nonsense on to Facebook and it gets liked by lots of people who then, based on their liking of that clip, get sent even more clips of even more extreme stuff until you wind up with Fictional British Gran watching videos from Britain First – literally a neo-Nazi organisation – and finding that she is nodding along in agreement and clicking “like”.

(Image: Internet Unknown)

And there’s how Nice Gran became a neo-Nazi sympathiser.

But we might be approaching the beginning of the end of all this. Facebook are likely to face massive class-action suits for their role in failing to protect data. Nearly $60billion has been wiped off their share price in the last week.

Stories are emerging that Mark Zuckerberg was quietly selling off millions of dollars of his own stock just ahead of the Cambridge Analytica story breaking. The platform could be finished.

Meanwhile, over on Fox, a former commentator called Ralph Peters left the channel, saying: “Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration…

“I feel that Fox News is now assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.”

Peters isn’t some crazed 30-year-old left-winger. He’s a hardcore Republican, a retired lieutenant colonel in his 60s who hated Obama with a passion. And even he’s finally got to this position. So maybe there’s some hope for all the radicalised grannies out there…