Bertrand Russell, Social Media, and the Rise of Intolerance

 When our perception is shaped by algorithms and emotion, rather than reality and reflection, it becomes dangerously easy to fear what we do not truly see.

By Sean Ash 

We like to believe that what we see is what is real. That our eyes, ears, and instincts are reliable tools for navigating the world. But this belief can be deeply misleading. Bertrand Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, offers a simple yet profound example. He asks us to consider a table. When viewed from different angles, the table may appear to be a slightly different colour, shape, or size, depending on the lighting and perspective. But which view is the true table?

This question, seemingly trivial, opens a door to something much deeper. Our perception of the world is not a mirror of truth, but a reflection distorted by light, angle, and expectation. And in our modern age, those distortions are no longer just optical. They are digital, algorithmic, and emotionally engineered.

About five months ago, I watched a video on TikTok of a Muslim man saying Jesus was a Muslim. He claimed Jesus was never crucified, and even said the Bible was a book of lies. At first, I shrugged it off, thinking, “What nonsense.” But I watched the entire clip. And that was enough. The algorithm took that one moment and made a decision. This is what I must be interested in.

Suddenly, my For You page was flooded with similar videos. More Muslims saying the same things, pushing the same ideas, again and again. It began to frustrate me. I started searching for rebuttals, for people pushing back. That’s when I found David Wood (God Logic) and Sam Shamoun, and began watching videos between them and Muslim preachers like Ali Dawah, Sheikh Uthman and Mohammad Hijab. I even joined a debate with a well known convert from Wales who calls himself Hamza’s Den.

I came into that debate with the idea that we could coexist, that pluralism meant room for all. But the way he spoke, so forcefully, so sure that Islam must dominate, it made something rise in me. Anger. I wanted to strike back. Not because what he was saying was right, but because of the pressure it created, and how it fed the very perception that so many people already fear. The way he presented his views played into a narrative that Islam is here to take over. And when you hear that kind of rhetoric, especially from someone who refuses to allow space for other beliefs, it starts to feel true.

But here’s the thing. If Islam were trying to take over, it would have happened already. History shows us that it is possible for religious or political movements to dominate through force, but that doesn’t mean it is happening now. It doesn’t mean it will. Most Muslims in this country live peacefully, go to work, raise families, and want the same safety and dignity we all do. The danger lies not in the religion itself, but in how a few loud voices and a reactive algorithm can shape our perceptions. Like the voices of these preachers, and the voice of Tommy Robinson. 

I began to speak out against Islam. I picked at contradictions. I supported the IDF. I turned cold to the suffering of Palestinian children. I stopped seeing people, and started seeing symbols, religions, flags, and groups. And all of it, somehow, felt righteous. I felt like I was defending my faith. But then I looked at my Muslim friends. People I had grown up with. Played football with. Spent time with as kids, and supported each other as adults. They had never done anything but care for me.

So why was I angry at them now?

None of it made sense. If they were good people, and I believed that they are, then what I was starting to believe could not be true. The contradiction cracked the illusion. But it went deeper than that. I began to remember the Muslim doctors who had operated on me. The nurses who cared for me with patience and kindness. The pharmacist who sorts out my medication every week. My GP, who has always managed my blood pressure with professionalism and calm. I thought of a good friend of mine, a fellow patient who wasn’t necessarily muslim but wasn’t white either, he shared the hospital bay with me. We were both paralysed. We shared our journey. We talked through pain. We shared laughter. We struggled together.

In those moments, race didn’t matter. Faith didn’t matter. Skin colour didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were human. All of us. Connected by something deeper than belief or background. And in that realisation, I saw it clearly. I had been brainwashed. Not by a person. Not by a faith. But by a system that exploits our emotions and feeds on our fears.

It also made me reflect deeply on my Christianity. It took me back to the verses that shaped my earliest understanding of faith. Love your neighbour. If there is a foreigner in your land, take him in. Show compassion. Offer shelter. Welcome the stranger. And I realised that the way I had been speaking, the way I had been arguing, was not Christian at all. If I was being called to follow Jesus, then I certainly wasn’t going the right way. I was walking a path of anger, not of grace. A path of division, not of love.

The algorithm had fed me a version of reality that aligned with my emotional responses. It knew what would provoke me. It didn’t show me the whole truth. It showed me the parts that would keep me watching. And in watching, I had become entangled.

That’s how perception traps us. It’s not always about deliberate hate or ignorance. Sometimes it’s about how easily we mistake repetition for reality, emotion for conviction, and anger for righteousness. Like Russell’s table, what we see depends entirely on where we’re standing and how the light hits.

You can begin to understand why so many people become obsessed with the idea of Pakistani grooming gangs. It is not because they are seeing the whole picture, but because the part of the table they’re looking at is illuminated only on that one corner. The light shines there, and so that’s all they see. But if you walk around the table, you find something different. You begin to realise that the majority of group-based child sexual exploitation offences in the UK are committed by white men. And if you trace the outline even further, internationally, you find that the perpetrators of such crimes tend to be the dominant ethnic male group in each society. Whether that’s white men in Britain, Arab men in certain Gulf nations, or Black men in other contexts. It is not the ethnicity that drives the crime, but the power, the access, and the invisibility granted by being part of the majority.

Yet if your light only ever shines on one corner, and your feed only ever reflects that back to you, it becomes your reality. You begin to believe that what you see is the whole. And that is where the danger lies. Not in the presence of a particular group, but in the narrowing of your field of vision, until everything outside it disappears.

To find the truth, we must walk around the table. We must step back, ask questions, and look at people, really look at them. Because no truth worth holding ever needs our hatred to keep it alive.