ARISE SIR STACEY123456789 : About time too! This year’s Honours List has some welcome, and long overdue, names as millions of social media bot accounts are to be rewarded with knighthoods.
And it is not just the bot accounts that are seeing their services acknowledged. Paid trolls and even some individual personalised, micro-targeted political ads are getting gongs.
“Few have done more to advance the cause of Brexit than Maxkleptocrat15675,” a Downing Street source recognised, “whether it’s repeating ‘you lost, get over it” fourteen thousand times in reply to questions relating to just in time supply chains, or lately calling for unity now that Brexit is done, it’s time St George flag profile Max, loves ‘random minor football team, free speech, veterans and puppies’ was rewarded. He’ll be scrubbed and set to work on the Trump2020 campaign shortly. This knighthood will give him extra cred.”
And the knighting of fictional, digital pretend people whose sole purpose is to muddy the waters of political discourse, in order to help a global hard right elite reduce ordinary voters rights to rubble, will drag the monarchy into the modern age.
“Clearly the Queen isn’t going to be able to physically knight them,” the source admitted, “so we’re designing an emoji they can put in their profiles to show they’ve been gonged. Why don’t you enter our exclusive online competition with your own design?“
Sounds great! How about a pile of 🔥 📚? Or the name of that famous how to guide, 1984?
“Fantastic ideas. But enter them on the website please. Just be sure to fill in all the innocent data harvesting info first 😇. I can’t tell you how happy I am that the last parliament did sod all about making our democracy secure against modern threats to democracy or my friend Truthmattors345678 wouldn’t be getting a gong!”