It wasn’t a new phenomenon. It had started two months earlier, on Easter Sunday, when Clacton-on-Sea was invaded by “1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motor-cycles”. But there was no identification then of any specific groups, so they were all lumped in together, headlined “The Wild Ones”, a reference to a 1953 biker-movie starring Marlon Brando that had been banned in Britain.

Clacton had been a big story, but it was Margate, 60 years ago this weekend, that made the most impact — both at the time and in popular memory — because now there were named subcultures. In fact, had the papers been paying attention, the categorisation had already been established.

“Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” Motorcycle magazine had asked in December 1963. The choice of transport was probably enough to answer the question — the greasy motorbike of the rocker, or the neat little scooter of the mod — but in case there was any doubt, you could look in a mirror. If you were wearing a black shirt, blue jeans, big boots and a leather jacket, said Motorcycle, you were a Rocker; whereas a polka-dot shirt, pink half-mast trousers, Cuban boots, and a parka with fur-trimmed hood signified a Mod.

So Mods vs Rockers it was. They had names and they had a rivalry. It was like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story, which gave the papers a reference point for the older reader; three years after release, the film was still being screened in British cinemas, and the soundtrack was still in the album charts.

In the run-up to the August bank holiday, the press were licking their lips with anticipation. “Will it be another Margate?” they hoped, as they reported that 400 men from the Metropolitan Police were waiting at RAF Northolt, ready to be flown into any resort that required additional support. And in Hastings, the disturbances were bad enough for the chief constable to call in this flying squad, to deal with what the papers dubbed the Second Battle of Hastings.

The ripples spread out in unpredictable ways. In Streatham, south London, the local Young Socialists produced a leaflet: “Up the Mods! Up the Rockers! Down with police violence!” and were promptly suspended by the constituency Labour Party, with five members being expelled. There was a general election due, and caution was the order of the day; no one wanted to risk controversy with a leaflet that “was detrimental to Labour Party election chances”. Meanwhile, 22-year-old satirist Bill Oddie released his first single, “Nothing Better to Do”, inspired by the seaside confrontation: “Play, little boy,” he mocked, “there’s so much to destroy.” It was banned by the BBC, he said, because they feared “the gangs would use it as an anthem”.

And at the London School of Economics, a young PhD student named Stanley Cohen became fascinated by the media response to Margate. The fruit of his research was one of the most influential works of sociology, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). The phrase “moral panic” already existed, and the idea wasn’t entirely new — “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote historian Thomas Macaulay in 1831 — but it was Cohen’s book that formalised and established the concept.

At its heart, it was an understanding that a moral panic is a short-lived explosion of outrage that is rooted in a longer history. The media present an incident as being shockingly new, but it shocks only because it plays into an existing narrative.

In the case of the Mods and Rockers, there was the obvious precedent from the Fifties of the Teddy Boys, and before them, the Cosh Boys. There’d been a rise in juvenile crime in the post-war years, and in 1950 the Daily Mirror had asked its readers to identify the cause. “Films, radio, lack of parental control,” came the answers, together with a call for the restoration of corporal punishment for young offenders. (Judicial birching had been abolished in 1948.)

But even then it wasn’t new. There were reports in 1942 of a group of teenagers being attacked and robbed by a gang of men in south London, leaving one of them dead in the street. The previous decade, before the war, newspapers had noted that “knives, razors, knuckle dusters and sandbags were used by rival gangs in fierce street fighting” in north London. Going back before the First World War, shots were fired “during an encounter between rival gangs”. Further back still, to the days when judicial birching was at its peak, in 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette listed “the bandit gangs of London”, including the Prince Arthur Gang, the Gang of Roughs and the Jovial Thirty-Two. (All available for use by indie rock bands seeking a name.)

These late-Victorian delinquents were collectively known as Hooligans in London, but there were similar groups elsewhere, referred to as Scuttlers in Manchester, High Rippers in Liverpool, Peaky Blinders in Birmingham. What they had in common was low-level crime and street violence, though mostly they fought each other in turf wars. They tended to dress much the same as well: cap worn forwards over the eyes, no collar, a muffler or neckerchief instead of a tie, bell-bottom trousers, hobnailed boots and, in some quarters, a Newgate fringe — a shaved face with a beard running below the jawline, in imitation of where the hangman’s noose would be placed. Then there was the element of clothing as weaponry. “The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal,” read a report in 1900. “It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.”

In short, young men have always had a propensity to violence — and each generation discovers this anew when it gets to be old enough to talk about “young people”. It’s the moral panic that keeps on giving, because it’s a reflection of human nature. Also discovered on a regular basis is the shock revelation that this isn’t just a male preserve. In 1906, it was said that the gangs in Glasgow included “young girls of ages averaging from 14 to 17, with very long draggled skirt and hair in tightly twisted pigtail”.

Nonetheless, there was something different about the post-war youth subcultures. “Teddy boys were really narcissistic,” wrote Mim Scala in his memoir Diary of a Teddy Boy. “I mean Masai warrior, Beau Brummell, Bertie Wooster narcissistic…” And that reference to Beau Brummell was significant. It was Brummell in the early years of the 19th century who’d invented the concept of the dandy, using an obsessive attitude towards clothes as an entrée to the highest circles in the land. “A nobody, who made himself a somebody, and gave the law to everybody,” said novelist Catherine Gore, and his inspiration soon filtered down through society.

The young Charles Dickens, with his green velvet jacket, red waistcoat and long hair, was typical of those who aspired to dandy status. “We keep no horse, but a clothes-horse,” he wrote in the 1830s. Later, the music hall had a rich vein of songs that mocked those who came from working-class parts of London and dressed above their station: “The Marquis of Camberwell Green”, “Percy from Pimlico”, “Burlington Bertie from Bow” and more. “Tho’ I’m not worth a groat, I wear a decent coat,” sang Walter Laburnum in “Fashionable Fred”, a sentiment that resonated down the years, recognisable in Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman: “I spend my cash on looking flash.”

What the Teddy Boys did was to bring together these two strands from the 19th century: the street-gang tradition of the Peaky Blinders, and the working-class dandy. And then, with the arrival in Britain of rock ’n’ roll, they added a musical soundtrack.

The subcultures that followed took their lead from the teds. Mods and Rockers, skinheads and punks, metalheads and goths — all defined themselves by dress and by music. That connected them to a wider popular culture and made them national movements, not just local street-gangs as the scuttlers had been. They identified themselves as being outside the mainstream, yet helped to shape it.

The other thing that the fashion and the music did was to soften the violence. According to the police, teds didn’t resist when arrested; they’d spent too much on the outfits to risk damaging them. Despite the press coverage, no one was killed or seriously injured at Margate or in the Second Battle of Hastings. And not even the Skinheads, at their racist football-hooligan worst, were as violent as the Peaky Blinders had been, 70 years earlier.

“You could say it’s a fashion statement, but I think it’s more than that,” said Paul Weller in 2004. “The working-class love of clothes, looking good, rising above your station. I don’t think it’ll ever die. It’s really in our British fibre. These clothes, my haircut, reflect my attitude.”

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By then, however, the phenomenon had ceased to exist. Vestiges of the old world remain, frozen in time, but they’re museum pieces, not new creations; they’re the punks who hang around Camden Market in north London, selling themselves for tourist photos. Street gangs still exist, but they’re more akin to scuttlers than teds, fighting turf wars that are certainly more violent than their 19th-century predecessors.

What is long gone is the great British tradition of creating a new subculture every four or five years, along with a new form of pop music. Maybe it’s because music is no longer a badge of identity, but a massive online jumble of everything that’s ever been recorded. Clothes mean less, as well, in an era of body modification, from tattoos to piercings to surgery. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a shared culture anymore, and it’s hard for a group to define itself as outside the mainstream if there’s no mainstream in the first place.

Tribalism hasn’t disappeared, of course, the wish to belong, to go where the in-crowd goes. It’s just that, lacking a cultural escape-valve, it finds its place in internet “communities”, where identity comes with the political slogan and the hashtag. It’s much the same as the polka-dot shirt and pink half-mast trousers, but not as cool. 

The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. 

***

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,

As an independent investigative journalist, it is my duty to serve the broad public interest, to watch over governmental and corporate conduct, to safeguard the principles underpinning a free society, and to spotlight wrongdoing — whether it comes from the Left, the Right, or the centre. It is a privilege to present my work to this committee. Over the past 15 years, I have uncovered a variety of different forms of surveillance and censorship, documenting how special interest groups, politicians, and law enforcement agencies use these tactics to silence or weaken their enemies.

I am committed to reporting on surveillance and censorship, because I regard free speech as the bedrock of our republic and the linchpin of our democratic process. These principles are the defining characteristics that set America apart on the global stage. But freedom of speech has not endured without a fight. In every generation, political and corporate actors from across the ideological spectrum have seized on crisis and moral panics to demand restrictions on speech.

Now as ever, we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine free speech and free expression. Recent technological advancements have created new opportunities to restrict speech without public input or accountability. The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools, in particular, offers powerful entities the unprecedented ability to monitor, flag, and censor billions of individuals at a scale and scope never before conceivable. While this technology holds significant benefits, it also carries substantial risks. Private security firms are increasingly marketing AI solutions to both government agencies and corporations. Mounting evidence suggests that state and business interests are already deploying this technology with the goal of stifling lawful discourse and silencing dissent.

Some of you may be familiar with my October 2022 investigation delving into the history of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the FBI’s concurrent expansion into the policing of social media. Using court documents and evidence provided by a DHS whistleblower, I reported that government programs initially designed to curb foreign influence and incitement to terrorism had transformed into a broader campaign to suppress ordinary domestic speech. CISA’s expansive focus eventually touched on a wide range of political topics, from the 2020 presidential election to the origins of Covid-19 to criticism of the Ukraine-Russia war.

Two months later, in December 2022, I reported on a cache of Twitter’s internal corporate documents that became known as the Twitter Files. I gained access to internal emails, tools, and chats that confirmed my earlier reporting about CISA. I revealed that law enforcement agencies like CISA and non-governmental partner organisations consistently pressured Twitter executives to censor political speech under the guise of combating misinformation. I have since published many articles on my Substack based on these documents, including a piece released on Monday.

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In my latest report, I reveal that a non-profit anti-misinformation election consortium provided an inaccurate tip to CISA in November 2020 about a New York Times journalist’s observations about delays in the presidential vote count in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Instead of verifying the validity of the tip, CISA hastily produced a “Misinformation Report” about the incident, arguing that the tweet had promoted falsehoods about the election. The agency then lobbied Twitter to restrict access to the reporter’s tweet. In response, Twitter shadowbanned the Times reporter’s tweet, effectively rendering it invisible to most users — despite substantial evidence supporting the journalist’s accuracy.

I understand the stated intent behind these efforts — the desire to uphold the highest standards for our elections and deter any illicit manipulation. However, as this and many other cases illustrate, the government often errs and acts in a politically motivated manner. For this reason alone, it is inappropriate for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to act as the arbiter of permissible journalism. Moreover, government censorship of truthful and accurate speech — rather than dispelling conspiracy theories — serves only to exacerbate the erosion of public trust in our elections.

My work on the Twitter Files and other reporting on this topic differs slightly from recent testimony heard by this committee. I have also shed light on private entities’ attempts to control and curtail public discourse on major areas of public policy. I revealed that a group called Public Good Projects regularly collaborated with Twitter during the pandemic to censor specific social media accounts because of their criticism of establishment views around Covid-19 vaccines, while amplifying accounts supportive of vaccines and government viewpoints. This particular censorship campaign was entirely funded by biopharma lobbyists that represent Moderna and Pfizer.

In some instances, the censorship demands targeted users who simply expressed opposition to “vaccine passports” – the proposal to make a person’s right to travel and engage in certain forms of commerce dependent on their vaccination status. The validity of the idea of “vaccine passports” is a reasonable topic of debate in a free society, and should not be repressed by a drug company with financial interests at stake.

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More recently, in collaboration with UnHerd and RealClearInvestigations, and with co-author Jack Poulson, I reported that Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

The company even targeted tennis champion Novak Djokovic in its misinformation reports, not for any statement he made but for his accomplishments. In one report, Moderna warned that: “The optics of Djokovic, whose vaccine opposition barred him from competing in the 2022 US Open, returning to and winning the Moderna-sponsored [2023 US Open] competition bolsters anti-vaccine claims that vaccines — and mandates — are unnecessary.” In other words, Djokovic’s alleged act of “misinformation” was his unvaccinated athletic ability. There are many other examples in my reporting, beyond the Twitter Files and Moderna documents, that show government and corporate interests trying to stifle free speech on public safety and national security grounds.

Last month, I reported on confidential documents chronicling the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that has expanded into the US market with the guidance of former DHS intelligence director Brian Murphy. This individual was previously responsible for the illicit surveillance of Left-wing protesters and the creation of dossiers on journalists critical of the government. Logically has quietly secured US military contracts and piloted a program for the Chicago Police Department to employ its AI platform to analyse local hip-hop music to predict crime. The state of Oregon also retained Logically to combat so-called election misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections. The company is now competing for contracts to monitor and remove alleged social media misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

It is important to underscore why the American public should be aware of the British AI firm Logically. The United Kingdom government awarded Logically multi-million dollar contracts to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. The company instead surveilled activists and academics who expressed legitimate forms of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns and vaccine passports, according to a recent watchdog report on the firm’s activities. Logically previously boasted of a special partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to automatically suppress and label content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company immense influence over content moderation decisions. It is another case of the government outsourcing censorship to a private entity with a record of targeting lawful speech around hotly contested political issues.

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I want to emphasise that this focus on corporate influence and government surveillance is not a recent development in my work. In 2015, I uncovered evidence of agricultural industry lobbyists ghostwriting state legislation designed to criminalise the recording of slaughterhouses and dairy facilities. The legislation was designed to imprison journalists and animal rights activists who document conditions in slaughterhouses. Many of these “Ag-Gag” laws have since been overturned by the courts for violating the First Amendment. I have also previously reported on government and private sector surveillance and censorship targeting environmental groups, Black Lives Matter activists, and labour unions.

In December, I exposed the efforts of pro-Israel activists to stifle pro-Palestinian voices. One notable example, relevant to today’s hearing, involves the deployment of artificial intelligence bots to mass-report social media posts expressing solidarity or sympathy for Palestinians as violations of platform terms of service. Many of the targets appear to be individuals using innocuous hashtags like #FreePalestine, unrelated to hate or violence. There are over 1,000 documented cases of Meta removing peaceful content advocating for Palestinian human rights. The use of artificial intelligence bots to suppress nonviolent and benign forms of political expression during a conflict illustrates another case of organised censorship.

Last summer, I profiled the activities of Flashpoint, among the cottage industry of so-called threat intelligence firms that use artificial intelligence to monitor activist behaviour. The company began by infiltrating al-Qaeda chat rooms and selling that data to the FBI. Critics argue that the firm played a central role in the wrongful convictions of several Muslim Americans. Flashpoint, which still maintains ties with the FBI, has more recently infiltrated the private communications of ordinary airline workers who organised against coercive and ultimately unconstitutional vaccine mandates. Many of these anti-mandate activists were conservative Trump supporters.

I present these examples to underscore how censorship affects dissenting voices of all ideological stripes. I understand that in our intensely polarised environment, free speech has become a divisive issue — often misused by politicians seeking a scapegoat for societal ills. But free speech is critical for activists spanning the ideological spectrum, and to every journalist committed to uncovering the truth. And history teaches us that when governments and private entities demand new censorship authority to attack dissidents of a particular stripe in one era, those tools are just as likely to be used against an entirely different set of actors a few years later. Today’s cheerleaders for an unaccountable “content moderation” regime may very well be tomorrow’s victims of that same system.

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Before I close, I wish to draw your attention to a hearing held nearly 12 years ago by another House committee, addressing a remarkably similar topic. The committee convened a hearing to demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about revelations that the agency had retained General Dynamics, a defence contractor, to conduct round-the-clock monitoring of social media.

Republicans controlled the House at the time, but members of the committee from both sides of the aisle raised concerns about DHS practices. Then-Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, called for assurances that DHS was not infringing upon “civil rights and civil liberties of those who choose to use social media” or “spying on lawful activities”. Then-Rep. Patrick Meehan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, cautioned against DHS and its contractors monitoring private citizens’ speech, which he said “could have a chilling effect on individuals’ privacy rights and people’s freedom of speech and dissent against their government”.

That hearing looks quaint today. In terms of bureaucratic and technological capabilities, the General Dynamics scandal was a relic of another era. It occurred prior to the emergence of CISA, the DHS agency with a multi-billion-dollar budget, actively monitoring Americans for wrong speak on contentious issues. It transpired before significant advancements in AI allowed for far more invasive monitoring of constitutionally protected speech through sentiment analysis. And it pre-dated the creation of numerous anti-misinformation NGOs and private-sector firms competing for contracts to control and censor the internet.

Nonetheless, the 2012 hearing serves as a reminder that concerns about censorship and surveillance need not break down along partisan lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can still unite to voice concerns about the erosion of free expression and government efforts to regulate political discourse. I implore this committee to rise above partisanship and treat the threat posed by online surveillance and censorship as an American issue, affecting all of us equally. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to testify today, and I eagerly await your questions. Thank you.