Read on Twitter
Having come to the GRA from a professional policy officer point of view, and therefore entirely based on the actual legislation & its impacts, it's actually been pretty disturbing to watch the real-time radicalisation of some folk on social media, completely void of any facts.
A handful of folk I originally followed due to shared views on independence slowly, but very clearly in hindsight, went from having fair questions & concerns to becoming full blown bigots, based on very little other than misinformation & the stoking of their fears.
The very nature of Twitter then means that they end up subsequently creating bubbles & echo chambers where the fiction is repeated & affirmed so much that it becomes fact, and the increasing transphobia simply becomes normalised.
None of this is exactly news. It's horrendous, it's grim, but it's also fascinating. I've often wondered how exactly folk can end up being radicalised online. Lo & behold, we have a step-by-step guide on ScotPol Twitter & it's alarmingly simple.
And what's particularly incredible about it is that, from a policy point of view, its fairly mundane, simplistic stuff designed to make a process a bit more efficient. Absolutely the kind of thing, that had it just been implemented quietly, nobody would have noticed.
All that said, it's also important to avoid being too naive & to acknowledge that some were already bigots, the radicalisation of others has just provided the space to feel empowered.
