Online Extremism’s Challenge to the Enlightenment

We uphold the importance of free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. But what happens when they lead someone to mass murder?

In an interesting and often-overlooked passage in his foundational work on economics, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that the benefits of markets apply to ideas as much as to material goods. State religions, like state-enforced monopolies, would become rigid and inflexible, unable to adapt to change. But if there were a multitude of churches, they would all need to innovate to seek new converts, like businesses competing for new customers. Religious zeal, he argued, was dangerous in the leaders of sects which held broad power in society, but was benign if the sect was one of hundreds, without institutional power.

Smith then went even further. Just as competition in a market would lead to economic growth, so would competition among churches lead to a steady improvement in religion. Such competition ‘might in time, probably reduce the doctrine of the greater part of them to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have, in all ages of the world, wished to see established; but such as positive law has, perhaps, never yet established, and probably never will establish in any country’.

It’s a classic argument from a classic Enlightenment thinker. Free thought and free speech lead to backwards, absurd, and destructive ideas being defeated and overturned by the force of argument and evidence. But is it a good argument?

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Smith was half-right. State-enforced religions are barriers to progress. From when Christianity became the only legal religion in the Roman Empire in the late fourth century until the breakdown of laws against blasphemy, apostasy, and heresy during and after the Enlightenment, ideas which were accepted by the religious authorities were enforced, regardless of their merit. Aristotle wrote that the Sun orbited the Earth, the Catholic Church accepted that Aristotle was right, and so for twelve centuries, the Earth remained stubbornly immobile in European science. This argument applies equally to state-enforced secular ideologies, too. These did not exist in Smith’s time, when all forms of philosophy were more closely bound to religion, but it is easy to understand Soviet or Chinese Communism as a state-enforced monopoly of thought.

But at the same time, we also must confront the reality that free and open exchanges of ideas among the adherents of thousands of sects have led to the growth and dissemination of ideologies which are varying hues of destructive and insane. When he was writing of exchanges of ideas, Smith was probably thinking of polite debates among his learned colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, not the spewing of bile back and forth on X/Twitter.

From online radicalisation to terrorism

In my own country, Australia, political and religious violence is thankfully rare. Yet over the summer, we saw two deeply disturbing examples of it. On 14 December, two Islamic extremists shot dead fifteen people at a Jewish event at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach and wounded dozens of others. And on 26 January, a man threw a homemade bomb into a group of Indigenous Australians and their supporters who were protesting the celebration of Australia’s national holiday on the anniversary of the beginning of British colonisation. The bomb, thankfully, failed to explode, but it is clear that the bomber had the same murderous intention as the Bondi shooters. We know that the Bondi shooters were radicalised into the fanatical and violent ideology of Islamic State, and while details of how they were radicalised are still coming out, it is likely that the internet played a role. Western Australian police have confirmed that the Australia Day bomber was self-radicalised through a steady stream of white supremacist and anti-Aboriginal material accessed online.

There are, sadly, many examples of online radicalisation leading to violence. It is a challenge—arguably the challenge—to the Enlightenment commitment to free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. What do we do when the free market of ideas does not lead to ‘a pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism’, but to mass murder? There are no perfect solutions. Even if we decided that the Enlightenment thinkers got it wrong and we do actually need an end to free speech and a new, state-imposed orthodoxy, censoring the internet is impossible. If Galileo had been able to post that the Earth orbited the Sun anonymously on Reddit, the Papal Inquisition would have had a harder time silencing him. Like splitting the atom, inventing the internet has presented humanity with unimaginable promise and also new and unprecedented risk.

The tools available to governments to address online radicalisation are limited and fall into two categories. On one hand, governments can try to find, block, and remove extremist content, suspend the individuals who spread it, or ban access to platforms that allow it. On the other, they can spread counter-narratives and educate those who are identified as being vulnerable to radicalisation. Both approaches are easier said than done. And when it comes to spreading counter-narratives, there have been some major misfires.

How Pathways backfired

Take the example of Prevent, the British Government’s anti-extremism initiative. Prevent does not have an easy job, but even making allowances for this, it did not get 2026 off to a good start.

Late last year it collaborated with the West Riding of Yorkshire Council and the Hull Collaborative Partnership to launch a program called Pathways. Pathways is a simple online game created by Shout Out UK. You play as a student presented with a series of dilemmas. For example, do you share a friend’s anti-immigration video or risk losing the friendship? In several of the scenarios, the serpent tempting Charlie to bite the apple of online radicalisation is a young woman called Amelia. With her distinctive bobbed purple hair, black choker, and rage-against-the-establishment attitude, she quickly became a mascot of the online right. For much of early 2026, social media was flooded with human- and AI-created Amelia memes.

In an interview for The Guardian, Matteo Bergamini, CEO of Shout Out UK, admitted that the online right’s enthusiasm for Amelia, and the general criticism of the game, took him by surprise. ‘There has been a lot of misrepresentation unfortunately’, he said in the interview. ‘The game does not state, for example, that questioning mass migration is inherently wrong’.

This touches on one of the problems with Pathways, which is that it isn’t clear on what the extremism it is about actually is. At different points, the game suggests that attending an anti-immigration rally or even sharing an anti-immigration video might be forms of extremist conduct. ‘Downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction’, it warns sternly at one point. There is a chasm between protesting levels of immigration and committing an act of racist violence, and the vague nature of Pathways’ warnings fuelled the online pile-on.

If they are to be in any way successful, online deradicalisation initiatives will need to present a much clearer message than Pathways does, and present it in a way that understands its intended audience. This would include not personifying radicalisation as an attractive Gen Z woman with a distinctive sense of style. One thing we can say for certain is that young men’s social lives and romantic prospects are definitely not improved by becoming an online racist, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use this as leverage.

Conclusion

The overall picture is grim, but there is one point which gives me hope. Before the spread of Enlightenment ideas, killing people because they were of a different race, culture, or creed wasn’t particularly controversial. We all have ancestors who thought in the same way as the Bondi shooters and the Australia Day bomber. The Enlightenment does present a compelling counter-narrative to extremism. And publications, like the Freethinker, which share Enlightenment ideals, have a role in promoting this narrative. It is not an easy task, but a worthwhile one. And the distinctive pig logo, Porcus Sapiens, is much less likely to be co-opted than Amelia.