For someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about the internet, I am sometimes accused of being rather suspicious of it.  If you sit through one of my classes, though, you’d know really, I am driven by encouraging people to get the best out of it.

As a criminologist, I have written extensively about the way search engines, social media platforms, and online archives can become repositories of judgement. Through my work on digital rehabilitation, I have explored what happens when a person’s worst day becomes permanently searchable. As a Jew, I am acutely aware that social media is not always the best friend of our community either. Algorithms reward outrage more readily than nuance, and antisemitism has found fertile ground online.

It is therefore easy to become cynical.

Easy to focus on what the internet gets wrong.

Easy to forget that the same tools capable of amplifying hatred can also amplify creativity, entrepreneurship, and community.

Recently, however, I found myself reflecting on a rather unlikely example of social media being used extraordinarily well.

The setting was Gateshead in the North East of England.

For those unfamiliar with it, Gateshead is home to one of the largest Charedi Jewish communities in Europe. It is a community more commonly associated with yeshivot and scholarship than with influencer culture. If somebody had asked me ten years ago where I expected to find a social-media-driven food phenomenon, Gateshead would not have been near the top of the list.

And yet that is precisely what appears to have happened.

At the centre of........

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