JASON PARHAM
A recent study published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that rage is a lucrative business. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict last October, “accounts posting anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim content have seen a sharp rise in followers on X,” the study concluded, and the social media company appeared to be making money from ads that showed up alongside those posts. Imran Ahmed knows this problem all too well, and he’s made it his life’s work to expose what happens when hate can be profitable. It’s been this way since September 11, 2001, the day before his 23rd birthday.
“I felt connected to it,” Ahmed tells me over Zoom. His family is Pashtun, one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The Taliban were also Pashtun. “I thought, I’ve got to do something to fix the world,” he says. “Fix this deep evil, this deep wrong.” So Ahmed went back to college, studying politics at the University of Cambridge, which later led to a role as a political adviser to Hilary Benn, then the shadow foreign secretary in Parliament.
But Parliament came with its own set of challenges. Ahmed’s second life turn came in 2016, as the Labour Party campaigned to keep the UK in the European Union. As debate over Brexit intensified, Ahmed tells me, the party was experiencing “a rapid infiltration of antisemitism.”
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