Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism<\/a> is a simple multiple choice format game with basic animation. Its players are taken on a journey as characters at a college. They are invited to make decisions in scenarios including whether or download potentially extremist content or join an Amelia character on a rally organised by \u201ca small political group\u201d protesting against changes in society and the \u201cerosion in British values\u201d.<\/p>\nCertain choices result in a referral under the British government\u2019s Prevent counter-terrorism programme.<\/p>\n
However, it is a subversion of the Amelia character that has exploded across social media channels in a way that has astonished even the creators of the original game.<\/p>\n
Among the plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations are a Manga-style Amelia, a Wallace and Gromit version and AI-generated \u201creal life\u201d encounters between her and the characters of Father Ted or Harry Potter, accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging.<\/p>\n
Analysis provided to the Guardian by Logically, a UK company that monitors disinformation, indicated that an anonymous account known for skilfully disseminating far-right messaging started the Amelia meme on X on 9 January with a post that has since been viewed 1.4m times.<\/p>\n
The volume of \u201cAmeliaposting\u201d has since gone from an average of 500 a day when that account first introduced it to the world to roughly 10,000, starting on 15 January as it hit international audiences. On Wednesday, it hit 11,137 posts on X alone.<\/p>\n
In one of the most surreal twists, an Amelia cryptocurrency has emerged, with social media users seeking to leverage its value on the meme\u2019s rising profile. On Wednesday, Elon Musk retweeted an X account promoting an Amelia cryptocurrency token.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing is the monetisation of hate,\u201d said Matteo Bergamini, the founder and CEO of Shout Out UK, a political and media literacy training company that created the original game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen Telegram groups all messaging each other in Chinese about the meme coin and talking about how to artificially inflate its value, so a lot of money is being made.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company itself has been the target of a deluge of hate mail, including death threats that have now been reported to the police.<\/p>\n
Bergamini points out that the original initiative was never meant to be a stand-alone game. Rather, it was intended to be used in the classrooms alongside a suite of teaching resources, a fact he says coverage and commentary has ignored.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has been a lot of misrepresentation unfortunately,\u201d he said. \u201cThe game does not state, for example, that questioning mass migration is inherently wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others have suggested the initiative had backfired, not least by casting a \u201ccute goth girl\u201d as a negative character, leading to her inadvertently becoming a focus of admiration. But Bergamini said the game \u2013 which used feedback from focus groups with young people before production \u2013 continued to be used and feedback from schools and others was positive.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the speed and sophistication surrounding the creation of supposedly subversive Amelia memes online has taken him by surprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has given us pause for thought about safety, while also demonstrating the very real risks inherent in this emerging AI technology when it comes to democracy, disinformation and other areas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said: \u201cWe have seen the meme having a remarkable spread and proliferating among the far right and beyond, but what\u2019s also been of note is how it is now international.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a way it gets to the heart of what we might term the \u2018dissident\u2019 far-right \u2013 individuals who position themselves outside of the mainstream political scene \u2013 whether that\u2019s \u2018shitposters\u2019 who are just into provoking, others who are in twee memes. A whole ecosystem has embraced it. Clearly, the sexualised imagery is also key to this. The target audience is almost exclusively young men.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In certain corners of the internet, on niche news feeds and algorithms, an AI-generated British schoolgirl has emerged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-389350","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"AI-generated](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1769326508_991_1920.jpg\")
AI-generated Amelia far-right meme \u2013 video<\/p>\n