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At first glance, Amelia, with her purple bob and pixie-girl looks, seems an unlikely candidate for the far right to adopt as an increasingly popular meme.
Yet, for the past few weeks, memes and AI-generated videos featuring this fictional British teenager have proliferated across social media, especially on X. In them, Amelia parrots right-wing, often racist, talking points, connecting her celebration of stereotypical British culture with anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes.
She sips pints in pubs, reads “Harry Potter” and goes back in time to fight in some of Britain’s most famous battles. But she also dons an ICE uniform to violently deport migrants and embraces such extreme rhetoric that even British far-right activist Tommy Robinson has posted videos of her. It’s an unlikely life for a schoolgirl.
But Amelia has other characteristics that have made her “memeable” – namely, that she was originally created two years ago for a computer game as part of the British government’s anti-extremist Prevent program.
The game, called “Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet & Extremism,” was developed by Shout Out UK (SOUK), a nonprofit attempting to improve public understanding of politics, as part of a learning package funded by the UK’s Home Office.
It aimed to educate young people about the dangers of online radicalization, requiring them to navigate six different scenarios using multiple-choice options. Users play as a cartoon character, “Charlie,” who joins a new school and makes friends with “Amelia,” who shares anti-migrant ideas and disinformation before attempting to recruit Charlie to join anti-migrant groups and protests.
This video portrays Amelia traveling back in time to the 1960s, the color saturation becoming brighter to portray how some far-right supporters perceive Britain was then.
This video portrays Amelia traveling back in time to the 1960s, the color saturation becoming brighter to portray how some far-right supporters perceive Britain was then. Amelia the Patriot/X
The game was relatively simple, and it was picked apart online for the logical leaps it made in each of its scenarios, though it is “not supposed to be played in isolation,” as SOUK CEO Matteo Bergamini told CNN.
Instead, it was meant to be part of a “wider learning package that allows teachers to facilitate more nuanced discussions about what constitutes healthy and safe behaviors and what could be potentially unsafe and/or illegal,” he explained.
Amelia’s appearance was “not particularly significant,” Bergamini said, but experts say her being a White, purple-haired girl who espouses far-right ideas inadvertently created an avatar who could be coopted by the online right.
She “ticks a lot of boxes” for that group, which, in its specific, sarcastic, online tone, memes everything, said Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue.
Her role in the game embodies the broad “stereotypes” many right-wingers have of the British government – namely that they perceive it to be “anti-White” and a “nanny state,” he told CNN.
And, importantly, she is a beautiful woman with the same views as them. “It’s striking how many of the edits are highly sexualized” at the same time as similar accounts “accuse migrants of being sexual predators and sexually deviant,” Venkataramakrishnan added.
When asked for comment, a Home Office spokesperson told CNN that its Prevent strategy “has diverted nearly 6,000 people away from violent ideologies, stopping terrorists and keeping our country safe.” The local council for whom the game was made hasn’t yet responded to CNN asking whether the game was still in use.
‘Degree of plausible deniability’:
The meme first started spreading on January 9, after The Telegraph, a right-leaning British newspaper, ran an article titled “The Prevent video game that treats every teenager like a far-Right extremist.” Bergamini described the headline as “misleading.”
The videos play into anti-migrant and racist tropes.
The videos play into anti-migrant and racist tropes. Amelia the Patriot/X
Right-wing outlet GB News picked up the story the next day, wrongly saying that the game “warns children they’ll be treated like terrorists for questioning mass migration.”
That was “outright misinformation,” Bergamini said, underlining that the game said children would only be referred to anti-extremist programs if they became involved in illegal activity, not for their opinion on an issue. Still, with that fuel and the perception of a British government-funded game policing teenagers’ political opinions, the Amelia meme spread like wildfire.
“I think I’m in love with Amelia,” one X user posted alongside a screenshot of the game, garnering more than 5 million views. One X community group called “for the Based, the Phenomenon that is, Amelia,” had more than 11,000 members as of Thursday. Elon Musk retweeted an Amelia meme last week and, by last weekend, there were two Amelia cryptocurrency “meme coins,” according to CoinGecko.
Memes, which operate as a sort of coded language, imbued with different layers of meaning depending on how much context the viewer has, have become integral to any political discourse. And those that connote hate speech have a “degree of plausible deniability,” noted Venkataramakrishnan, because they can be defended as “just a joke.”
As AI allows people to churn out content almost instantaneously, these memes and images can spread quickly both inside the country in which they originated – the UK in Amelia’s case – and internationally.
Flooding the internet with content like this, which aligns with their world view, “really helps” the far right, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in Britain and the United States.
User-generated videos featuring Amelia soon adopted references to other far-right memes beloved internationally. In one AI-generated video, she holds out two pills and urges “Charlie” to take the “purple pill,” referencing the far -right’s insistence it is “red-pilled” and the famous scene in “The Matrix” where Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo, chooses between taking the blue pill, which will keep him in blissful ignorance, or the red pill, which will reveal an uncomfortable, enlightened reality.
The "red pill" is a popular incel meme.
The "red pill" is a popular incel meme. Amelia the Patriot/X
In another AI-generated video, posted on X, she stands alongside US President Donald Trump as the poster calls on Americans to “repost if you support Amelia and want Britain to remain British – ethically, culturally, religiously.”
CNN has contacted X for comment.
Though Amelia is a particularly viral example, using AI to generate content was already a popular pastime for the online right in Britain. It allows them to “fabricate support from empathetic, trustworthy-looking British characters,” as well as simply generate images “they want to place in people’s minds,” Hood told CNN.
He cites one example where a Facebook page “churning out images of trustworthy-looking British pensioners or veterans talking about their concerns about immigration” was run from Sri Lanka, according to the platform’s own transparency information.
And without tech companies clearly labeling such content as AI, it becomes difficult for people to distinguish between real images and AI ones, Hood added, especially if they aren’t already in on the joke.
“Our research indicates that there seems to be a significant number of people who treat these images as credible… Particularly where there’s an effort to make this stuff look believable, you will find comments that seem to suggest the users responding thinking that’s a real person.”
At first glance, Amelia, with her purple bob and pixie-girl looks, seems an unlikely candidate for the far right to adopt as an increasingly popular meme.
Yet, for the past few weeks, memes and AI-generated videos featuring this fictional British teenager have proliferated across social media, especially on X. In them, Amelia parrots right-wing, often racist, talking points, connecting her celebration of stereotypical British culture with anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes.
She sips pints in pubs, reads “Harry Potter” and goes back in time to fight in some of Britain’s most famous battles. But she also dons an ICE uniform to violently deport migrants and embraces such extreme rhetoric that even British far-right activist Tommy Robinson has posted videos of her. It’s an unlikely life for a schoolgirl.
But Amelia has other characteristics that have made her “memeable” – namely, that she was originally created two years ago for a computer game as part of the British government’s anti-extremist Prevent program.
The game, called “Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet & Extremism,” was developed by Shout Out UK (SOUK), a nonprofit attempting to improve public understanding of politics, as part of a learning package funded by the UK’s Home Office.
It aimed to educate young people about the dangers of online radicalization, requiring them to navigate six different scenarios using multiple-choice options. Users play as a cartoon character, “Charlie,” who joins a new school and makes friends with “Amelia,” who shares anti-migrant ideas and disinformation before attempting to recruit Charlie to join anti-migrant groups and protests.
This video portrays Amelia traveling back in time to the 1960s, the color saturation becoming brighter to portray how some far-right supporters perceive Britain was then.
This video portrays Amelia traveling back in time to the 1960s, the color saturation becoming brighter to portray how some far-right supporters perceive Britain was then. Amelia the Patriot/X
The game was relatively simple, and it was picked apart online for the logical leaps it made in each of its scenarios, though it is “not supposed to be played in isolation,” as SOUK CEO Matteo Bergamini told CNN.
Instead, it was meant to be part of a “wider learning package that allows teachers to facilitate more nuanced discussions about what constitutes healthy and safe behaviors and what could be potentially unsafe and/or illegal,” he explained.
Amelia’s appearance was “not particularly significant,” Bergamini said, but experts say her being a White, purple-haired girl who espouses far-right ideas inadvertently created an avatar who could be coopted by the online right.
She “ticks a lot of boxes” for that group, which, in its specific, sarcastic, online tone, memes everything, said Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue.
Her role in the game embodies the broad “stereotypes” many right-wingers have of the British government – namely that they perceive it to be “anti-White” and a “nanny state,” he told CNN.
And, importantly, she is a beautiful woman with the same views as them. “It’s striking how many of the edits are highly sexualized” at the same time as similar accounts “accuse migrants of being sexual predators and sexually deviant,” Venkataramakrishnan added.
When asked for comment, a Home Office spokesperson told CNN that its Prevent strategy “has diverted nearly 6,000 people away from violent ideologies, stopping terrorists and keeping our country safe.” The local council for whom the game was made hasn’t yet responded to CNN asking whether the game was still in use.
‘Degree of plausible deniability’:
The meme first started spreading on January 9, after The Telegraph, a right-leaning British newspaper, ran an article titled “The Prevent video game that treats every teenager like a far-Right extremist.” Bergamini described the headline as “misleading.”
The videos play into anti-migrant and racist tropes.
The videos play into anti-migrant and racist tropes. Amelia the Patriot/X
Right-wing outlet GB News picked up the story the next day, wrongly saying that the game “warns children they’ll be treated like terrorists for questioning mass migration.”
That was “outright misinformation,” Bergamini said, underlining that the game said children would only be referred to anti-extremist programs if they became involved in illegal activity, not for their opinion on an issue. Still, with that fuel and the perception of a British government-funded game policing teenagers’ political opinions, the Amelia meme spread like wildfire.
“I think I’m in love with Amelia,” one X user posted alongside a screenshot of the game, garnering more than 5 million views. One X community group called “for the Based, the Phenomenon that is, Amelia,” had more than 11,000 members as of Thursday. Elon Musk retweeted an Amelia meme last week and, by last weekend, there were two Amelia cryptocurrency “meme coins,” according to CoinGecko.
Memes, which operate as a sort of coded language, imbued with different layers of meaning depending on how much context the viewer has, have become integral to any political discourse. And those that connote hate speech have a “degree of plausible deniability,” noted Venkataramakrishnan, because they can be defended as “just a joke.”
As AI allows people to churn out content almost instantaneously, these memes and images can spread quickly both inside the country in which they originated – the UK in Amelia’s case – and internationally.
Flooding the internet with content like this, which aligns with their world view, “really helps” the far right, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in Britain and the United States.
User-generated videos featuring Amelia soon adopted references to other far-right memes beloved internationally. In one AI-generated video, she holds out two pills and urges “Charlie” to take the “purple pill,” referencing the far -right’s insistence it is “red-pilled” and the famous scene in “The Matrix” where Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo, chooses between taking the blue pill, which will keep him in blissful ignorance, or the red pill, which will reveal an uncomfortable, enlightened reality.
The "red pill" is a popular incel meme.
The "red pill" is a popular incel meme. Amelia the Patriot/X
In another AI-generated video, posted on X, she stands alongside US President Donald Trump as the poster calls on Americans to “repost if you support Amelia and want Britain to remain British – ethically, culturally, religiously.”
CNN has contacted X for comment.
Though Amelia is a particularly viral example, using AI to generate content was already a popular pastime for the online right in Britain. It allows them to “fabricate support from empathetic, trustworthy-looking British characters,” as well as simply generate images “they want to place in people’s minds,” Hood told CNN.
He cites one example where a Facebook page “churning out images of trustworthy-looking British pensioners or veterans talking about their concerns about immigration” was run from Sri Lanka, according to the platform’s own transparency information.
And without tech companies clearly labeling such content as AI, it becomes difficult for people to distinguish between real images and AI ones, Hood added, especially if they aren’t already in on the joke.
“Our research indicates that there seems to be a significant number of people who treat these images as credible… Particularly where there’s an effort to make this stuff look believable, you will find comments that seem to suggest the users responding thinking that’s a real person.”
