By Issy Ronald, CNN
(CNN) — 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.
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 de