Adolescence Writer on How Show Sparked False Race-Swap Theory

One-shot Netflix seriesAdolescence” created much more than just a record number of views. Soon after its debut on the streamer, it sparked widespread debate both in the UK and abroad about knife crime, incel culture and the impact of social media on boys, issues that were then debated in the British Parliament.

The phenomenal success of Teenager also quickly led to claims that the story of a young boy accused of murdering a classmate took a real-life crime in Britain and changed the antagonist from a black child to a white child. The claims were shared on social media, with Elon Musk using his own platform X to label the show as “anti-white propaganda.” Meanwhile, back home, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch confirmed the theory and in an interview railed against any government policy based on anything that took real history and “fundamentally changed” it.

For the writer Jack Thornewho at the time called the allegations “ridiculous” and said they were not based on any one crime, the conspiracy theory about the show was not only wildly inaccurate, but underscored exactly what it was trying to say about the dangers of online algorithms.

“That was the most interesting thing about our show: how quickly it became a bouncing ball, where a lot of people had a lot of different opinions about it, and a lot of people said a lot of things as if they were facts,” he said, speaking at a panel discussion at Content London. “And one fact that spread very quickly was that they took a crime committed by a black boy and turned it into a crime committed by a white boy because they are woke and destructive and hate white people.”

When it came to Badenoch herself endorsing these claims, Thorne said that the fact that she clearly saw the race-swapping theory as fact “speaks to her algorithm and speaks to what the show is all about in a lot of ways.”

He added: “We're in a situation where we're being fed what we believe in, and in the post-fact era that we live in, it was fascinating to be a part of this whole issue and touch on all the topics that we were trying to talk about.”