Are you racist, or is it your algorithm?

Lee Bongo has an enviable amount of time on his hands. While the rest of us are trying to remember our passwords or work out why our energy bills have doubled, Lee has made it his personal mission to patrol adverts featuring Black and brown people on social media.

From a handful of screenshots of perfectly ordinary advertising campaigns, he's managed to uncover what he believes is evidence of the "Great Replacement". For anyone fortunate enough not to have encountered this particular corner of the internet, it's a racist conspiracy theory claiming that white European populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white people.

Imagine seeing a Black woman advertising a savings account and concluding that Western civilisation is under threat. Quite the creative interpretation of a 4.2% interest rate. And unfortunately, Lee isn't alone.

Across social media, adverts featuring Black, brown and mixed-race people are attracting streams of racist comments. The advertising industry has spent years working to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, encouraging brands to reflect the actual people who live in Britain. And now, having finally put more representative faces on our screens, we're watching those same people become targets of abuse in the comments.

Advertising has always had the power to shape perceptions of society. It tells us who belongs but social media has added an interesting complication: the audience now gets to write its own commentary underneath. Have you ever heard of the phrase "the culture is in the comments"?

And some of that audience could do with a very long break from the internet. Hostile comments will always exist, they attract attention, generate engagement and become highly visible alongside the advertising that brands are paying to promote. An advert intended to normalise diversity can suddenly become a platform for a nasty barrage of racism.

So in trying to make society more representative, are we inadvertently creating more opportunities for racism to spread?

It's an uncomfortable question, but one worth asking. And what happens if it happens to your brand? We can't stop featuring diverse people in advertising, that would be an absurd victory for Lee and crew. The answer is actually to be able to take more responsibility for what happens next.

So whose problem is it? Other than Lee's problem, social platforms have a duty to enforce their rules around hate speech and prevent harmful content from spreading. And brands, particularly those paying to advertise on these platforms, have both the influence and the responsibility to demand better.

Imagine a brand coming to me and saying, "Asad, we've done everything you told us to. We've invested in research, we've improved representation, we've created a campaign that reflects our customers. It's brilliant. But now the comments section looks like a meeting of the world's least pleasant book club. What on earth do we do?" A fair question and a common question.

The quickest solution is to turn off the comments. Put up the digital equivalent of a garden fence and pretend nobody's shouting on the other side. And sometimes, particularly when abuse is escalating, that might be necessary to protect the people involved but it's not a strategy for tackling the underlying problem.

Lee can simply take his opinions elsewhere. Perhaps to a WhatsApp group, perhaps to Reddit, perhaps to whichever online community currently specialises in being furious about the ethnicity of people selling car insurance.

I'd like to see more brands willing to challenge this behaviour rather than quietly stepping away from it. Brands such as Aldi, NatWest, Ryanair and Innocent have shown how a confident, distinctive voice can make social media feel like an actual conversation rather than a corporate noticeboard. Responding to racism is, of course, considerably more serious than making a joke about someone's shopping habits or a delayed flight but the underlying principle is the same: brands need to know who they are and what they're prepared to say.

You don't need to be replying to every racist comment with a carefully crafted insult. Nobody needs the social media intern entering a 47-message argument at 11.30pm. It means knowing when to challenge misinformation, when to remove abuse, when to publicly reaffirm your values and when to refuse someone the attention they're clearly seeking.

At TU, we talk a lot about cultural confidence. It's the ability to understand the society you're operating in, recognise the tensions and conversations shaping it, and respond with knowledge rather than panic. It's exactly what brands need when situations like this arise.

You can invest in the most representative advertising campaign in the world, but if your team doesn't have the cultural understanding to handle the reaction, you've only done half the work.

Education can't prevent every offensive comment from being written, but it can prepare teams to recognise racist narratives, understand their impact and respond appropriately. It also gives people the confidence to distinguish between genuine criticism and prejudice disguised as consumer opinion.

Better moderation, stronger relationships with platforms, clear escalation processes and employees who are equipped to make culturally informed decisions. Above all, it means recognising that representation doesn't end when the advert goes live. The industry has made meaningful progress in showing more of society in its advertising. Now it needs to get equally serious about defending that progress.

So a huge thanks goes to Lee Bongo, you've really made a compelling case for cultural confidence.