Why social media platforms spread the worst political messages

There’s a quote I keep coming back to whenever I think about online political discourse: “All the world’s a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare. What the Bard didn’t foresee is that the stage would one day be run by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and littered with algorithmically selected hot takes, clickbait headlines, and QAnon memes.

Today the theatre of politics isn't Westminster or Washington, it’s TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter, still tragically named). This is where the stories get told and politicians’ actions in legislators exist only to trend on social media platforms and raise their profile. This is where most of our attention is focused, however “focused” we are when we doom scroll.

Theatre of retention

Technology platforms don’t just facilitate the spread of political narratives; they shape them. These are not neutral tools. The medium is not just the message, it’s the producer, the casting director, and the lighting technician. When we debate policy, news or conspiracy online, we are performing inside a theatre whose architecture was built not for reasoned argument, but for retention metrics.

If you’re crafting a narrative in 2025 and you’re not thinking about how it will play - how it will be clipped, quoted, memed, dunked on, or algorithmically elevated - then you’re not in the political conversation. This leads me to ask: is the way we consume politics shaping the politics we get? Also, are the wrong narratives winning?

Take QAnon. Or the idea that vaccines are a secret form of population control. Or the increasingly popular belief that central banks are a satanic cabal in disguise. Or scepticism about climate change. These narratives didn’t go mainstream because they were true. They went viral because they were sticky. Catchy. Shareable. Especially amongst bored Boomers spending hours on Facebook on their smartphones. Facebook, and other social media platforms elevate the sticky over the true.

Down the rabbit hole

We’re all living on the timeline now, and most of us aren’t choosing the stories we see. We’re being fed them, passively, in the gaps between emails, while queuing for coffee, or waiting for sleep to arrive. The hardware and software feeding them to us are not neutral broadcasters either. They are dopamine slot machines, calibrated to hijack attention and convert it into advertising gold. They’re not here to inform you. They’re here to keep you looking.

So, what happens when these systems encounter politics? You go down a rabbit hole without much of a say in where you end up.

Recommendation engines, particularly YouTube’s, don’t just give you what you asked for. They give you what will keep you watching. Sometimes, that’s another Mitchel and Webb Look sketch, sometimes it’s a video about distant galaxies, sometimes an interview with Florence Pugh. However, sometimes it’s “The TRUTH About the Deep State (They Don’t Want You to Know)” given the same level of prominence as legit news reporting and trailers for Marvel films. From there, it’s just a few clicks to flat Earth, climate change denial, or white genocide.

Fear works

The kicker? You didn’t even search for this stuff. You didn’t have to. The system knew you’d bite, because someone like you - same age, same job, same fears - already did.

This isn’t a system that pushes everyone into their own bespoke dystopia. It’s worse. It amplifies the most engaging narratives - the ones with moral panic, emotional simplicity, and good enemies - and after the most attention grabbing narrative of all has been found it’s fired at everyone. It turns out the same things hold most people’s attention, and that’s fascism. It turns out fear works. Anger works. “They’re coming for your kids” always works.

It’s bad for business

So, if narratives shape politics, and platforms shape narratives, then who shapes the platforms? Capital. That’s who.

These systems are designed to maximise ad revenue. That’s the logic of surveillance capitalism: capture attention, model behaviour, feed stimuli, and then sell that attention - that’s your attention - to advertisers.

Truth, nuance, and boring-but-important policy details don’t trend, so they don’t get a look in. It’s bad for business. The tech billionaires and the Wall Street types who fund their projects might nominally care about abstract things like truth and democracy, but they care about concrete things like revenue, market share and time on site much more. This means they will continue to aid the spread of narratives that are false or enrage people until they vote for reactionary politicians. Now tech billionaires must bend the knee to the monster they created.

Changing the record

Can we change this?

Yes, but that’s political. It would take a movement, an electoral coalition, which is hard to assemble. The people most harmed by this system are too fragmented, too polarised, or too doom-scrolled to organise. Real change would mean confronting the wealth and power of tech billionaires.

We have done it before. We regulated cigarettes. We demanded seatbelts. We could ban certain algorithmic features, restrict attention-hacking designs, or break up tech monopolies. We could treat tech platforms like we once treated cars: useful, but too dangerous to go unregulated.

There is still time

To do this we have to be honest. Social media didn’t invent the business model of using outrage to get attention and then selling that attention to advertisers. Fox News and tabloids like The Sun have been at it for years. The difference is now it’s in your pocket, and it never turns off.

So yes, technology matters. Yes, narrative matters. However, it’s the design of technology platforms, optimised for surveillance capitalism, which determines the political narratives we are exposed to. If democracy is a battle of stories, then it matters who controls the stage of this world. The good news is that there is still time to change it.