Populism has always lurked in the wings of democracy, but in recent years it has been thrust onto centre stage, amplified through social media megaphones.
From Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and its authoritarian undertones to the surge of the populist Right in Europe and the UK, the pattern is clear: politics today is made viral first, and coherent later — if at all.
The common thread is not just disaffection with political elites or the failings of traditional parties. It is also — largely, I submit — the result of “The Algorithm”. Social media platforms, built to maximise engagement and outrage, have become political engines that simplify complex realities into memes and keep feeding us the biases we already hold. And it appears now to be threatening the liberal world order that has underpinned Western democracy since the end of World War 2.
The consequence is a politics of shallowness, emotiveness and polarisation — and it’s far more dangerous than many of us are prepared to admit. South Africa is not immune.
Reading — the slow kind that informs and makes us think deeply — is dying. According to researchers at the University of Florida and University College London, reading for pleasure in the US has declined by more than 40% over the past 20 years. “This is not a small dip; it’s a sustained decline of about 3% a year,” Jill Sonke, at the University of Florida, told the Financial Times. “It’s significant and deeply concerning.”
Book sales are plunging, libraries are poorly funded (and barely used) and young people have turned almost exclusively to short-form video on their smartphones as their main source of information about the world. What hope is there for nuanced political thought when the primary medium of political communication is a 10-second TikTok clip?
Newspapers once curated the flow of news, offering a balance of perspectives and the steadying hand of editorial judgment. Now much of that journalism lives behind paywalls, accessible only to those willing and able to pay (few do). Free-to-air online journalism survives but is increasingly succumbing to the economics of clicks.
Publishers chase page impressions over depth, the tyranny of the analytics dashboard forcing even credible outlets to flirt with clickbait.
There are noble exceptions — still-free sources that hold the line on quality — but the business model is threadbare, and AI-generated search summaries are siphoning traffic away from publishers.
The result is that most people no longer encounter the considered work of reporters and editors — you, dear FM reader, are part of a small and shrinking minority. Instead, people scroll through algorithmic feeds tuned to provoke, amuse or enrage. Tabloid trash masquerades as journalism, feeding conspiracy theories, sharpening divisions and drowning out the voices that once stitched societies together through common narratives.
The political effects are obvious. MAGA thrives not only because of Trump’s weird charisma, but because Fox News sound bites are distilled into TikToks, shared a million times and inserted into endless digital echo chambers.
In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK understands that a cleverly edited clip shared on X can move public opinion faster than any newspaper editorial. It won’t be long before South African politicians latch onto this trend and exploit it for all it’s worth — some already are.
We are becoming more polarised as societies, not because our politics has become more complex but because our attention spans have shrunk. The gnat has replaced the owl. We consume politics the way we consume memes: instantly, emotionally, and without the slow digestion that comes from reading, reflecting and interrogating. And quality journalism, once the antidote, is under endless siege. Paywalls wall off the serious work, leaving the public square awash with free but poor substitutes.
Meanwhile, AI companies scrape publisher content, without asking, to train large language models, then spit out synthetic news summaries that keep users within their ecosystems — further depriving journalism of readers and revenue.
I don’t know where this ends. History is littered with moments where new technologies reshaped politics — the printing press, radio, television, the web — but never has media been so personalised, so algorithmically tailored to confirm our prejudices.
Democracy requires a shared base of facts, a willingness to listen across divides and the patience to engage with complexity. Without these, what remains is performance politics and outrage theatre, leading to the rise of populist and authoritarian temptations of “strong men” who promise simple solutions to complicated problems.
Our politics is increasingly being written not in newsprint but in software code — proprietary algorithms optimised for engagement, not truth. They shape what we see and what we believe — and how we vote.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral