How algorithms are breaking democracy
The rise of the far-right is being fed by information disorder, says Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins
Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about the huge crowd that marched with Tommy Robinson in London at the weekend. Whatever the exact number, this was the biggest far-right gathering in Britain in living memory.
My first reaction was close to home. On the same day, St George’s crosses in red paint were daubed on doors in my neighbourhood — almost all on the homes of immigrant families.
But what stuck with me most were the voices from the march itself. Not just Robinson’s speech, or Elon Musk’s intervention, but the interviews with ordinary protestors.
Some of those voices sounded very familiar. That’s because I’d met the same people just weeks earlier, at Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham.
Many of the protestors had different complaints — though immigration was a constant — but what united them was an overarching distrust of authority in all its forms.
That chimed with my experience at Reform’s conference. I’ve written about it at length in the London Review of Books: who is bankrolling Reform, how the media covered the event, and why I think Reform’s emerging ideology is “Monday Club Toryism meets Project 2025.”
But one thing that struck me above all was the sheer volume of conspiratorial thinking. The head of a Trump-aligned US think tank dismissed climate change as “a scam.” Covid vaccines had supposedly given the Royal family cancer. The Fabian Society, I was told, secretly runs Britain.
At one point an “independent journalist” from Alex Jones’ InfoWars confided that the European Central Bank wanted to start a war with Russia “so they can break it into five pieces and pillage its resources.”
It’s a cliché to say the internet has broken politics — but that doesn’t make it less true. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been a gift to the far right. Many of the people I spoke to in Birmingham said their media diet was limited to social media, GB News and the Telegraph.
As I write in the LRB:
Reform is well placed to appeal to fragmented communities, already distrustful of mainstream institutions and now consuming a daily diet of online media that confirms their worst suspicions. In the emerging paranoid style of British politics, even such established realities as anthropogenic climate change are endlessly contested. At the same time, the Westminster lobby system provides a veneer of normality, regardless of how far – and how fast – the Overton window shifts.
This all raises deeper questions: How exactly is the internet fuelling radicalisation? And why are such disparate grievances converging on the radical right?
To explore this, I invited Eliot Higgins onto Democracy for Sale. Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, the open-source investigative collective that identified the Salisbury poisoners and proved Assad was gassing the Syrian people.
He also finds himself at the centre of countless conspiracy theories: accused of being a CIA asset, MI6 operative, or worse. That experience has given him unique insight into what he calls disordered discourse.
“Disordered discourse,” Higgins explains, “thrives not only by spreading falsehoods but by destabilising how people know what they know. One of its most effective tools is the systematic use of doubt.”
Doubt is essential to journalism — but when scepticism hardens into distrust of everything, democracy is in peril.
Part of the problem is self-inflicted. The Iraq War, the financial crash, decades of corruption — all have primed citizens to see politics as hollow. That’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories. As Higgins puts it, disinformation, distrust, and disengagement are “symptoms of a single underlying problem: the loss of the shared processes that make democratic life possible.”
Elections may still be held, rights may still exist on paper, governments may still speak the language of democracy. But without those shared processes of deliberation and verification, democracy itself becomes a simulacra.
This isn’t abstract. Neoliberalism has reduced politicians to technocratic managers. (Adam Curtis’s recent BBC series is worth a watch on this theme.)
Where Keir Starmer offers managerialism, Farage and Robinson offer revolution — turbocharged by algorithms that push users toward ever more extreme content.
Higgins stresses that it doesn’t have to be this way. Countries like Finland and Estonia show resilience can be built, through education, critical thinking, and a stronger culture of accountability. But Britain’s political class, he warns, needs to stop “chasing whatever’s trending on Twitter” and start governing with substance.
It’s a sobering, but also hopeful conversation — one I hope you’ll find as thought-provoking as I did.
At Democracy for Sale, our mission is to expose these hidden systems of power — the money, the influence, and the technologies that tilt the playing field.
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The decline in our politics cannot be fought with reason or alternative policies. We are dealing with the constant repetition of falsehoods and use of images to sway opinion, first described by Gutsave le Bon in the nineteenth century, see his book Psychologie des Foules (Psychology of Crowds, available in English).
The only way out of this is to reform the system of political governance to prohibit all communications that fail a test of "clear, fair, and not misleading" (taken from UK financial services advertising rules) and to entrench that reform in a written constitution to prevent another government overturning it.
We need to accept that UK political governance has evolved to a dead-end in which it cannot cope with the 21st-century world. It's a common problem around the Anglo-Saxon countries.
All this, and a first-draft written constitution, are in my book Reinventing Democracy: Improving British political governance. Have you read it yet?
Interesting. A question arises about algos and their effect. If there is no underlying embodied experience of unaddressed social injustice, would they take collective fire so easily. Also, a distinct pattern has emerged with the rise of MAGA and Britain United. One that consistently raises the trope of widespread child rape, by both the powerful and the powerless. Why is it that this particular tactic works every time to incite abstract hate fuelled violence against whatever target their media feed tells them to hit ? What does this signify regarding unaddressed, even invisible, social injustices in both nation states ?