Look over there! Immigrants! Trans people! A woman in a headscarf! A blue-haired teenager!

And before you know it, otherwise decent people are on Facebook sharing absolute drivel about “protecting our way of life,” as though the true threat to their mortgage, their healthcare, their retirement, their wages, their children’s future, and the price of bloody olive oil is a refugee family or a trans swimmer, and not the billionaire class currently feasting on caviar and champagne while throwing bones into the yard for the rest of us to fight over.

It works because it’s built on something very immediate and very real.

People know something is wrong. They can feel it in their bones. They feel it at the supermarket checkout, when the rent goes up again, when they can’t get a doctor’s appointment, when their adult children are still living at home. Housing has become a rigged carnival game where the prize is a damp unit near a train line and some clown still wants a million dollars for it.

So along comes the billionaire-funded right with a simple answer. It’s immigration. It’s gender ideology. It’s woke schools. It’s women getting too mouthy. It’s anyone, really, except the people who have spent decades hoarding wealth, avoiding tax, privatising public goods, buying political access, crushing unions, and underpaying workers, and then looking wounded when anyone suggests they might be part of the problem.

The consequences of that misdirection are not abstract. Read A Lullaby for Gaza: When Babies Starve and the World Shrugs for what it looks like when the world successfully looks away.

How convenient.

And this is where social media becomes the perfect delivery mechanism.

We’re not standing outside the machine looking in. We’re in it when we wake up, when we’re tired, when we’re angry, when we’re lonely, when we’re sitting on the toilet at eleven-thirty at night with one sock on and our nervous system hanging by a thread. That’s when the message gets in. It doesn’t arrive as a formal argument or a lecture. It arrives as repetition, tone, mood, and a thousand small nudges, each one barely noticeable on its own.

Repetition works. Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect: information we encounter repeatedly starts to feel more true simply because it becomes familiar. A 2026 systematic review found that repeated exposure to false headlines makes people more likely to believe they’re accurate, and more willing to share them.^[1] So when your feed is showing you the same “immigrants are destroying everything” message dressed in twenty different outfits, it’s not informing you. It’s softening you up. Your brain begins to mistake familiarity for evidence. You haven’t researched the issue. You’ve been marinated in it.

And if you point this out, you become the lunatic. The person repeating billionaire-funded talking points believes they’re the brave independent thinker. You, poor fool, with your sources and your concern about minority groups being scapegoated, are apparently the brainwashed one. They’re “awake”. You’re “woke”. They’re “doing their own research”. You’re apparently brainwashed because you don’t believe a Facebook profile called TruePatriotEagle1776 with 1 friend, no followers, and seventeen spelling errors.

You do have to admire the architecture, even as you want to set fire to it.

Look at the pattern.

Elon Musk did not just have opinions. His pro-Trump America PAC spent roughly US$200 million helping elect Trump in 2024, with most of that money coming from Musk himself.^[2]

Mark Zuckerberg did not just suddenly discover “free speech” floating in his cereal one morning. Meta donated US$1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, then in January 2025 announced it would end its third-party fact-checking program and replace it with a Community Notes model, while loosening restrictions on various political topics.^[3] Meta also agreed to pay US$25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over the suspension of his accounts.^[4]

This is not an accident of personality. It is the logic of a system — one we examine in detail in The Rise of Fascism: Power That Favours Men and Wealth.

It’s not a cartoon conspiracy. It’s alignment, access, and mutual usefulness. The warm handshake between political power and platform power; it’s the buying of the room without having to buy every chair.

And the algorithm is not just a cute little recipe for dance videos. It’s the pipe through which attention flows, and whoever controls the pipe has enormous power over what millions of people see, and just as importantly, over what they never see at all. A major study of Twitter’s algorithm found that in six of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right received higher algorithmic amplification than the left.^[5] A 2026 Nature study found that X’s algorithmic feed shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, with effects that persisted even after users returned to a chronological feed.^[6] A separate 2026 study found TikTok’s recommendations skewed towards Republican content during the 2024 presidential race.^[7]

No, you’re not imagining it when the water tastes wrong.

That doesn’t mean everyone sharing right-wing talking points is stupid or evil or beyond reach. Many of these people are tired, under pressure, they worry about money, they’re watching the world change faster than their nervous system can keep up with. A simple story arrives in their feed that delivers a clear villain, a satisfying slogan, and a button that delivers a small hit of certainty in a chaotic moment. They’re not born foot soldiers. They’re slowly, repeatedly, socially, and algorithmically trained. The fact that the training arrives through jokes and memes and the warm familiarity of people they already trust, means that instead of it feeling like propaganda, it feels like common sense.

But common sense is not always so common. True common sense would let you see that it’s just a well-funded lie that’s been repeated until it fits comfortably in your worldview, meanwhile those oligarchs are making bank out of your moral outrage, while all you have is a bad taste in your mouth.

So what do we do?

Stop pretending we’re immune.

Nobody with a phone and a nervous system gets to declare themselves algorithm-proof, and that kind of complacency is exactly how you get sloppy. The first defence is humility, the second is friction. Don’t share in anger. Don’t repost while your pulse is up. Take a pause and check who made it, who funded it, and whether the villain being served up to you actually has any power over your life. If the answer to every modern problem is somehow “immigrants” or “trans people,” you’re not looking at analysis. You’re looking at bait.

Ask better questions.

Who benefits from my anger at this group? What policy would actually fix the thing I am upset about? Would blaming this minority lower my rent, shorten a hospital waitlist, raise wages, or stop supermarkets from treating cucumbers like luxury goods?

If you want a practical toolkit for navigating this, we've written a companion piece: Finding the Truth in a World of Spin.

When someone you know shares the drivel, you don’t always have to go in swinging. Sometimes the most useful thing is: “I’m not sure this is the real cause.” Or: “Who runs this page?” Keep it short, plain, and don’t deliver a sermon. Clean up your feed. Unfollow rage farms. Follow people who explain material reality rather than delivering you a fresh enemy every morning. Talk to actual human beings, where you can see their faces and remember that most people are not avatars or slogans but complicated mammals doing their best with poor sleep and rising bills.

And teach young people how the machinery works. Not just to “be kind online” although yes, obviously, we should be kind online, we’re not feral goats after all. Teach them that feeds are designed, that outrage is profitable, that repetition changes belief, and that a platform surfacing something doesn’t make it true, important, or organic. It may simply mean you’re useful to someone.

When you’re being manipulated into hating the powerless, you’re not being rebellious. You’re being useful. Useful to billionaires. Useful to political operators. Useful to every powerful person who would far rather you scream at each other, and not  ask why wealth keeps being hoovered to the top while the rest of us are handed a mop and expected to clean up.

If you are asking what meaningful resistance actually looks like, Liberty Lost: Can it Be Regained? is worth your time.

None of this is glamorous work. The person who second-guesses their instinct to share, who asks whose funding backs the page, who pushes back in the comments, risks becoming a target of the same machinery. I have my own doubts about the direction I'm taking the work of this site. But I also know that to sit back and do nothing makes me complicit, and so I am compelled to put this on the record.

It was at the Nuremberg trials that the enablers of the system that caused so much destruction in the 1930s and 40s were not spared, even though they believed they had no choice. We always have a choice.

So the next time a neat little panic arrives in your feed, pause before you swallow it, especially if it's one that asks you to blame a minority group for a structural problem.

Put down the bone, look past the distraction, and ask who is sitting at the table, licking caviar off their fingers, hoping you never turn around.