The result of this week's election will be largely determined by technology. From debates around the economy, immigration and women's rights being fought predominantly online, to the medium of voting itself – electronic votes are expected to account for 19 percent of the total – the most important election in our lifetime is being decided by software and algorithms.
Our democratic institutions are, in other words, at the mercy of the internet. At the heart of this phenomenon is the world's richest man, Elon Musk. Since coming out in support of Trump in July, he has posted about the US election hundreds of times on X, which he owns, attracting more than four billion views. Last month, he attacked the Democratic party in a spate of tweets alleging they had imported millions of illegal immigrants to vote for Kamala Harris on Tuesday. There is no evidence for such claims.
Meanwhile, the latest disinformation campaign to disgrace the social media website has focused on ballot fraud and Doug Emhoff, Harris's husband, after two videos did the rounds and the FBI had to put out a statement identifying them as fake. BBC Verify has separately linked the videos to a Russia-based operation.
In truth, Elon Musk's X is but the symptom of a wider issue. The modern philosopher and host of the Daily Stoic podcast, Ryan Holiday, told the Standard earlier this year that Donald Trump would not have won in 2016 were it not for X, then Twitter. This long predates Musk's acquisition; and the issues at stake here (fake news and the end of reason) do too.
We know that social media thrives off division; that people are ironically more likely to stay online if they see something that annoys them. When we're upset, or angry, our bodies release stress hormones like adrenaline, which keep us on high alert. This makes it harder for us to disengage from whatever has triggered us. Moreover, anger often pushes people to seek validation of their views; confirmation that they might be right, and others wrong. People look for arguments that reinforce their own sense of righteousness and which social media algorithms are specifically designed to enhance. By keeping us online, the likes of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg make more money.
Algorithms prioritise certain ideas, at the expense of others which are harder to articulate
No one knows quite how the algorithms work – although this may soon change given the lawsuits against Mr Musk. If X is subpoenaed in court, this could force the Tesla chief to reveal the website’s inner workings. What we know for sure is that algorithms prioritise certain ideas, at the expense of others which are harder to articulate. Take, for example, climate change, all but absent from both Republican and Democratic tickets. Neither side is focusing on what is without a doubt the biggest existential issue of our time. Perhaps tackling climate change feels less urgent than curbing immigration; the sort of issue we get to once we've dealt with everything else. There is a narrative around climate change that paints it as a first-world problem; a luxury which only wealthy nations have the time or capacity to address – despite the fact that poorer nations will end up suffering from it the most. Does that matter, though, when “America First” and “Make America Great Again” are such sexy taglines? "Make America a world leader on climate change" doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
It's also a harder topic to get one's head around. Climate science is far more complicated than most supporters and deniers realise, with internal debates over climate modelling and whether solutions should include such propositions as nuclear energy. It's a topic that cannot easily be reduced to a soundbite. When it does – say, "Countdown to Extinction" – it feels trivial; gratuitous; unhelpfully catastrophising. Important but complicated debates are lost in algorithmic translation, while simpler ones find a way to thrive. This, in turn, encourages simplification: complex ideas, if not cast away, are truncated and distilled. It's why so many on the Left are tempted to view a conflict as multilayered as that between Israel and Gaza in such simple terms as a conflict between victims and oppressors.
These narratives then take foothold: the speed at which they propagate consolidates them into perceived truisms. But what happens when companies that are in the business of telling the truth – say, national newspapers – end up buying into the click economy and reinforcing a system that rewards the simple and straightforward, at the expense of nuance?
What conversations are sacrificed for the sake of those more captivating? What tedious, unsexy – and important – ideas are we ignoring while we scroll? What happens when clicks become the ultimate marker of success not just in the public realm, but in the private sector? What happens when private medical companies, for instance, sacrifice certain lines of enquiry to focus wholly on those deemed more "fashionable", and thus more likely to receive funding and coverage? Is it significant that the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded not to a tenured professor but to Sir Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of founder of Deep Mind, a subsidiary of Google? (Answer: yes it is.)
At the live show for the Rest is Politics last month, Rory Stewart claimed the leading figures of today's Conservative Party are more concerned with seeing their name trending on Twitter/X than in the small print, and had no time for the invisible but necessary tasks that make a truly great politician. The politics of showmanship, of which Donald Trump is king, is not the sign of some tragic, unexplained intellectual decline; but rather of the tyranny of search engines and the power which they hold over our collective attention.
