Let’s Fix Politics to Fight Social-Media Polarisation

By Grace Dicker

Along the streets of Bloomsbury there are various rain-and-time-worn posters, glued to a line of streetlamps and bus stops. These posters, though different in design, share the same message: politics is failing. The system sucks. Vive la révolution! Or this is what they would say, if they were not torn and ink-drained — if they were any more than leftovers from an age of hopeful activism.

I am thinking about these posters as this evening’s lecturer gives a definition of populism, runs through the statistics of democratic resilience, and tells us to trust in institutions. All will be fine. Democracy will pull through. Unconvinced, the hall of twentysomethings stirs.

“How can we be sure that’s good enough?” says someone in the front row. “What’s the point of democracy surviving if it’s not good quality?”

As the room hums in agreement and the professor responds with a modest “I’m not sure”, I sense — though I am only a guest here — that these university students feel the same way I do. That we can study politics all we like, we can read the news and watch the bulletins, but that may not cure the illness we feel at its core.

Back in my A-Level politics classroom, we watched Keir Starmer resign on the smartboard screen. At break, I listened to the girl in the Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt and eyeliner admit that she didn’t mind Starmer, but she would never say that to her friends since they’d kick her out for being a pro-establishment centrist.

But by the next lesson she forgot about it, because it was better to keep one’s friends than to reach out along the political spectrum and risk finding only loneliness on the other end. Better to stay in separate worlds, and to let off steam by hating those who live in different ones. Better to hate, in general. Because at least that made sense: there were enemies and there were allies. But somewhere, she felt as I did — as the room of university students did — that these were symptoms of some terrible sickness. A sickness we could only respond to with resignation.

This sickness, perhaps, is the product of a politics that polarises for strategic gain. After all, there are few better ways to earn party loyalty than by associating political identities with personal characteristics. Do band-tees and eyeliner have anything to do with politics? They shouldn’t — not to the point where it becomes impossible to believe in anything else without becoming estranged from one’s identity. A politics that relies on these connections is one that becomes incapable of compromise, and incapable of moving forward. Making political concessions is not possible in a world where the opposition is painted as the enemy.

This new political reality is born, possibly, from two things that share the same logic: our electoral system, and social media. As these twin pillars continue to operate, they reinforce the group-based vision of politics that stifles compromise.

In the 2024 General Election, Labour won a landslide majority of 411 seats (63% of the House of Commons) with just 34% of the vote. Accounting for turnout, this number drops to 20% as a proportion of the total population. This discrepancy between vote share and seat share comes from our First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system. In this winner-takes-all system, the victor just needs to beat their competitors, even if their votes only add up to a minority. In a two-party country, FPTP would be relatively unproblematic: if 100 votes were split between Labour and the Conservatives, the winning party would need at least 51. However, the UK has always been multipartied, and is becoming increasingly so; currently, the top five parties all poll within 13 points of each other. As the margins narrow, FPTP becomes less proportionate. In 2024, for instance, only 15% of MPs received half of the votes in their constituency.

A world in which voter bases as small as 34% become capable of producing the second largest parliamentary majority in the modern era is one in which minoritarian strategies triumph. The need for a compromising kind of politics is eliminated, and it becomes more important to secure the support of party bases than to convince those still on the fence. Divisions become more pronounced; camps dig themselves in deeper.

This logic is perpetuated on social media with an endless collection of sensational videos, clipped PMQ reactions, even politically oriented ‘brainrot’ edits. Online algorithms follow the same minoritarian logic as a winner-takes-all electoral system, siphoning individuals off into ever-smaller echo-chambers, where politics becomes another aspect of a user’s online ‘mega-identity’. Social media companies have the incentive to create such rigid algorithmic identities because it means they can target users with more ‘personalised’ content to keep them engaged for longer and collect more data. The more accurate predictions get, the more profit is made from selling ad space. In a 2026 Ofcom study, a group of 17 teenagers averaged over 7 hours a day on screens, with over half their time on social media. These teenagers — my generation — can hardly imagine a politics that looks different. To us, party affiliation is fixed, held up in our online selves, which are sometimes the only version of an identity we know.

Yet, it is clear that social media is not going away. Our response must therefore be to look towards our electoral system. The logic of our politics must counteract that of the online world. Our politics should be an example of compromise and pluralism in a world where differences are exploited for profit. Our politics should stand against divisions, against hatred, against games of identity. Our politics should be proportional to the people who participate in it.

Twenty-first-century Britain is a multiparty democracy and must accept — and embrace — this political status. Across Europe, multiparty and proportionally representative parliaments form the foundation of democracies that are countering the growing force of polarisation. In Ireland, for instance, the system of Single Transferable Vote (STV) asks voters to rank their candidates according to preference, meaning that parties compete for second and third votes. This encourages broad, unifying campaigns instead of ones that harden divisions. Ireland has a score of 3.1/10 on the Dalton Polarisation Index — the third best in Europe. Malta, which ranks number 1 in Europe, also uses STV as its electoral system. In the UK, a similar system would reverse the minoritarian incentive in politics and divorce it from social media’s algorithmic logic of division, sensation, and hatred. Parties would have to learn how to cooperate, form coalitions, and work constructively with one another. It would — hopefully — finally be possible to embrace more flexible political identities, to be un-stuck from the web of hatred and resignation.

This is the politics my generation has so far been denied. But we are not so far removed that it is unimaginable — it is the politics we are prepared to build.

Grace Dicker is an A-Level Politics student based in Winchester, Hampshire. Her research focuses on the relationship between politics and technology, and explores solutions to digital-age polarisation.

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