Elections like Makerfield are decided by the posts on your feed

For a growing majority of people, social media is not merely one source of news, it is the source. The consequences of this shift are only beginning to reveal themselves.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we caught a glimpse of what was to come. Non-experts took to their feeds with extraordinary confidence, defending vaccine theories they had assembled from a handful of posts. More alarmingly, some people consumed bleach, genuinely convinced by misinformation that had circulated on social media. These were not fringe cases of the gullible or the reckless. They were ordinary people whose opinions had been shaped by the information environment around them.

Our recently published research, from Trinity Business School and NEOMA Business School, helps explain why. We found that people form strong, stable opinions on unfamiliar topics after exposure to as few as five consistent social media posts. Once that threshold is crossed, the opinion locks in, and subsequent exposure adds very little.

More troublingly, it makes almost no difference whether the information is true or false. Five consistent false posts are just as effective at shaping belief as five true ones. And because most people inhabit closed information ecosystems, curated Facebook groups, partisan subreddits, and algorithmically filtered feeds, they rarely encounter a perspective that might challenge what they have already come to believe.

This is the operating environment of modern politics, and sophisticated political actors have learned to exploit it with precision. Rather than winning arguments, the goal is to reach voters first, consistently, and often flooding the feed with a coherent narrative before any counter-narrative can take root.

Fear is a particularly efficient tool here. Topics like immigration, the economy, healthcare combine personal stakes with genuine complexity, making them fertile ground for simplified, emotionally charged messaging that travels fast and embeds deep.

The recent electoral victories in the UK and the United States are difficult to understand without this lens. Whether the claims driving those campaigns were accurate matters far less than the fact that a substantial portion of the electorate was repeatedly exposed to them, believed them, and ultimately acted on them at the ballot box.

The battle for political power, it turns out, is increasingly a battle to be first through the door of an unfamiliar mind.

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Ashish Kumar Jha is a Professor in Business Analytics at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin.

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