The Brexit Bus Was Only the Beginning

When historians write about the decline of democratic institutions in the early twenty-first century, they may not focus on artificial intelligence, deepfakes or social media algorithms.

They may focus on a bus.

A red bus promised that leaving the European Union would free up £350 million a week for the NHS. The claim was repeatedly challenged, repeatedly debunked, and yet it worked. Not because it was true, but because it was emotionally satisfying.

Ten years later, the argument is no longer about whether Brexit delivered what was promised. The economic consequences are still debated, but something arguably more important happened: a lesson was learned.

The lesson was that political narratives no longer needed to be true.

They only needed to spread.

The Brexit campaign was not the first political movement to use misinformation. Propaganda is as old as politics itself. What changed was the information environment. Social media platforms transformed the economics of persuasion.

For centuries, publishing information carried costs. Newspapers had editors. Broadcasters had regulations. Journalists had professional standards. False information could spread, but it faced friction.

The internet removed much of that friction.

Social media platforms then discovered something even more consequential: outrage, fear, tribal identity and moral panic generated engagement. Engagement generated advertising revenue. The incentives aligned perfectly.

The result was not merely the spread of misinformation.

The result was the industrialization of misinformation.

Today, we often discuss disinformation as though it were an unfortunate side effect of technology. Yet it is increasingly difficult to view it that way. The largest platforms on Earth possess vast resources, employ thousands of researchers and have unparalleled visibility into how information flows through society.

They know which content drives engagement.

They know which narratives spread fastest.

They know which emotions keep users scrolling.

And yet the underlying business model remains largely unchanged.

Brexit was not caused by Facebook, Google, Twitter or YouTube.

But Brexit revealed a new political reality: a sufficiently compelling narrative could outperform evidence, expertise and fact-checking.

Since then, the same dynamics have appeared repeatedly across the democratic world.

The issue is no longer any single election, referendum or political movement.

The issue is that democratic societies increasingly depend upon information ecosystems whose incentives are fundamentally misaligned with democratic health.

A healthy democracy requires informed citizens.

A platform requires engaged users.

These are not necessarily the same thing.

One day there may be public inquiries into the role social media corporations played in accelerating polarization, amplifying disinformation and weakening public trust in institutions.

Not because these companies intended to damage democracy.

But because they built systems optimized for engagement while treating the resulting societal consequences as someone else’s problem.

The question future generations may ask is not whether we knew the damage was occurring.

The question may be why we allowed it to continue for so long.

Britain is a swamp of lies and disinformation – and we got here on the Brexit bus by Jonathan Freedland