An adversarial stress test exploring how far algorithms and digital platforms are to blame for polarising the landscape of modern public debate.
Me: Tommy Robinson was recently
cancelled from the Oxford Union. I disapprove.
Kiki: You seem to be confusing a thirst for intellectual friction with a desire for a cheap, algorithmic circus. Inviting speakers with criminal records isn't a victory for free speech; it is weaponized rage theatre designed to spark real-world violence.
Controversial figures from across the political spectrum, including some with criminal records, have historically spoken at the Union, so I don’t see a justification for cancelling. What do you mean by 'algorithmic'?
Kiki: It means driven by computer software formulas engineered to maximize user engagement, clicks, and outrage. Instead of a thoughtful, organic debate, an "algorithmic circus" is an event specifically designed to feed internet code. It relies on predictable, highly shareable triggers that get boosted by social media platforms because they provoke intense emotional reactions. It is a chaotic, performative spectacle meant for public entertainment rather than serious discussion – a controversy manufactured and amplified by code rather than by real human merit.
Are you saying the content of many physical public debates these days is determined by what will generate internet attention?
Kiki: Yes, exactly. We now live in a world where attention is the ultimate currency, heavily governed by algorithms that reward conflict. Because of this digital plumbing, physical debates are no longer self-contained rooms. Speakers structure arguments for 15-second viral clips, destroying nuance. Debate topics are selected for their potential to spark online firestorms rather than social utility. Organisers and participants are forced to constantly calculate the "internet risk" of their words, leading to sudden de-platforming or defensive over-corrections.
What are the remedies? Because none of the proposed internet fixes I've read about – like forcing platforms to rewrite code, or imposing heavy fines – seem likely to happen. Has any institution adopted procedures that are actually helping?
Kiki: Some are fighting back through procedural friction. Some parliamentary committees now ban third-party, heavily edited clips, insisting that any shared snippet link directly to the unedited, timestamped raw stream. Elsewhere, elite academic and political forums are enforcing "zero-device chambers" with no phones, laptops, or live-streaming. When you remove the cameras, you break the algorithmic incentive. Participants stop playing to a hyper-reactive digital mob and start talking to the actual humans in the room.
You sound like you think technology is the culprit. But I would argue the world is factiously polarised, not primarily because of the internet, but because the intellectuals who controlled mainstream platforms over recent decades became increasingly left-leaning, and gradually censored away dissent. The internet comes along and, bam, suddenly dissent is there again, but it’s crude and coarse, and driven by ads.
You can't eliminate disagreement, you can only try to make it invisible, with the result that it later re-emerges in an uglier form. Right now online dissent is often boorish. But the internet may eventually help to make disagreement more civilised – for instance, by enabling e-magazines that offer heterodox viewpoints but in a reasoned way. Figures like Robinson are just a sign that we’re still a long way off from genuine balance.
Currently, institutional framing means an academic article and an internet post with the same content are perceived very differently. This weakens the incentive to be reasoned online, and creates pressure to attract raw numbers rather than thoughtful readers. It seems only people like Donald Trump, who are willing to be seen as verging on the criminal, have so far been sufficiently bold to trumpet disagreement loudly enough that mainstream media actually report it.
Kiki: You are romanticising a playground for grifters. Dissent didn't just burst forth because the internet liberated it. It was weaponised because polarisation is highly profitable. Trump and Robinson aren't heroic iconoclasts brave enough to puncture a left-leaning institutional monopoly. They are symbiotes of the very hyper-attention economy we've been critiquing. They don't want a level playing field or a "civilised" debate; they thrive precisely because they are perceived as being beyond the pale. That brand of transgression is their entire business model.
You may be right about their motivation, and that they're not heroes, but that strikes me as irrelevant. Here politics and debate seem to mirror the marketplace – as they should. The exact motivation of suppliers in an economy is beside the point: many of them may be driven by greed, but market pressure means they’re compelled to satisfy demand. Ditto in politics, at least the informal kind. Figures like Trump and Robinson arise to fill a gap that exists because of the conditions we face: near-total elimination of non-leftist perspectives from 'civilised' platforms. The result: a counter-revolution that's forced to depend on populist sentiment to gain any traction at all.
Kiki: But politics isn't a simple market, and you are treating toxic manipulation as if it's just a consumer service. In a normal market, if a supplier sells you poison they go out of business. In this outrage marketplace, the poison is the product. Figures like Trump and Robinson don't just "fill a gap"; they actively stoke the fears and anger that create the gap in the first place. They are manufacturing the very panic they claim to cure, all while laughing their way to the bank and the ballot box. Characterising that as a kind of marketplace is just a polite way to excuse demagoguery.
You're still ignoring the reality of intellectual prohibitionism. When mainstream institutions censor dissent, demand doesn't vanish; it goes underground. Just like the war on drugs, suppressing a part of the marketplace of ideas doesn't eliminate desire for the product – it just ensures that the supply chain falls into the hands of bootleggers. People like Trump aren't creating this market out of thin air; they are filling a massive vacuum left by platforms that refused to host legitimate heterodox debate. If the output looks crude, coarse, or beyond the pale, that is the predictable result of ideological prohibition, not just algorithmic manipulation.
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas
