Last week, on a trip to North America, I had some strange conversations.

On more than one occasion, I spoke to somebody who seemed to pity that I had to live in Britain. They were concerned for me. They were anxious about my safety. They told me they’d heard that Britain was a lawless hellhole… with gang ridden streets, wide-spread corruption and an authoritarian regime.

I’m the first person to moan about the UK at the moment. I travel the West Coast Mainline every week, I know full well how miserable it feels to get entangled by Britain’s crumbling railway. We’ve all waited longer than we’d like for a doctor’s appointment or struggled to get a call back from the council. But that wasn’t their concern. They weren’t worried about Avanti’s timetable… they were worried about civil war. They weren’t hearing stories of crumbling infrastructure… they were hearing stories of a crumbling civilisation.

I don’t live a sheltered life. I live in a working class community in Greater Manchester, I spend a few days a week in London, I host weekly radio shows that speak to, and about, the whole country. And I just couldn’t marry this extreme view with my day-to-day experience of living in Britain.

I landed back in the UK on a Saturday lunchtime and turned my phone on. The first notification was about a protest, where the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley Lennon – also known as Tommy Robinson – had lead a march of 100,000 people through the streets of London on a similar pretence. Britain needs saving from… whoever. Once a punchline and a pariah, Tommy Robinson’s posts have started peppering their way into my feeds, shared by old school friends or neighbours or colleagues. Enticed by his hateful message, emboldened to share it.

There in North America, as I struggled to make sense of another fanciful story of authoritarian decline, something suddenly struck me. All the people I was talking to were seeing the same sort of content on their social media feeds – in particular, TikTok. Dramatic video after dramatic video, all depicting a country adrift. Most of the stories are exaggerated, many of them just made up.

Back in the UK, and I’m not the only one to have stumbled across this dystopian view of Britain being fed to people on their social media feeds. The sociologist William Davies talked about this in a recent piece for the London Review of Books. William noticed that the right-wing political party Reform UK – and its leader Nigel Farage – were doing particularly well on TikTok. Nigel Farage has more followers than all other MP’s combined, although as of the last election only around a hundred had accounts. William wanted to know what the For You feed of those who’d engaged with Reform UK and Nigel Farage looked like. He set up an account, scrolled through some of their videos to trigger a passing interest, and sat back. What he was fed by the algorithm was extraordinary… and revealing.

“I was shown clips of policemen and women asking not to be filmed. Clips of masked men cutting down Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras with angle-grinders. Clips of supermarket shelves displaying inflated new prices. Clips of fights breaking out in the street. But above all, clips of men and women addressing their phones while sitting in cars or out walking, lamenting the state of ‘Starmer’s Britain’, their words appearing in TikTok’s distinctive pink-highlighted font. ‘I need help: someone tell me why this country is such a fucking joke?’ demands a man sitting in his car, who is sure his energy company is scamming him. ‘Have you had enough?’ asks a woman, also in a car, but without explaining what we might have had enough of. A man holds up his Greggs coffee, and asks viewers to leave a comment guessing how much he just paid for it. ‘How are we not in a civil war?’ asks one woman. Another man walks through woodland, in despair at the amount of tax he is paying for government ‘waste’. The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value. This gloom is punctured only by those who have managed to emigrate or develop successful side-hustles, escaping the constraints of what (to all appearances) is an irredeemably bleak and dishonest society… love of nation has flipped into hatred of it.

Racism, especially Islamophobia, is impossible to avoid in Farage-adjacent TikTok. Some of it is imbued with nationalist melancholia, the screen dotted with Union Jacks, clips of wartime heroics interspersed with laments for what the country has become. Some of it is didactic, explaining to the viewer where Islam originated, and the dangers it supposedly presents. A counterpoint is provided by a few (non-Muslim) TikTokers, who take it on themselves to describe Islam in more sympathetic terms, apparently in an effort to temper the resentments and misunderstandings in their own community. Then there is content more in keeping with the platform, which uses humour, clips of pop songs and mashed-up graphics to lampoon the asylum system, with Starmer the butt of most of the jokes.”

Our ‘For You’ feeds are more heavily curated than ever before, rarely showing us people we actively choose to follow. TikTok’s powerful algorithm hands us a potent cocktail of content – moreish video, after moreish video – to grab and keep our attention. They are our gateway to the world. They are our world. There is no better way to keep us hooked than by making us feel things. They build us a new world that makes us scared and furious. Everything is terrible, everyone is corrupt, it’s us against them, fight-back or die. Characters like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage wait with open arms, ready to embrace the anxious and the angry.

And it appears that it IS the hard-right, and far-right, that benefits the most from the algorithm. In the interest of balance, we’ll come on to the left in a moment.

Firstly, the organisation Global Witness carried out an experiment last year to see what sort of content was being delivered to German voters with an interest in politics. They set up several accounts, followed the four largest political parties, and let the algorithm do the rest. Of the content it fed them on TikTok, 78% was supportive of the far-right. On X, 64% was supportive of Germany’s far-right political party the AfD. A reminder, that’s not just people who engaged with right-wing content like William did, this is reaching everyone. There could be lots of reasons this is happening, and not all of them are that the algorithms are politically biased. It could just as easily be that there is more content on these platforms from, or supportive of, the far-right. Or that this sort of content – often angry and extreme in nature – creates more engagement. The more extreme it is, the more engagement it gets, the more promotion it receives.

Whatever the reason, far-right content is thriving on social media, and it’s radicalising people into believing Britain is a dystopian hell.

So, what about the left? While Nigel Farage is the most followed politician on TikTok, second and third place go to former Labour MP’s Zara Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. Both are, unsurprisingly, anti-establishment. Although the left doesn’t appear to do even half as well, their content is also angry with Starmer’s Britain, is full of feeling, has an easy answer for who to blame, and is extremely clickable.

This should land with a thud inside No.10 and Labour circles. We spend so much time wondering what will define the next few years of British politics, and some inside Labour are still sure that slowly, steadily, fixing things – making people feel a few quid better off, reducing the number of boat crossings, making more NHS appointments available – will answer the questions the Tommy Robinson protest posed and give them a strong footing at the next general election. The truth is, no matter what this government does, and no matter who holds power, people are never going to be allowed to believe that things are getting better. Their feeds won’t let them.

It might also explain why the MAGA crowd in America have become so obsessed with Britain recently, and why Elon Musk has vowed to liberate us, and why Donald Trump told a meeting of the United Nations yesterday that London is descending into sharia law. It’s hard to say if those men are exploiting a falsehood, or if they have been radicalised themselves.

And if you aren’t being presented with that kind of content, it can be easy to watch those protesting against a dystopian country you don’t recognise and conclude they must be living in a different world. Well, they are: a world curated for them by the platforms on which we spend so much of our time.

I spoke to William Davies on my Times Radio show this week to explore more of his experiment – you can listen to that by clicking here – and you can read his excellent piece from The London Review of Books by clicking here.