Last week I was in North America, and 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 told me they’d heard that Britain was a lawless hellhole… with gang ridden streets, wide-spread corruption and an authoritarian regime.

Sure, the country has well documented problems, but we’re not talking about not being able to get a train: we’re talking about not being able to leave the house. I just couldn’t marry this extreme view with my experience of living in Britain, when 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, depicting a country adrift. Most of the stories are exaggerated, many of them just made up.

And I’m not the only one to have stumbled across a dystopian view of Britain being fed to people on their social media feeds. The sociologist William Davies carried out an experiment with TikTok, and set up an account that engaged with a couple of videos from Reform UK… and let the algorithm do the rest.

What he found was incredibly revealing – and probably one of the most important things we need to know about modern politics and discourse. Why people believe what they believe, and how it’s influencing the way we think, feel and vote.

Listen here as I spoke to William on my Times Radio show.