We remain hominids. Fear, anger, social comparison and the need to belong still shape what we notice, whom we trust and which stories feel convincing. These are ordinary features of social life, and they provide readily accessible points of leverage. Status rests on comparison; belonging requires recognition; humiliation draws its force from a social world. A threat can gather attention; an enemy can organise resentment; a declaration of solidarity can make a person feel recognised. Emotional responsiveness helps us navigate relationships, but it also makes those connections vulnerable to manipulation. Lerner et al. (2015) describe emotions as systematic influences on judgement and choice, with effects that can help or harm us. Technologically mediated populism exploits this familiar terrain. A primate with a smartphone remains available to anyone who knows which grievance to keep feeding.
Manipulation works through relationships between insecurity, recognition and expectation. Repeated encounters make particular interpretations familiar: another accusation confirms what an earlier message encouraged us to suspect. What begins as a reaction to one event can become an emotional attachment carried into the next. The headline changes while the feeling remains available for reuse. A person anxious about exclusion can be offered a group defined by whom it rejects. Someone frightened of losing control can be offered certainty about whom to blame. Martel, Pennycook and Rand (2020) found experimentally that encouraging reliance on emotion increased acceptance of fabricated news headlines. An account can acquire credibility because it relieves anxiety, confirms resentment or offers a sense of belonging. The simplicity trap begins when emotional satisfaction stands in for an adequate explanation of what is happening.
At scale, some aspects of exploitation become easier. A system need not understand every person, persuade an entire population or circulate one universally effective story. It can draw value from recurring responses across different groups. Similar cues can activate distinct grievances, while the resulting reactions reveal where attention is already concentrated. Once a cue reliably attracts a response, it can be repeated and varied across many encounters, without rebuilding the emotional relationship from nothing each time. Research on political posts on Facebook and Twitter found that references to political opponents were associated with substantially greater sharing than references to allies (Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden, 2021). Different people can disagree about almost everything while continuing to respond to familiar invitations to fear, resent or denounce someone. Individual differences do not prevent repeated patterns from becoming exploitable.
Populist communication gives those susceptibilities a political direction. A dissatisfied public becomes a betrayed people; complex conditions acquire identifiable adversaries; restoration appears to require defeating whoever has been placed in the way. Hameleers, Bos and de Vreese (2017) found that emotional blame attribution influenced perceptions of responsibility and populist attitudes. Big tech manipulates the information environment for commercial advantage, shaping which encounters become visible and recur. Milli et al. (2025) found that Twitter’s engagement ranking amplified emotionally charged, politically hostile content compared with chronological presentation. Political operators and commercial platforms can consequently benefit from sustaining the same emotional attachments. A hostile reaction can be counted immediately, while its wider consequences remain difficult to assess. Their purposes need not be identical. The important continuity is that antagonism keeps generating another reason to participate.
Institutional failure supplies genuine grievances for this process. Housing pressures, insecure work, rising costs and inaccessible public services affect lives. Political entrepreneurs can exploit those experiences without accepting equivalent responsibility for resolving their causes. Responsible administration must negotiate constraints and answer for consequences; a campaign can keep supplying accusations. Established institutions and their opponents become mutually sustaining through recurring cycles of disappointment, blame and reaction. One side offers another procedure; the other offers another enemy. A factual correction can address an individual claim while leaving the emotional attachment that makes the next provocation effective largely intact. Producing another accusation is easier than rebuilding the confidence required to act together on shared problems. The damage extends beyond belief in a particular statement: distrust can weaken cooperation and make constructive responses harder to organise.
Commercial and electoral rewards arrive much faster than many of their social consequences. Engagement registers now; weakened trust, exhausted attention and reduced capacity for collective correction accumulate elsewhere. Destructive mobilisation can accelerate while effective responses become harder to coordinate. Foreign actors can exploit those fractures without manufacturing the original dissatisfaction. Domestic dysfunction becomes a strategic vulnerability when familiar fears and antagonisms provide repeated opportunities for interference. The underlying danger is the industrial exploitation of ordinary psychosocial needs. People seek safety, recognition and belonging; systems organised around extraction can keep those needs unsettled and commercially productive. We remain susceptible to manipulation through the social relationships that make life bearable. A society can become remarkably efficient at monetising the relationships it depends upon, while steadily destroying the trust that makes those relationships possible.
Key takeaways
- Ordinary psychosocial needs provide readily exploitable points of leverage.
- Scale can make recurring emotional responses easier to exploit.
- Populist blame and commercial amplification can sustain the same attachments.
- Collective damage accumulates beyond immediate commercial and electoral rewards.
References
Hameleers, M., Bos, L. and de Vreese, C.H. (2017) ‘“They did it”: The effects of emotionalized blame attribution in populist communication’, Communication Research, 44(6), pp. 870–900. doi:10.1177/0093650216644026.
Lerner, J.S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P. and Kassam, K.S. (2015) ‘Emotion and decision making’, Annual Review of Psychology, 66, pp. 799–823. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043.
Martel, C., Pennycook, G. and Rand, D.G. (2020) ‘Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5, 47. doi:10.1186/s41235-020-00252-3.
Milli, S., Carroll, M., Wang, Y., Pandey, S., Zhao, S. and Dragan, A.D. (2025) ‘Engagement, user satisfaction, and the amplification of divisive content on social media’, PNAS Nexus, 4(3), pgaf062. doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf062.
Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J.J. and van der Linden, S. (2021) ‘Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26), e2024292118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2024292118.
