The recent Senedd election in Wales was more than just a typical political shift; it was a seismic event, a “political earthquake” as Yuliia Bond describes it. For the first time in over a century, Welsh Labour lost its grip on power, with Plaid Cymru surging to 43 seats and Reform UK making an astonishing leap to 34. This dramatic change, as Bond, a Ukrainian refugee living in Wales, acutely observes, isn’t just about party politics; it’s a symptom of a deeper societal transformation, accelerated by the insidious spread of disinformation and emotional manipulation online. Having witnessed similar dynamics in her homeland before the war, Bond brings a unique and urgent perspective, highlighting how vulnerability to information warfare isn’t confined to battlefields but silently erodes trust and reshapes political realities in seemingly stable democracies. Her insights serve as a stark warning: what happened in Wales isn’t just a local anomaly but a potential blueprint for how democracies can subtly unravel when the information environment becomes weaponized.
Bond emphasizes that the scale of Reform UK’s rise, particularly in areas like Caerphilly where their support skyrocketed by 15.7 percentage points in just over a year, transcends a “protest vote.” This is a structural political realignment, born not in a vacuum, but within a landscape increasingly dominated by information warfare. Many in the UK, she argues, still view disinformation as abstract or foreign, something that only happens during wars. However, Ukraine’s harsh lesson was that modern conflicts are fought not just with bullets and bombs, but inside digital spaces. Russia didn’t just send tanks; they first weaponized narratives, letting algorithms amplify outrage and false stories until they “emotionally felt true,” slowly eroding trust and polarizing society. Ukraine’s response was a “Digital Army” not just of cyber experts but of ordinary citizens—researchers, teachers, journalists, volunteers—who understood information as strategically vital. They tracked propaganda, countered false narratives, and strengthened digital literacy, realizing that defending democracy required a society-wide effort. Bond believes Britain has much to learn from this, as a similar, emotionally driven populism and anti-migrant rhetoric, fueled by algorithmic outrage, is now surging in the UK, and many still “underestimate the danger.”
One of the most insidious aspects of this new information warfare, Bond explains, is how modern propaganda has shed its old, overt forms and now masquerades as everyday online content. Gone are the Soviet-style posters; instead, we have Facebook comments, TikTok clips, emotionally manipulative headlines, “rage-bait” videos, and out-of-context crime stories. These seemingly innocuous fragments coalesce into powerful, emotionally charged narratives that, over time, “reshape political reality itself.” The central protagonist in many of these narratives, according to Bond, is “migrants.” Can’t find housing? Migrants. Struggling public services? Migrants. Crime? Migrants. Economic insecurity? Migrants. National decline? Migrants. Social media algorithms, Bond clarifies, aren’t designed to find truth but to maximize emotional engagement. Fear, anger, and outrage spread infinitely faster than nuance, statistics, or context. Thus, individuals can live in areas with minimal migration but consume hours of emotionally charged anti-immigrant content online, leading to a political perception shaped less by lived reality and more by “algorithmic reality,” asking not “Is this accurate?” but “Will this keep people emotionally engaged?” This reality-shaping power of social media, Bond asserts, is not just persuasive; it’s profoundly dangerous, turning politics into a battle of emotional opposition rather than problem-solving.
This shift, Bond argues, dangerously redefines political identity. When identity becomes psychologically tethered to outrage, permanent anger replaces deliberation, making compromise virtually impossible. It’s how democratic cultures, she warns, slowly become unstable, not through sudden collapse but gradual erosion. Importantly, she rejects the “intellectually lazy and emotionally convenient” explanation that all Reform voters are simply racist. Many people are genuinely struggling, feeling abandoned, facing financial and emotional exhaustion, and seeing their communities overlooked. The anger is real, but modern populism is masterfully effective at redirecting this legitimate anger toward “emotionally convenient targets”—migrants—rather than addressing deeper systemic issues like housing policy, austerity, economic inequality, the collapse of local journalism, industrial decline, or governance failures. When politics becomes psychologically based on outrage and identity rather than problem-solving, the very fabric of democratic culture begins to fray. Wales, once seen as kinder and more grounded, is no longer immune to this “culture war” spreading like wildfire across the digital landscape, importing outrage “at industrial scale.”
Bond shares a deeply personal concern, observing how her adopted home of Wales, where she rebuilt her life after fleeing war, is subtly changing. She feels the atmosphere shift—”slightly colder,” “slightly more suspicious,” “slightly more ‘us and them'”—especially when discussions about elections reveal that a significant portion of voters now support a movement heavily focused on immigration fears. This realization, hearing it spoken aloud, hits her harder than any online poll, particularly as someone who has experienced war. She points out a critical flaw in many Western societies: they often see refugees as those to be helped, not as equals from whom to learn. Countries that consider themselves “developed” often underestimate the invaluable lessons that societies which have grappled firsthand with propaganda, democratic destabilization, and information warfare can offer. Ukraine learned these lessons through sheer survival; the UK, she warns, still has time to learn them before consequences escalate.
The consequences, Bond articulates with chilling clarity, are severe if this emotional shift continues unchecked: increased hate crime, safeguarding concerns, community tensions, and the normalization of political extremism. Trust between groups will weaken, online radicalization will deepen, and, most perilously, people will gradually lose the capacity to distinguish genuine political debate from emotionally manipulative content. Democracies, she reminds us, don’t just collapse through dictatorships. They can deteriorate through “emotional exhaustion,” “permanent outrage,” “algorithmic radicalisation,” the normalization of dehumanizing language, and the slow erosion of a shared reality. Ukraine learned that information warfare’s ultimate goal isn’t just to make people believe lies, but to “destroy trust itself”—trust in institutions, media, neighbors, and objective reality. When societies can no longer agree on what’s real, democracy becomes fragile. Yet, Bond asserts, Wales still has a choice, and the situation isn’t hopeless. The solution isn’t censorship or dismissing voters, which only worsens polarization. Instead, Wales urgently needs “democratic resilience”—a serious, cross-society strategy. This includes creating online anti-disinformation working groups, supporting organizations already combating racism and disinformation, strengthening independent Welsh journalism, integrating media literacy into community life, building cross-community solidarity, and challenging disinformation early, “before it hardens into ‘common sense.'” This is now bigger than party politics, she insists. A healthy democracy demands not just free elections but a public capable of discerning evidence from manipulation, and genuine debate from algorithmically amplified outrage. Bond hopes she’s wrong about some of her fears, but she believes pretending this emotional shift isn’t happening would be far more dangerous. Societies don’t suddenly divide; they do so “one emotionally manipulative headline, one algorithm, one rumour and one dehumanising narrative at a time, until eventually people stop seeing each other as neighbours at all.”