There’s no end of analysis paralysis on Gorton and Denton, so I’ll keep this post brief. A first section on what it means for Labour and a second on the altogether stunning commentary on the rise of “sectarianism” in British politics.

Clearly, for Keir Starmer this result lessens whatever remains of his political authority. It was the Prime Minister who set the test for British politics in his conference speech last year. He argued, unwisely as I wrote at the time, that the Conservatives were finished and that the battle was between Labour and Reform. He set the essay question of politics as a technical one: who would be best to beat Farage? His implicit pitch to progressive voters was that you may not love me, but that you’ll really hate the alternative. In this, he set himself up as a curious mix of Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron.

As of this morning, he looks more like François Hollande. A leader of a mainstream centre-left party, who through a lack of vision, programme and communicative ability, sees his party haemorrhage votes to insurgents on his left and right. He has weakened himself because he is failing his own test. Voters appear to be adjudging that he was wrong: he is neither the only alternative nor the one who can best beat Farage. Partly because he distrusts ideas, Starmer has a habit of describing his political purpose in instrumentalist terms: he will be more competent, he will be less chaotic, he will be more managerial. His being the best vehicle to defeat Farage, by virtue of being the biggest anti-Farage party was the latest such wheeze and attempt to find purpose. The problem with this approach is that all of them are easy binaries- as soon as you’re not that thing, you’re instantly sunk. Ideas can’t be easily defeated. Instrumentalism can.

Weirdly, for a while at least, a Green surge might keep Starmer in place, for longer. Labour have had a poor electoral record these last 15 years, especially in old heartlands. But they’ve quietly built up new ones: becoming the hegemonic force in urban, progressive, metropolitan England. For the first time since the Iraq war Lib Dem surge, that is now seriously threatened. That will scare scores of Labour MPs who have become accustomed to weighing votes. If a leadership election were held now, the essay question therefore for Labour will not be, who can defeat Farage, but who can defeat Polanski. That will in turn scare the Labour right, who will cling to Starmer for fear of who might replace him. By-election dynamics are not replicable at a general election, and Polanski’s Greens have much work to do to neutralise problems, especially on defence and foreign policy. But make no mistake, the winds blown by Gorton and Denton voters will work their way through the Labour Party.

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Meanwhile, we see the right of British politics engaging in one almighty sulk. Reform performed well but not nearly as well as they might have done if their rise were as unassailable as has been talked about. Matthew Goodwin, their eccentric candidate for the seat, blamed his victory not on his performance or views but simply on “sectarianism.” Kemi Badenoch (whose Conservatives scored minor party status at less than 2% of the Gorton vote) went further. She issued a dark statement, kicking off with: “Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them.” Much of the right in British politics has spent the morning talking about Muslim voters as if they are some sort of fifth column.

We need to separate out two distinct things here. There have been allegations of violations of the secret ballot in Gorton and “family voting.” This must be investigated as a potential serious problem. That goes for any violations of electoral law. There are pockets of Britain where clan, machine or braidhri politics have proven problematic, sometimes leading to electoral fraud. We shouldn’t be dewy eyed about this. I reported on it at Newsnight and wherever it happens it should be rooted out.

But the accusations we’re seeing go over and above that. We hear politicians and commentators suggesting that Muslims- uniquely- tend to vote as a group, and that that is illegitimate, wrong or dangerous. Absurdly, I’ve even seem the claim that it is the first time we’ve seen sectarian politics in Britain. Residents of Belfast, or Derry, or Glasgow, or Liverpool might have something to say about that. In fact it is completely normal, across democracies, for minorities to tend to vote in one direction. Yet it only seems to be problem, for these people, when Muslims are the ones doing it.

Was it sectarian when the Church of England used to be described as the “Tory Party at prayer?”. Or when the Liberal Party represented nonconformist interests? Was it sectarian when Labour aggressively courted Catholic votes in Glasgow and Liverpool? Is it sectarian when the Conservative Party courts British Indian voters, something they’ve very successfully done in recent years? Is it sectarian when they did the same with Jewish voters at the height of Labour’s problems over anti-Semitism? Was any of this wrong? The danger is not that minorities vote together. This is normal. The danger is when politicians decide that only some minorities are allowed to. British Muslims, like any other demographic group, tend to vote where they perceive their interests — economic, social or foreign policy — are best represented. That is coalition politics, not confessional politics.

Extraordinarily, I’ve heard politicians express bafflement and even disgust that the Green Party campaigned over Gaza and that voters chose to vote over the issue. That is quite literally what democracy is. It is a marketplace and the voters are the buyers. The real democratic question is not whether communities mobilise, but whether party structures remain transparent, meritocratic and open — something every party, in every era, has struggled to guarantee.

Right now, we have a situation where much of British politics consistently tells us that Islam and Muslims are a problem, or incompatible with British society and democracy, and then express fury when those same people choose not to vote for them. To put it another way, Reform and Conservative seem to have decided they don’t want to bother with British Muslims. They cannot be surprised when they decide they don’t wish to bother with them.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said George Santayana. Such has been the fate of Sir Keir Starmer, who recently said:

My experience as Prime Minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons I want to cut down on regulation generally and within Government.

He is not of course the first minister to discover this. The diaries of Tony Benn and Richard Crossman express frustration at the difficulty of getting things done. And in 1999 Tony Blair spoke of having “scars on my back” from trying to reform public services. Writing in 2008 David Richards, David Blunkett and Helen Mathers described (pdf) three decades of frustration with policy-making:

A minister might pull a policy lever only to discover later that it has not had the desired effect.

In believing that there are such levers politicians are following some defunct economist. In 1949 Bill Phillips built a machine which, he thought, represented the economy. Partly, it did; it showed the circular flow of income and it reminded us that the economy is not an act of nature but a creation of humankind - and what humans can create they can change. But partly it did not, as it omitted important things such as inequality, environmental degradation, supply shocks, growth and innovation.

Polly McKenzie draws an inference from all this - that the “levers of government” is an unhelpful dead metaphor:

The economy is not a thing but an aggregation of billions of decisions, each made on the basis of incentives, opportunities and desires...Government has tools, it’s just that they are not mechanically connected into that system like a lever is.

Giles Wilkes agrees:

All physical analogies for working on the economy are misleading and imply the sort of direct causality, measurability, clear categories and obvious relationships that barely ever applies.

They’re right.

But, but, but. As George Lakoff has shown, metaphorical thinking is ubiquitous. When we confront abstractions such as the economy, politics, nature, or moral questions, we use metaphors to try to make sense of them. Asking us to forego all metaphors is a counsel of perfection. Metaphors are like models (in fact, models are metaphors): all are wrong, but some are useful in some contexts.

On the basis that it takes a metaphor to kill a metaphor, but subject to that caveat, I’d suggest an alternative - to regard the economy and society not as a machine but as a garden.

For one thing, you do not make a garden just as you choose. You cannot simply impose a vision. What you grow depends upon the type of soil; how much sun you get; how long your growing season is; how much space you have and so on. You need to work with what you’ve got, not against it. It’s similar in policy-making. You need to work with and through civil servants, not merely rail against the “blob”. And you must remember Burke’s words:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

This was one way in which Truss went wrong. Fiscally expansionary tax cuts might have worked in a depression. But they didn’t when markets were worrying about inflation. The circumstances rendered her scheme noxious.

Truss is mad, but this government is guilty of something similar. The UK economy’s comparative advantage lies to a large degree in higher education and crreative industries; these are some of our garden’s most succesful plants. But the government is putting weedkiller onto these by taxing overseas students; allowing nibmys to close down music venues; making it harder for musicians to tour Europe; and allowing tech companies to steal writers’ work. Meanwhile it is also trying to grow flowers that are not well-suited by subsiding steel and chemical industries, like trying to grow a mediterranean garden in north-facing clay soil.

“Cut your losers and run your winners” applies in gardening as well as investing. The government seems not to realize this.

Both gardening and policy-making are forms of guided emergence. Societies are the product of human actions but not of human design, which is why the machine metaphor is at best only half-right. Similarly, gardeners cannot easily predict exactly how their garden will look because of course the weather (among other things) will intervene. What they can do is simply create the best chances for plants to thrive by feeding and watering them properly, and putting them in the right light and soil. So it is with governments. They can provide the right conditions for a thriving people and economy (to a much greater extent than it is actually doing so now) but they cannot guarantee that they will indeed thrive.

This is not to say that conditions are always a binding constraint. Gardeners prepare soil by mulching and composting, or improving the drainage of clay soils or by changing the acidity of the soil. Good politicians do something similar; they know that public opinion is not a fixed datum but is something malleable. In Thinking the Unthinkable Richard Cockett describes how thinktanks such as the IEA and CPS spent years preparing the ideological ground for Thatcherism. And Thatcher herself did not immediately embark upon that project; it was not until her second term of office that she began serious privatization and attacks on the NUM. You must plant at the right time.

Her epigones, however, have not been so wise. Osborne and Cameron failed to cut the size of the state in part because they never made a serious ideological case for doing so or had a means of identifying genuine waste, instead hiding behind mindless drivel about the “nation’s credit card”. And Starmer did not devote enough effort in opposition to undertanding just how effort much is needed to repair the economy and public services.

Some constraints are binding; the neighbour’s fence or the position of the sun. Others are not so much. Equally, politicians must know what’s a binding constraint and what isn’t.

A further parallel between gardening and politics is that in both, change takes time. All gardeners know the need for patience, if only because it can take years for plants to grow. The same is true of social change. Shifting tens of thousands of people from some jobs to others takes a long time. One of the right’s consistent errors has been to under-appreciate this. Just as it was wrong to think unemployed miners in the 80s would soon find new jobs, so it wrongly though that companies could quickly divert trade efforts from the EU to non-EU countries. But economies and people don’t work this way. Change takes time.

Which leads to another similarity between gardening and policy-making. Gardens are almost never perfect; there are always some plants that aren’t (yet) thriving. Similarly, there is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Which is inevitable, because there are trade-offs. Do you want a benefit system that errs on the side of generosity or meanness? Do you want efficient public services or ones that have some slack in them to respond to emergencies? Do you want a simple tax system with some inequities, or a more complicated one with deadweight costs?

Some things, therefore, we must just live with. In gardening, said Gertrude Jekyll, “one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.” At this time of year, for example, it’s tempting to start weeding - and in doing so to dig up perennials by accident. Echoing her, the late John Cushnie would often tell listeners to Gardeners’ Question Time: “it’s not worth the bother.” Politicians, by contrast, rarely heed this, preferring, in Jaap Stam’s words, to be “busy cunts.”

There’s one more similarity. Gardening isn’t only about enouraging growth. We also need to destroy things - to kill weeds and pests; to prune branches; and even to cut out whole plants. Sometimes, we need a chainsaw.

The same is true of politics: you must not only cultivate client groups but also weaken or destroy opposing interests, as Thatcher, for example, attacked trades unions. Politics isn’t only about technocratic fixes, hawking product like market traders, and TV soundbites. It is about forming and weakening interest groups.

In this respect, Shakespeare knew more than we know today, our brains having been addled by moronic current affairs shows. In Richard II he has a gardener say of Richard:

O, what pity is it
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being overproud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live.
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down (Act 3 scene 4).

And Bolingbroke spoke of as enemies as pests:

But we must win your Grace to go with us
To Bristow Castle, which they say is held
By Bushy, Bagot, and their complices,
The caterpillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away. (Act 2 scene 3)

He had them killed. Like nature, politics is and has to be red in tooth and claw.

I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps.

I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any reasonable person would. But the results were so stark they opened my eyes to exactly what these platforms reward - and it’s not what you might think.

The Numbers

Here’s what I posted:

Six months since I booted my Windows “gaming” PC.
One game I want to play.
GPU drivers.
Windows updates.
27GB Steam update.
Three hours later, I’ve played zero games.

Same post, three platforms, posted simultaneously at about 6pm. Here’s what happened:

Platform	Followers	Likes/Favourites	Comments/Replies	Reshares/Boosts/Reposts
Threads	330	927	404	3
Mastodon	5,300	19	4	3
Bluesky	1,700	3	0	1

Let me spell that out clearly: On Threads, where I have my smallest following by a country mile, the post got 49 times more engagement than on Mastodon, where I have 16 times more followers.

Mental.

What Threads Actually Rewards

Here’s the thing - most of my Threads posts get precisely sod all engagement. Zero. Zilch. Nowt. I’ll share something I’m building, a technical observation, community updates, links to blog posts - nothing.

Complain about Windows? 927 likes.

A few weeks back I had a moan about a poorly-worded GitLab email. The message said “You’re receiving this email because of your account on gitlab.gnome.org” which, as I pointed out, isn’t actually a reason for sending an email - it’s just stating a fact about my account existing. Fair criticism, I thought.

Got absolutely slated in the replies. Told I was clueless about technology, that I was being unreasonable, the works. 22 hearts, 11 replies, mostly having a go.

Pattern emerging?

Threads has worked out what drives engagement on their platform: conflict.

My Windows post hit every algorithmic sweet spot:

• Complaint/frustration ✓
• Platform wars potential (Windows vs. Linux) ✓
• Invites correction ✓
• Triggers strong opinions ✓
• Generates replies (even hostile ones) ✓

The algorithm doesn’t care if those replies are helpful, thoughtful, or complete bollocks. It just cares that people are engaging.

The Response Patterns

404 comments. Bloody hell. Now, I’m fully aware that posting a complaint online is basically asking for it. Some of these responses were genuinely trying to help, some were having a laugh, some were probably winding me up for sport (fair play), and some seemed genuinely annoyed that I’d dared complain about Windows. They fell into some pretty clear categories:

The “You’re Doing It Wrong” Brigade

“That’s neglect….. you’re a terrible PC dad.”

“clearly a skill issue”

“Sounds like this is 100% user-error”

“You’re just self reporting your incompetence”

My personal favourite: “Your poor parents, bro. As a father of five I can’t imagine seeing my adult child struggle with basic critical thinking skills.”

Look, I’ll admit this last one made me laugh. The mental image of my 84-year-old mum receiving a concerned phone call about my inability to operate a computer is genuinely brilliant. I’m choosing to believe this was someone having a laugh rather than genuine concern for my elderly parents’ wellbeing.

The Well-Meaning (But Mistaken) Helper Squad

Dozens of people telling me to use Linux. Fair enough on the surface, except the game won’t run on Linux. That’s literally why I have a Windows PC. But they didn’t ask what game - they just assumed I was either being thick or hadn’t considered Linux. Which is quite funny given I co-host a Linux podcast and spent years advocating for Ubuntu professionally.

Multiple suggestions to “just enable auto-updates” - missing the point that I can’t predict when I’ll want to play, so auto-updates wouldn’t have solved this particular Friday evening situation.

“Play while it downloads” - it’s multiplayer, the game literally requires the update to be installed before you can launch it. But I appreciate the optimism.

A surprising number recommending GeForce Now or other streaming services. Points for creativity, even if it wasn’t what I was after.

The Actually Helpful Responses

Buried among everything else, there were some genuinely lovely responses:

“This is my experience as a new parent. I finally get a few hours to do something fun for the first time in months and BAM 3 hours of updates, no matter what I choose to play.”

“People will blame you about this, but I’ve made the same complaints. The problem is not the amount of upgrades but how blocking and synchronous they are. They don’t know there are better user experiences, they are just used to poorly designed systems.”

These folks got it. The issue isn’t that updates exist - it’s that the entire experience is designed to block you from doing what you actually want to do. They understood it was about UX frustration, not technical incompetence.

The Question Almost Nobody Asked

What game?

Out of 404 comments, almost nobody asked which game I was trying to play. They just assumed I was being thick, or that I should obviously be using Linux, or that I was exaggerating for comic effect (I wasn’t - it genuinely took three hours).

The game is PUBG. Kernel-level anti-cheat. Won’t work on Linux, won’t work on SteamOS, won’t work in a VM, won’t work on anything except native Windows. Full stop. It’s the sole reason I keep a Windows PC around.

What Nobody Knew (And Nobody Asked)

The PC sat unused for six months because we offered housing to someone experiencing homelessness. My gaming room became their room. They’ve since moved on, and it took a while to get everything set back up properly.

Not anyone’s business, really. But it’s interesting what people will assume when you don’t provide full context. I’m not blaming anyone for not knowing this - how could they? But it does highlight how social media strips away context and leaves room for people to fill in their own narratives.

For the record: I’m a Developer Advocate at an AI-native dev company. Long-time Ubuntu community member. I co-host Linux Matters podcast. I spent years working at Canonical in various roles including Developer Advocate. I’ve advocated for Linux professionally and personally for over two decades.

But Threads doesn’t know that. Threads doesn’t care. Threads just knows: complaint → engagement → boost the hell out of it.

The Platform Comparison

Let’s look at what happened on the other platforms.

Mastodon’s 4 Replies:

“that’s why ppl kick out win and start using linux but you already know that I guess 😂”

“and I used to complain about the loading bars on the speccy taking ages before I could play dizzy”

This second one is absolutely brilliant - nostalgic Spectrum reference, understands the frustration of waiting ages to do something you wanted to do right now, and doesn’t assume I’m a numpty. Just lovely, that.

“RIP Windows”

“And you know what the next stage is going to be. Yesss Finaly! Let the games begin!!! Oh. Shader pre-cashing .. I might as well go to bed :D”

Light, friendly, empathetic. Nobody assumed I was completely incompetent. Nobody got angry at me for daring to complain. Just people who understood the frustration and shared their own experiences.

Bluesky:

One repost. No commentary.

The community’s still finding its feet over there, I reckon. Or maybe they just didn’t think it was worth engaging with. Either way, pretty quiet.

Threads:

Mixed bag. Some genuinely thoughtful responses, some people winding me up (fair enough), some people who seemed genuinely annoyed that I’d complained, and quite a few who wanted to help but made assumptions about my technical knowledge.

But here’s the key thing: the algorithm boosted it all the same, because engagement is engagement. Doesn’t matter if you’re being helpful, hostile, or having a laugh - it all counts the same to the algorithm.

What This Actually Reveals

Different platforms, different algorithms, different incentives:

Mastodon: Chronological timeline. No algorithm boosting controversial content. Your followers see your posts in order. Engagement is modest but genuine. People who follow you chose to follow you, and they see what you post. Revolutionary concept, that.

Bluesky: Algorithm exists but doesn’t seem to heavily favour conflict. Still relatively quiet, community still finding its shape. Might just be that my particular crowd hasn’t really migrated over there yet.

Threads: Meta’s algorithm surfaces content that generates interaction - any interaction. Arguments are engagement gold. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between “this post made people think” and “this post wound people up” - it just sees numbers going up.

I wasn’t trying to game the system. I was genuinely frustrated about waiting three hours to play a bloody video game on a Friday evening. But Threads saw a post about Windows, updates, and gaming, thought “this will make people argue” and ran with it.

Got notifications at 100 views, 500 views, 1000 views. The algorithm was having a whale of a time.

The Irony

I’d rather have 19 favorites and 4 friendly replies on Mastodon than 927 likes on Threads if a chunk of those likes come packaged with people assuming I’m incompetent or having a go at me (even if some of them are just having a laugh).

High engagement ≠ good engagement.

The algorithm doesn’t care if people are being helpful or hostile. It cares that they’re engaging. That’s the metric. That’s what gets boosted. That’s what drives the platform.

And look, I get it - I posted a complaint online. That’s basically an invitation for people to respond however they like. Some will help, some will take the piss, some will genuinely think you’re being thick. That’s the internet. I’m not precious about it.

But it’s fascinating that this type of content gets algorithmically boosted so much more than anything else I post. That’s the bit worth paying attention to.

What I’ve Learned

Threads rewards rage bait. Complain about popular things - Windows, GitLab emails, whatever - and you’ll get engagement. Won’t necessarily be good engagement, mind. You’ll get helpful people, people winding you up, people having a laugh, and people who are genuinely annoyed you dared complain.

Platform incentives shape behaviour. On Threads, I’m learning (reluctantly) that controversy performs. On Mastodon, thoughtful content finds thoughtful people - just fewer of them. The numbers tell you what each platform values.

Context collapse is real. Without context, a post becomes whatever people project onto it. Very few people assume good intent. Most jump straight to filling in the gaps with their own assumptions. That’s not necessarily malicious - it’s just how human brains work when presented with incomplete information.

The network effect paradox: I have 16x more followers on Mastodon, but get better reach on Threads with 330 followers - because one platform actively surfaces controversial content to people who don’t follow me.

I’m still posting to all three platforms. But I know now what each platform rewards. I know what kind of engagement I’ll get where.

Choose your platform based on what kind of engagement you want - not just how much of it.

---

Did I eventually get to play PUBG?

Yeah, hours later, as advertised. I’m terrible at it, but glad I managed to squeeze a quick round in.

The internet’s reaction to my mild frustration about waiting to play it? That turned out to be the more interesting story.

In Europe, heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

In Norway, one prominent diplomat has already been suspended and a police investigation has been opened into a former prime minister. In the U.K., the former ambassador to the U.S. has been fired; on Tuesday, he resigned from the House of Lords. Police are reviewing reports he shared market-sensitive information with Epstein.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, was stripped of his royal titles and residence. A charity founded by his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, will shut down indefinitely following the release of emails where she called Epstein a “legend” and “the brother I have always wished for.”

But as Europe’s political class moves to clean up its mess and address its shame concerning ties with the convicted sex offender, it’s inadvertently highlighting something else — the comparative lack of accountability in the U.S.

No prominent politicians have taken a fall. Consequences have been limited. Wagons have been circled around the most prominent political figures whose names have surfaced in the legal document dumps.

In the U.K., former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson — who has said he was wrong to believe Epstein following his conviction and to continue his association with him afterwards — has emerged as a millstone around British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s neck. While Starmer never actually met Epstein, some are calling for his resignation over his appointment of Mandelson. The prime minister publicly apologized Thursday to Epstein’s victims.

“I am sorry,” Starmer said. “Sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you, sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him and sorry that even now you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”

It’s a different story in the U.S. Donald Trump’s Republican Party has largely averted its eyes or rallied to the president’s defense despite his documented ties to Epstein and the unverified additional allegations against the president that appeared last week.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein allegations, and no evidence has suggested that he took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. The president also has maintained that he and Epstein had a falling out years ago.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick remains unscathed in his Cabinet post. Lutnick said on a podcast last year that he was so disgusted by his neighbor Epstein in 2005 that he vowed to never be in the same room with him again. But when the Justice Department released more than three million pages of materials related to the late American financier last Friday, emails surfaced suggesting a closer relationship and that Lutnick had actually seen Epstein some years later on a trip to Epstein’s Caribbean island. A spokesperson said the Commerce secretary “had limited interactions with Mr. Epstein in the presence of his wife and has never been accused of wrongdoing.” So far, there are no signs it affected his standing in the Trump Cabinet.

Likewise, Goldman Sachs and its CEO David Solomon have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the company’s general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler as she’s faced brutal headlines for months for her associations with Epstein, which include gifts of a $9,400 Hermes bag and a spa treatment at the Four Seasons Hotel in D.C. Solomon told the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago that Ruemmler, a former White House counsel to Barack Obama, “is widely respected and admired at the firm.”

Ruemmler has said she regrets “ever knowing him, and I have enormous sympathy for the victims of Epstein’s crimes.”

Even Dr. Peter Attia, the author and influential longevity researcher who is a contributor to CBS News, remains on the job despite his appearance in numerous emails with Epstein, where they discussed female genitalia and how Epstein’s life was “so outrageous.” In an email that he posted on X, Attia apologized and said he was not involved in any criminal activity, his interactions with Epstein had nothing to do with his sexual abuse or exploitation of anyone and that he was never on his plane or island, and never present at any sex parties.

Some see the relatively limited fallout — in a public arena where infidelity or even smoking marijuana were once enough to sink a career — as a reflection of the diminished standards of the Trump era, when the president’s own indiscretions and extreme polarization has led to a greater tolerance of the scent of scandal. They point to the Cabinet nominations of former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, both of whom would have been unthinkable in the past given allegations about their involvement in sex crimes that both men have denied.

“Some of that has to do with the general chaos on this side of the pond where it’s a never ending stream of scandal emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Trump has set a tone of defiance on refusal to accept and feel any shame,” said Norm Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic who is now a top Trump critic and the founder of Democracy Defenders Action, a bipartisan group that tracks what it calls “autocratic” behavior by the administration. “Those who should feel shame are hunkering down instead.”

It’s true that several American figures linked to Epstein have been forced to step away from public life. They include former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has said he is “deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” and Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, who resigned as the law firm’s chair on Wednesday saying it’s in the best interest of the firm. David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, stepped down this week from his position at a Manhattan art school and said in a statement that he felt ashamed for falling for Epstein’s lies. But for many of the best-known elites who were in contact with the late convicted sex offender — including former Trump aide Steve Bannon and billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk — the only consequence has been the reputational hit.

“What matters is not release of some subset of the Epstein files, but rather the prosecution of those who committed heinous crimes with Epstein,” Musk wrote on X. “When there is at least one arrest, some justice will have been done. If not, this is all performative. Nothing but a distraction.”

Bannon has said little publicly about their relationship, but he did previously call for an independent investigation into the files.

Bannon, a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York house, was planning a documentary to help revive Epstein’s image and even was texting documentary scheduling questions with Epstein the day he was arrested in 2019. Even so, there are few outward signs that the scandal has touched him: Bannon still does his “War Room” show on Rumble and his political musings are widely covered in the press.

It’s an approach in keeping with Trump’s own never-concede-an-inch style.

“We as Americans need to be looking at ourselves in the mirror. Why are we not having that same reaction [as Europe]?” said Rufus Gifford, a former Obama-appointed ambassador to Denmark. “Without a doubt how Trump has acted has filtered down to broader society. But I think the question that we have to ask is whether or not this existed before Trump, and Trump is just a symptom of that larger problem.”

Last Tuesday, it was a year that Bart De Wever (Flemish nationalist N-VA) first became Prime Minister of Belgium. He is the first Flemish nationalist politician to get the job of Belgian prime minister. How has he fared? What were his best moments? And what obstacles and challenges lie ahead? VRT News consulted political scientist Dave Sinardet(VUB) to find the answers.