Political actors now possess more real-time engagement data than at any point in modern campaigning. Decision quality has nonetheless deteriorated. A central reason is that platforms no longer merely surface public reaction; they actively shape the signals used to interpret it.

This session draws on eighteen months of electoral monitoring across the UK and Europe, anchored by a controlled experiment conducted with the Sky News Data & Forensics team, to examine how signal distortion emerges from converging structural forces: platform governance retreat, commercialised disinformation markets, hybrid domestic–foreign operations, and the continued erosion of US counter-disinformation infrastructure.

It introduces alternative diagnostic approaches centred on non-politically aligned environments, where narratives form prior to platform amplification, and argues that 2026 will test democratic resilience through the cumulative effects of sustained signal degradation rather than isolated events.