Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he has apparently spent a considerable amount of time “looking into” the personal complaints of individual users who suspect that they are not as visible on the platform as they should be.

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the fearmongering account Libs of TikTok, pointed out that she is on a “trends blacklist” and asked, “When will this be fixed @elonmusk?” A popular MAGA shitposter who goes by Catturd ™ wrote that he was “Shadowbanned, ghostbanned, searchbanned.” The far-right personality Jack Posobiec said that “a lot of people” had told him that they couldn’t see his tweets for some reason. And Musk replied to each one and offered all of them the same assurance: He would get to the bottom of it.

“Shadowbanning,” in its current usage, refers to a content-moderation tactic that reduces the visibility of a piece of borderline content rather than removing it entirely. It originally referred to something much more dramatic: quieting annoying personalities on message boards by making their posts totally invisible to everyone else. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have denied doing anything that extreme, but they do limit content’s reach in various ways—it’s frequently unclear how or why, which makes people suspicious. Shadowbanning can mean that posts aren’t promoted to a wide audience, or it can mean something more severe, such as hiding accounts from search results (platforms tend to blame this on bugs).

In general, the practices that slow a post’s spread or limit an account’s reach are intended to be consolations or compromises—they allow for more nuanced moderation than a system in which something is only either left up or taken down, and a person is either not banned or banned. Regardless, shadowbanning has been a pet peeve of Republicans since 2018, when Donald Trump called it “discriminatory and illegal.” Controversy was renewed in December with the temporary uproar over “the Twitter Files,” a batch of pre-acquisition documents and internal communications about content moderation (including some practices that could be called shadowbanning) that Musk gave to hand-selected reporters.

Although Musk wants to be the hero who ends shadowbanning forever, he’s unlikely to fully assuage paranoia about it. After more than a decade of widespread social-media use, many people have deeply held pet theories about how algorithms work, and about how they affect them personally. So far, the Musk era of Twitter has been a shadowban Rorschach test, with different users seeing a different reality based on the stories they’re already telling themselves about their experiences on the platform. “Thank you @ElonMusk for lifting the #shadowban on controversial views,” an #exvegan who advocates for all-meat diets posted earlier this month. Meanwhile, Catturd ™ tweeted on Friday that he believes “all conservatives accounts are being throttled and hidden again just like before @elonmusk took over ownership.” Other users have also complained that they’re still being persecuted:

“It’s so dull & frustrating STILL being under a shadowban” “@Twitter busily shadowbanning folks again, including me” “Hi @elonmusk, can you stop hiding my cleavage from the world?”

Musk recently added “View” counts to the bottom of tweets, presumably with the intention of equipping users with data and giving them greater insight into whether others actually are seeing their tweets and just not liking them. This effort appeared to mostly anger people: The numbers were smaller than expected, which served as more evidence of shadowbanning.

[Read: The Elon Musk placebo effect]

Effective or not, Musk’s efforts indicate that moderation policy on major social-media platforms is moving into an anti-shadowban era. Users have been loudly agitated by shadowbanning for so long that platforms are finally acquiescing. Instagram introduced an “Account Status” tool in October 2021, which gives creators and business owners limited but meaningful insight into whether a professional account’s content has been marked as ineligible for recommendation (meaning that it won’t be promoted in the app’s Explore section or in other users’ feeds). In December, Musk announced, “Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal.” This update has yet to materialize (Musk says it’s coming “no later than next month”), but it’s sure to be popular when it does.

“Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned,” Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote in The Atlantic last year. In a survey he helped run, 9.2 percent of social-media users said they believed they’d been shadowbanned at some point in the past year.

But of course, these people had no firm proof. Those who believe themselves to be shadowbanned can only swap stories, share data they’ve collected, make arguments, and suggest conspiracies. This is the subject of recent work by Laura Savolainen, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Helsinki. For a paper published last year, she used a tool called 4CAT to collect thousands of comments about shadowbanning posted in popular Reddit forums about Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Sorting through the comments, she saw social-media users sharing bits of what she calls “algorithmic folklore.” They would describe a fluctuation in the engagement on their accounts and then tell a story about what they imagined was causing it. Or they would listen to someone else describe their suspicions and help build on them.

These people evoke data and cite analytic tools that monitor account performance, demonstrating their “heightened awareness” of “ubiquitous numbers,” according to Savolainen. But the way in which many of them use these numbers is arbitrary. They fill in the gaps with speculation and personal grievance.

“Algorithms are very conducive to folklore because the systems are so opaque,” Savolainen told me. “These wider technological networks connect us to people on the other side of the world, and we don’t know who they are or why they made this decision or that decision.” Obviously, we’re going to have fraught relationships with something that undergirds our social lives and, for many, our financial stability. (In the survey that Nicholas ran, 20 percent of respondents who believed they’d been shadowbanned said it “affected their ability to make a living.”)

Here is where the shadowbanning debate becomes sort of a tragic misunderstanding. People who use social platforms think of themselves, naturally, as people. And they think of the algorithm as one all-powerful thing assessing them and passing judgment. In reality, the people who use these platforms are collections of data. Savolainen explains in her paper that the algorithms behind something like TikTok or Instagram regard their users as “composites of individual features—clusters continuously formed and reformed as the data traces users emit are processed and correlated.”

In the Reddit comments Savolainen cataloged, there were many people who took their shadowbanning “very, very personally.” They felt persecuted by the algorithm; sometimes, they felt self-doubt. “Am I shadowbanned, or is it just not good-quality content? Maybe I’m shadowbanned, or maybe I’m not that good of a singer after all. I’m not sure which would actually have been worse for people,” she told me.

[Read: ]To be honest with you, no influencer has been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump Jr.

To her mind, platforms owe us transparency not because it’s fair and because we are all entitled to a certain amount of visibility, but because they have created a fake emotional and mental conundrum for us, and they should resolve it. “Everything that goes on on a platform is already always artificial,” she said. There’s no control against which to compare any post’s performance, because post performance isn’t a concept that exists without social media. The distinction between “now the algorithm is working normally” and “now the algorithm is shadowbanning me” is all in the brain of the beholder. It makes no sense. It’s not reality. (It’s hurting my head.)

The people in charge of most of these platforms would argue that they can offer answers only within limits. If they start revealing every single consideration that goes into every single recommendation decision, people will begin to game the system in ways that nobody will like. Or, if they start providing a ton of context to users about the way their accounts are being treated by various algorithms, there’s no telling what people would actually make of the information. Some may only be further confused by it.

And what’s worse? You may find that you’re not shadowbanned. You may find that ignorance was bliss.

As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy.

In Britain and the United States—and across most faltering Western democracies—this democratic dysfunction is routinely chalked up to a catchall culprit: polarization. The reason our democracies are decaying, we’re often told, is that we’re more divided than ever before. And that’s true: Polarization is worsening. Debates over Brexit and Trump tore citizenries—and families—apart.

But Britain’s and America’s democratic woes are not at all the same. The problems in American democracy are worse. That’s because a particularly insidious disease has infected the core of its political system, one that is not present to the same degree in other rich democracies: extreme conspiracism. Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.

Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or “deep state” cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base. Trump’s disciples have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of a dizzying cast of characters, along with a series of code words for alleged cover-ups. They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as “Italygate,” the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election.

In Britain, far fewer people believe in conspiracy theories. According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media,” compared with 8 percent of Britons.

What’s really troubling about this political moment in America, though, is not merely the spread of conspiratorial thinking in the general population. It’s also that the delusions have infected the mainstream political leadership. The crackpots have come to Congress.

When Kevin McCarthy finally became speaker of the House this week, one of the first photos to circulate was a selfie taken with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former QAnon believer who once blamed a wildfire on Jewish space lasers.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Writing a similar sentence about modern British politics would be impossible. There’s just nothing like it. Instead, in Britain, conspiracy theorists are ostracized by the political establishment. Politicians may disagree about policy, but those who disagree about reality face real consequences.

Last week, for instance, Andrew Bridgen, a conservative member of the British Parliament, tweeted a graph from a conspiracy-theory website, spreading false information about the risks of COVID vaccines. The vaccination program, Bridgen wrote, was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.” The response was swift. Bridgen was condemned across the political spectrum. His own party expelled him. The Tories, Britain’s ruling conservative political party, didn’t want to be associated with a conspiracy theorist.

Meanwhile, America’s political right is the leading global source of COVID conspiracy theories. The more outlandish, the better. Two years ago, in Ohio, in an almost exact parallel to Bridgen’s remarks, Republican State Representative Jennifer Gross compared mandatory vaccination to the Holocaust. Then Gross went much further. She effusively praised the testimony of a quack expert who claimed that vaccines magnetize people, such that spoons will stick to your forehead following a shot. “What an honor to have you here,” Gross fawned, after the alleged expert testified that vaccines can “interface” with 5G cell towers. Gross faced no primary challenger and was recently reelected, with 64 percent of the vote.

Rather than getting expelled from the Republican Party or becoming pariahs on the right, conspiracy theorists have become GOP stars. Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and a former top intelligence official, has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was created by George Soros, Bill Gates, and the World Health Organization to steal the 2020 election. In a separate statement, he argued that Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the best-selling book Sapiens, was part of a plot to alter human DNA and turn us into cyborgs.

Flynn should be an irrelevant laughingstock. Instead, he’s headlining right-wing conferences and commanding huge audiences. Flynn recently shared a stage at the deranged ReAwaken America event with Eric Trump—during which one speaker alleged that “demonic satellites” control voting in America. Donald Trump, America’s conspiracist in chief, spoke to the conference by phone.

Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the links between evolution and human storytelling, has come up with a simple, compelling explanation for why people are innately drawn to conspiracy theories. We are, in his words, a storytelling animal. Our minds have evolved to latch on to stories to make sense of a maddeningly complex world.  

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are some of the best stories out there. They’re thrillers. Many would make great blockbuster films. And to debunk a conspiracy theory is to tell someone that there is no story. It’s trying to convince a person who has made sense of patterns—by squinting at them through the fun-house mirror of conspiratorial thinking—that those patterns are meaningless. That’s not a message the storytelling animal wants to hear.

[Tim Harford: What conspiracy theorists don’t believe]

All humans of all political persuasions are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Millions of Americans, on the political left and the political right, believe in them. But conspiratorial thinking is thriving especially on the right because it’s sanctioned, and endorsed, from above.

This asymmetrical conspiracism has been going on for a while now. The historian Richard Hofstadter noted how “the paranoid style” took root on the right in the mid-20th century, starting with McCarthyism and continuing  through Barry Goldwater’s rise in 1964, shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. This is partly because of Trump himself, who peddled countless debunked conspiracy theories, including that climate change is a hoax invented by China, and the lie that Ted Cruz’s father had links to the JFK assassination. As Trump took over the party, his conspiratorial lies became Republican orthodoxy. And that opened the door to conspiratorial influencers, who started inventing new lies.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.

They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. At the ReAwaken America event, one speaker advanced the outlandish claim that the election was stolen by demons.

Alone, polarization is damaging but manageable. When polarization merges with deranged conspiracy theories, then democratic breakdown becomes far more likely. One purpose of democratic government is to allow citizens to solve problems through compromise without resorting to violence. Modern Republican conspiracist politics undermines those aspects—solving problems, compromising, and avoiding violence.

To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences. Moreover, left-wing and right-wing politicians both watch and agree to be interviewed by the BBC, whereas in the U.S., politicians gravitate toward friendly partisan media outlets.

Even if politicians can agree a problem exists, the Manichaean nature of conspiracy theories—and the extreme claims embedded in conspiratorial cults such as QAnon—makes compromise unlikely. Trying to find shared ground with a fellow American who disagrees with you on health care or taxes is one thing, but if you believe that Democrats are harvesting children to suck their blood, then working together on, say, democratic reform becomes much harder. Granted, elected Republicans on the whole don’t truly believe those more outlandish claims, but some of their core voters do, and that puts pressure on them to treat Democrats like evil enemies rather than legitimate political opponents.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of deluded insurrectionists attacked the Capitol because of lies spread by Trump and his acolytes. But the bigger problem was inside the ranks of Congress itself, as most House Republicans voted not to certify the election based on those debunked theories. These were the conspiratorial insurrectionists in suits—and they’re now in charge of the House of Representatives. What will they do now that they’re in power? Launch countless investigations into COVID vaccines, deep-state cover-ups, and the elections that they wrongly claim were stolen. Governing will be put on hold for two years.

Until modern Republican politics stops systematically empowering crackpots, America’s democratic dysfunction cannot be considered equivalent to the mere polarization that exists in peer countries such as Britain. In Britain, the political system is broken in ways that are more easily fixed. When reality shifts, people change their minds—and someone as incompetent as Liz Truss gets booted from office in just 42 days.

Unfortunately, loosening the grip of conspiratorial thinking in politics is extremely difficult; it means trying to make the storytelling animal give up on one hell of a story. But here is one nugget of wisdom for how to start, drawn from H. L. Mencken: “The way to deal with superstition,” he wrote, “is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”

QAnon is crazy. The notion that vaccines cause spoons to stick to you is moronic. Anyone who tells you that a best-selling historian is part of a secret plot to turn you into a cyborg is, with insincere apologies to Mike Flynn, a complete idiot. In the battle for reality, ridicule is a powerful weapon.