Once, “staying informed” meant giving something your time: reading an article; listening to a speech or a report; or watching a long interview and sitting with the awkward bits. Even when coverage was biased, the experience had friction. You had to follow a thread, absorb context, and notice what you didn’t yet know. Now, politics often arrives as a stream of clips – TikTok stitches and duets; YouTube Shorts carved from longer videos; and green-screen “breakdowns” at breakneck speed. The format is fast, persuasive, and built to travel. It’s also changing what we think thinking is, because more and more of what we “know” comes to us as pre-processed interpretation.
Into that churn steps the explainer.
The short-form explainer has become a central political actor. Not because they stand for office, but because they stand between viewers and events. Platforms reward creators who can turn confusion into coherence quickly: a crisis in 60 seconds, a scandal in three bullet points, a policy dispute compressed into a villain, a victim, and a moral. Sometimes this is genuinely useful. At their best, explainers translate jargon, flag what’s being buried, and make the stakes feel legible.
But short-form rarely stops at description. It delivers a verdict. Alongside the facts comes a posture: this is outrageous, that’s a distraction, this person is lying, here’s what’s ‘really’ happening. Given the constant churn of controversies, soundbites, resignations, court cases, strikes, budgets, and foreign crises, that posture is soothing. The world is complicated, and staying informed now often feels like being asked to take a position on ten things before lunch. In that environment, the explainer offers relief. Staying informed can feel like being asked to form ten different opinions before lunch. The explainer offers relief by doing the sorting for you, narrowing chaos into a story you can repeat.
The problem is that orientation is not the same as understanding. Short-form rewards speed and certainty, while democratic life depends on slower skills such as checking, comparing, and contextualising. When every story arrives already shaped into a clean narrative, we start outsourcing the hardest part of citizenship: working out what’s true, what’s missing, and what follows from it.
Clips don’t just shorten attention spans; they change our standards of proof. On TikTok or Shorts, confidence can look like evidence and polish can look like credibility. A steady voice, bold on-screen text, and a montage of ‘receipts’ can create the impression that a claim has been settled when it hasn’t. Repetition does the rest. If the same point ricochets through dozens of accounts, it begins to feel like common knowledge. And because platforms reward what is easily retold, the winners tend to be the simplest stories: clear villains, simple causes, instant solutions. Reality is rarely that tidy.
This is where ‘fake news’ becomes too narrow a phrase. The most corrosive misinformation in short-form politics isn’t always invented; it’s often selective. A politician’s quote can be real and still be misleading if the preceding question is cut. A statistic can be accurate and still be deceptive if the denominator is missing. A protest can be shown at its most chaotic moment and framed as representative. A policy can be described in a way that is technically correct but designed to provoke a particular reaction. Manipulation thrives in compression because compression hides the seams.
The incentives push in the same direction. A clip travels faster than a correction. A stitched rebuttal can amplify the original claim to a new audience. A ‘debunk’ becomes another unit of entertainment, and entertainment is what the algorithm understands. Politics turns into micro-drama: outrage, clapback, apology, counter-outrage, all compressed into minutes and measured in views. The reward is decisiveness, and decisiveness chips away at our ability to say, sincerely, ‘I don’t know yet.’ When uncertainty is treated as weakness, conspiratorial stories prosper, offering total explanations at the tap of a screen.
Trust shifting from institutions to personalities intensifies everything. Whatever your view of the media, credibility is supposed to rest on methods: sourcing, documents, corrections. On creator-led platforms, credibility often rests on familiarity. You trust the explainer because you recognise their voice and values, because they feel like ‘one of us.’ When trust is personal, correction becomes harder. A mistake by ‘your’ creator can feel like an attack on your judgement, so criticism gets reframed as persecution, and doubling down becomes part of the performance. The question quietly shifts from ‘Is this accurate?’ to ‘Is this ours?’
Short-form also changes the emotional entry point to political news. So much arrives through reaction formats that your first encounter with an event is often someone else’s facial expression and moral cue. Before you’ve weighed the evidence, you’re being told what is ridiculous, what is evil, what is frightening. Sometimes that mobilisation is justified; sometimes it’s manufactured. Either way, judgement arrives early, and independent assessment starts to feel like hesitation.
This is what we lose, piece by piece, without noticing. The habit of reading past the clip, the patience to compare accounts, the instinct to ask what’s missing and who benefits. As those habits weaken, so does the ability to recognise truth even when it’s right in front of us because truth is often slower, less dramatic, and harder to package.
The antidote is unglamorous. It’s a slightly higher threshold for belief. It’s treating any claim that fits too neatly into a 60-second story as an invitation to check the seams. It’s going to a primary source. The full clip, the document, the actual numbers. Especially before you share something that can harden into ‘common knowledge.’ It’s rewarding creators who show their workings and correct themselves plainly. And it’s making room again for the least viral sentence in politics: ‘We don’t know yet.’
In a world where politics is increasingly explained in fragments, the greatest danger isn’t that we’ll become uninformed. It’s that we’ll become convinced we’re informed while losing the skills that let us tell the difference between a compelling story and a true one.
Image: Nordskov Media on Flickr