The Politics of Emotion

Click here to join the broadcast from 19:00 GMT, 5 March 2026.

How do digital platforms amplify emotional messaging and influence behaviour and decision-making?

For the second conversation in the series, artist and human rights researcher Caroline Sinders will be joined by psychiatrist and clinical research fellow Dr Romy Gad el Rab and independent advisor and strategist Tanya O’Carroll to explore technologies' impact on political behaviours, attitudes and democracy.

Since 2015, internet usage has been rising rapidly and from 2020 stood at 92% of the UK voting age population. In tandem, British elections since 2015 have seen the largest numbers of voters switching their political standing.

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal exposed the ease and opportunities for behavioural engineering within the online landscape, but to what extent are voters susceptible to such manipulation.

Gad el Rab’s research focuses on the effects of technology on our mental health. O’Carroll is a senior fellow at Foxglove, a non-profit organisation fighting to build a fair tech future, where she has recently successfully sued Facebook to challenge its harmful model of surveillance advertising.

The panel will discuss how political messages are crafted to appeal to our emotions, and the consequences of this on public discourse and democratic processes.

This is the second event in a three-part series. Please see details on the final event in the series below: 

Episode 3 - Regulating the Digital Sphere | Monday 9 March 2026, 19:00 GMT

This three-part online series responds to The Last X Years, a digital project by Jay Bernard. Between 2021–2024, Bernard travelled across the UK, collecting reflections on the 2016 EU referendum. Combined with AI-selected historical headlines, these interviews formed an evolving broadcast, exploring the visible and invisible forces shaping our political and emotional lives.