I have been thinking about how we now experience elections. Not at polling centres, not in rallies, but in the endless scroll of our phones.
The 2026 national election in Bangladesh did not feel like a traditional democratic exercise. It felt like a high-velocity feed. A stream of outrage, hope, betrayal, conspiracy, nostalgia, and defiance -- everything flattened into thumbnails and captions; competing for that most precious commodity: Attention.
We like to believe we vote after thinking. Increasingly, I fear we vote after feeling.
What we witnessed in Bangladesh this year was not merely polarization. It was the maturation of something more structural -- a form of clickbait democracy, where political life is optimized for engagement metrics and citizens are gradually cultivated as algorithmic subjects before they are ever mobilized as voters.
The algorithmic cultivation of the voter
Digital platforms do not simply distribute information. They curate, prioritize, amplify, and bury. Their logic is not democratic deliberation but engagement maximization. Content that triggers outrage, fear, humiliation, or ecstatic hope travels further than sober policy debate. This is not an accident but architecture.
In such an ecosystem, the voter is no longer merely persuaded by manifestos; they are cultivated by repetition. Over time, feeds construct a patterned emotional environment: A steady diet of grievance here, triumphalism there, cynicism elsewhere. When similar narratives are encountered daily, they sediment into political common sense.
During the run-up to the February 12 election, I saw this sedimentation everywhere. AI-generated speeches circulating on Facebook. Short videos framing political actors as saviours or traitors in 30 seconds or less. Deeply edited clips stripped of context but rich in emotional charge. These were not random anomalies. They were artifacts of an economy where virality is rewarded and nuance is penalized.
The result is what could be termed the algorithm of discontent -- a feedback loop in which platforms amplify dissatisfaction because dissatisfaction generates engagement, and engagement generates revenue. Discontent becomes both the fuel and the product.
July, Gen Z, and the digital street
The July uprising of 2024 revealed both the promise and the peril of this ecosystem. Generation Z -- born into smartphones and story formats -- mobilized with remarkable speed. Memes became manifestos. Hashtags became organizing tools. Livestreams became counter-narratives to state messaging.
I remember watching how protest art and satirical edits travelled across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok within hours. A new political subject seemed to emerge: Digitally literate, aesthetically sharp, impatient with hierarchy. For a moment, it felt like the street had merged with the screen.
But algorithms are ambivalent allies.
The same infrastructures that amplified resistance also simplified it. Complex structural critiques were compressed into emotionally resonant binaries. Good versus evil. Youth versus old guard. Revolution versus decay. These frames are powerful but they are also brittle.
When the National Citizen Party, born from the moral energy of July, entered the electoral arena, many online spaces projected an inevitability of sweeping change. The feed suggested momentum. The comments sections suggested consensus. Yet ballots told a more complicated story. Digital enthusiasm did not translate proportionally into seats.
This disjuncture was not simply organizational weakness. It revealed a deeper tension between networked affect and institutional politics. Algorithms can accelerate sentiment; they cannot automatically build ground structures, local alliances, or electoral machinery.
From information overload to emotional governance
We often describe Gen Z as “difficult”-- distracted, impatient, hyper-reactive. But what if they are simply navigating an environment of permanent informational saturation? To live inside an endless stream is to constantly triage meaning. Under such conditions, emotion becomes a shortcut.
Political actors understand this. Increasingly, campaign communication in Bangladesh is not about policy architecture but about effective triggers. A carefully edited clip designed to humiliate an opponent. A dramatic soundtrack beneath a speech. A thumbnail that signals crisis or betrayal before any argument is made.
In classrooms, I notice how students consume political content in fragments -- screenshots, reels, clipped debates. The fragment becomes the whole. Context becomes optional. In such a media ecology, democratic deliberation risks being replaced by emotional governance -- the management of public mood rather than the negotiation of public policy.
The myth of the neutral platform
There is a comforting fiction that platforms are neutral conduits. They are not. Their ranking systems privilege certain tones and marginalize others. Outrage outperforms moderation. Certainty outperforms ambiguity. Spectacle outperforms complexity.
This shapes not just what we see, but how we feel about what we see. Repeated exposure to crisis-framed narratives produces a sense of perpetual emergency. Repeated exposure to humiliation memes produces contempt. Over time, these affective patterns crystallize into political identity.
By the time we stand in a voting booth, we are not encountering candidates for the first time. We are carrying months, sometimes years of algorithmically-curated emotion.
Bangladesh’s particular inflection
In Bangladesh, this dynamic intersects with a long history of centralized power and oppositional street politics. The digital turn did not replace these traditions; it layered onto them.
Traditional parties have learned to weaponize digital outrage. Youth movements have learned to aestheticize resistance. Meanwhile, AI tools lower the cost of manipulation. A fabricated voice clip or a subtly altered video can circulate for hours before verification mechanisms catch up. Well, if they ever do.
What unsettles me most is not that misinformation exists. It is that the architecture rewards its spread. The most inflammatory version of a story often reaches more people than the correction.
And so the cultivation continues.
Between cynicism and agency
It would be easy to end in despair. To declare that democracy has been hollowed out by code and commerce. But that would ignore the agency we have already witnessed.
The July uprising proved that digital networks can disrupt entrenched power. Young Bangladeshis demonstrated that they can coordinate, document, archive, and amplify at scale. The problem is not digital participation per se. It is the asymmetry between emotional acceleration and institutional consolidation.
If we are to resist clickbait democracy, we need more than fact-checking. We need digital literacy that interrogates platform incentives. We need political actors who refuse to reduce everything to spectacle. We need citizens who recognize when their anger is being cultivated for profit.
Most of all, we need to recover patience.
Democracy is slow. Algorithms are fast. That tension now defines our political present.
The 2026 election showed that Bangladesh has entered an era where the voter is no longer simply persuaded at the ballot box but shaped in the feed. Whether Generation Z becomes permanently disillusioned or evolves into a digitally savvy democratic force will depend on whether it can move from reactive engagement to strategic organization.
The algorithm of discontent is powerful. But it is not destiny.
The question is whether we remain its subjects or learn to reprogram the terms of our participation.
Nazia Afrin Monami is an independent media development consultant, journalism trainer, and educator with almost two decades of professional experience across newsrooms, classrooms and journalist capacity‑building programs in Bangladesh and South Asia.
