On Tuesday, the official Conservative Twitter account made what looked like a classic design error: using comic sans to deliver a serious message about Brexit. The response was predictable: the tweet prompted guffaws and mockery.

Yet this was hardly the gaffe it seemed. In an attention economy, the currency of every successful player is engagement. Paradoxically, the more people howled with laughter, or improvised cute putdowns, the more value the message had. The algorithms would ensure it appeared in more feeds. The words “Get Brexit done”, and the Conservative party logo, would be distributed as widely as possible. In itself, this is minor social media froth. But the Tories employ the same tactic in dealing with the mass media: getting attention with false or absurd claims which they then use to advance their narrative.

However clever or snarky our replies may be, we all know we’re helping to spread the very messages we want to discredit

Look at the party’s misleading hurrah over getting “Boris’s Brexit deal passed” by parliament. As Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy pointed out, this was plainly not true. But it didn’t matter. The message still spread. Or consider the absurd claim made by a Tory spokesperson that, if the government didn’t get its way, it would effectively go on strike. Boris Johnson later used a television interview to quietly retreat from this position. But the work was already done: it made sure millions of people were paying attention to the Tories’ argument that they are just yearning for an election fight, if only parliament would stop dithering.

As the insurgent, nationalist right has demonstrated, from Donald Trump to the Brexit party, trolling works. Forcing negative attention is still forcing attention.

This is becoming so obvious as to be a truism. The far right pioneered the political use of trolling, in part as a means to distribute its ideas. As the neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin once put it, the political claims of the far right had to be “couched in irony in order to be taken seriously”. Alt-lite celebrities such as Milo Yiannopoulos gained lucrative publicity from trolling, in his case by whipping up a racist mob on Twitter. But trolling soon evolved into a broader means of forcing attention.

Consider the Trump campaign of 2016. One of the campaign’s digital strategists explained the tactic in terms of agenda-setting. The idea was to keep saying things that the mass media could not resist reacting to. The outrage would create the impression of “off the cuff” authenticity and inflate the candidate’s importance for undecided voters. One result of this was a new sub-genre of listicle berating Trump’s “worst quotes”. Another result was that Trump received 15% more coverage than Clinton did.

Public discussion of trolling strategies has focused on the use of troll armies and sock puppets. There is evidence that suggests Trump may have gone there. But there is a more banal sense in which trolling – broadly defined as communication intended to annoy and derail conversation – has just become ubiquitous. Nor is it particular to digital media. Nigel Farage’s notorious “shock and awful” tactic in the 2015 general election involved using television debates to engage in crude, hateful incitement, in a successful attempt to split the Tory vote. The more it hurt, the more it enraged, the more Farage benefitted. He and his allies repeated the feat with the “breaking point” billboard during the Brexit referendum. These tactics don’t change how people feel in any deep way. But they do organise attention at heightened moments of volatility, when it really matters.

The sadistic element of this communications tactic is not incidental to its success. Consider the current Republican party efforts to defend Trump against impeachment proceedings. Trump is its candidate in 2020, and the GOP has made a clear decision to rally round him. The oleaginous senator Lindsey Graham, once a never-Trumper, has mutated into his most bombastic attack dog.

As allegations emerged that Trump bribed the Ukrainian government with military aid in exchange for a public investigation into one of his Democratic party rivals, both Trump and Graham lobbed a rhetorical bombshell at the media. Trump claimed that he was being “lynched” and, shortly after, Graham added in his southern drawl: “This is a lynching in every sense. This is un-American.” Many social media users took the trouble to point out that lynching is very American, and it looks nothing like what is happening to Donald Trump.

Just suppose, however, that Graham knows this. Suppose there was just an element of sadistic spite in the use of this metaphor. The more people who are repeating, even in outrage, the claim that Trump is being lynched, the fewer are talking about the evidence against him. And the more the “lynching” claim gets around, the more credibility it has for Trump’s supporters. The more it hurts, the better it works.

Why, then, do we tend to fall for it? Particularly when the trolling so obviously and eagerly craves our outraged response? Why do we think we gain from quote-tweeting or replying to politicians and journalists who say things we find hateful? However clever, snarky or “fierce” our replies may be, we all know we’re helping to spread the very messages we want to discredit.

Pity our Conservative MPs, forced to go on strike to protect their way of life | Marina Hyde Read more

The answer may lie in a version of what Natasha Dow Schull, in her study of machine gambling, calls “losses disguised as wins”. Gamblers, hooked on the machine, are almost certain to lose most of their money, most of the time. Yet the experience is punctuated with regular rewards, apparent wins signalled with flashing lights, noise and the clatter of change falling into the dispenser. Social media, with its notifications of likes and shares, offers similar pseudo-victories in exchange for our engagement.

At a moment of great political volatility, the insurgent wing of the right has correctly surmised that the way to win in today’s political landscape is to polarise rather than seek consensus. The issue is who gets to determine what the axis of polarisation will be. If we remain so predictably susceptible to these techniques of attention-forcing, then we ensure that it is our opponents who always set the agenda.

• Richard Seymour is a political activist and author; his latest book is The Twittering Machine