How do you engage in the era of endless scrolling?

“I want to explain why we don’t build enough houses in the time it takes me to build a house in Minecraft.”  

That’s not a phrase I ever expected an elected politician to use, but they are the words of Labour MP Gordon McKee. In a slick social media video, he explains the housing crisis in under four minutes while placing digital blocks together to make a nice-looking house on a game marketed at children.  

McKee goes through the various reasons houses aren’t built quickly enough as he counts out blocks and films himself holding a gaming controller. It’s weirdly engrossing. 

It’s a technique he, as one of the younger MPs, has been using on social media to get messages across to his followers. He has explained issues like falling birth rates as he plays Jenga, increasing wealth inequality as he carves a pumpkin, and why the government is charging VAT on private schools as he makes a dessert.  

And it seems to be working, particularly on platforms like X, where many news sites have seen engagement on posts linking to news articles down in recent years. His videos are proving popular, with hundreds of comments, reposts, and likes.  

Currently, one in four people in the UK are spending more than five hours per day on social media, according to a recent study. While it’s a positive thing that an MP is able to get a message across about issues the public would have read about in newspapers a few decades ago, it nevertheless paints a worrying picture of our ability to focus. 

The style of video feeds into the problematic endless scrolling on social media that many are attributing to rapidly declining attention spans, particularly amongst younger people.  

According to research by Johann Hari, a journalist and New York Times best-selling author who has written extensively about this topic, endless scrolling on feeds has increased a person’s average social media usage by 50 per cent in recent years. 

And to quote him: “Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen from you.”  

Hari argues that we’ve been conditioned to believe our inability to concentrate is our fault. It’s the result of external systems, such as social media, deliberately engineered to fragment our attention and hijack the brain’s reward system with constant interruptions and task switching, and ultimately keep your eyes on the platform for as long as possible.  

And this is why McKee’s videos are doing so well: they are built to keep you engaged with the video. Bored of hearing why the planning permission is hampering house building? Switch your attention to digital blocks. Bored of hearing why VAT should apply to school fees? Switch your attention to chopping strawberries and mashing meringue.  

It may keep you on the content for longer but ask yourself what you took away from it – before you scroll onto the next video. 

This is not a slight on McKee, by the way. He has identified how to get some much-needed cut-through in a world where attention is wrestled for. He knows that with so much of our spare time taken up by social media, it leaves us less time and less attention to engage properly with politics and news, and that it has deeply impacted the way we interact with political messaging. 

Take Reform UK, for example. Many pollsters currently have Nigel Farage’s party forming the next government. It’s no secret the party has gained immense popularity from working-class voters, mobilised in large part on social media, and who, rightly, feel worse off than they did two decades ago. Wages have stagnated, house prices have skyrocketed, and the cost of food has drastically increased, to name a few. They are right to feel angry and want better. 

Deputy leader Richard Tice, who heads up the party’s Elon Musk-style Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge), has said Reform will make “Britain competitive” and has mentioned “scrapping red tape”. These words, which have been well received on social media and ahead of the local government elections in May, have yet to bear fruit at a local level.  

To date, Dolge has reportedly visited just three of the 12 Reform-run local authroities and has failed to scrutinise any internal finances at any council because of legal barriers. 
And earlier this month, Farage rolled back on the promise to deliver tax cuts worth £90bn a year, arguing such cuts are not currently “realistic” because of the “dire state” of the public finances. But despite these developments, the party’s popularity is still at a near all-time high, according to the latest YouGov polling.  

I think it’s worth asking: have most people even heard about these developments? My guess is probably not. 

The chancellor will set out the Budget in the next few weeks. It’s clear there will be hard choices to make that will be scrutinised. What do you think is more likely to be more engaged with on social media: a balanced in-depth explainer of why decisions have been made and how they may affect people’s lives or businesses, or a short tweet, snappy headline, or critical short video? 

It’s safe to say it’ll be the latter – unless you slap some Minecraft footage on the explainer.