From the Nazi party’s ­antisemitic propaganda, to George H W Bush’s Willie Horton ad, politicians have long been using fear to influence voters.

“In Adam Curtis’s 2004 film, The Power of Nightmares, he talks about how politicians use fear as a way to hold on to power, telling stories about phantom enemies as a way to control the masses,” says copywriter Nick Asbury. “Occasionally, you get a politician who runs on a positive message – Obama’s Hope, or Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream. But by and large, political campaigns on all sides tap into fear.”

It’s an effective tactic – one that leans into our primal instincts and our tendency to act on emotion and instinct rather than reason and logic (something the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel ­Kahneman explored at length in his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow). Thanks to social media and 24-hour news coverage, these messages can spread further and faster than ever before. Campaigns are no longer limited to TV ads and billboards; instead, parties and their supporters can reach voters through dark ads and fake news, operating outside of mainstream ­media (and the rules imposed by electoral commissions and regulators). It has become difficult to distinguish fact from propa­ganda, and sensationalism seems to have won out over nuanced debate.