The election campaign in Malta has become less about ideas and more about visibility. Not visibility in the traditional sense of public meetings, debates or political discussion, but visibility measured in uploads, selfies, reels, stories and endless social media updates documenting practically every movement politicians make throughout the day.

It has become exhausting.

From the moment they wake up to the moment they finally stop campaigning late at night, politicians now appear determined to provide a minute-by-minute account of their lives. They post videos entering cafés, photos greeting supporters, clips of them shaking hands in village squares, smiling at children, hugging elderly people, attending meetings, driving to events, walking into headquarters and drinking coffee. At times, the only detail missing is how many times they visited the bathroom.

There was once a degree of distance between politicians and the public. Citizens could choose when to engage with politics. They could attend a rally, watch a discussion programme, read a newspaper or simply ignore the campaign altogether. Social media has destroyed that balance. Politics now invades every scroll, every feed and every quiet moment online.

And the problem is not only frequency. It is also the astonishing lack of substance.

Rarely does one encounter a post explaining a policy in depth, countering an opponent's argument with facts or presenting a coherent vision for the country. Instead, most posts serve no purpose other than proving that the politician is active, visible and permanently on the move. The campaign has turned into a competition over who visited the most localities, met the most people and uploaded the most content.

It is politics as performance.

Supporters only make matters worse. Every candidate now has an army of loyal followers desperate to show proximity to the leader or party hierarchy. Social media feeds become flooded not only with content produced by politicians themselves, but also by supporters reposting, tagging, photographing and documenting every possible interaction. The result is overkill.

What politicians fail to understand is that overexposure can easily produce the opposite effect. Visibility does not automatically create trust or admiration. Constant intrusion breeds irritation. Moderate voters, undecided citizens and people who follow politics from a distance are unlikely to be persuaded by endless images of candidates posing for photographs or pretending to enjoy choreographed encounters with voters.

The assumption appears to be that every handshake is electorally valuable and every uploaded smile is politically strategic. But many people see through it. They understand that much of it is staged, repetitive and shallow. A politician lifting a child for the camera or embracing an elderly person for the tenth time that week is no longer heartwarming.

Indeed, one wonders whether politicians themselves realise how artificial the whole exercise has become. There seems to be genuine belief within political circles that saturation equals success - that appearing constantly on people's screens somehow translates into popularity. Yet there is a growing sense that many voters are becoming tired of the relentless political bombardment.

Campaigns should inform people, not suffocate them.

This obsession with perpetual exposure also reflects a wider problem in modern politics: the fear of silence. Politicians now seem terrified that if they disappear from social media for a few hours, they risk becoming irrelevant. Every moment must be documented. Every activity must be publicised. Every encounter must be transformed into content.

But leadership is not measured by the number of Instagram stories uploaded in a day.

Good politics requires reflection, restraint and substance. It requires politicians to speak when they have something meaningful to say, not simply because an algorithm rewards constant activity. There is a difference between communicating with the public and imposing oneself upon it.

Unfortunately, Maltese politics has crossed that line.

The irony is that all this frantic posting probably works only on the already converted - the diehard supporters who would vote for their party regardless. The wider electorate is far less impressed. Many people simply want politicians to stop shouting for attention all day long.

This editorial will probably change nothing. Politicians will continue flooding timelines with carefully crafted images and endless campaign updates. Their media teams will continue filming every coffee, every walkabout and every staged interaction. Supporters will continue sharing everything in sight.

But it should at least be said openly: it has become too much.