The magazine was founded in 2001 with the same editor and many of the same contributors as Living Marxism, which had closed in 2000 after losing a case for libel brought by ITN.

[21] Environmentalists such as George Monbiot[22][9] and Peter Melchett have suggested that the LM Network pursued an ideologically motivated 'anti-environmentalist' agenda under the guise of promoting humanism.

[26][3][27] A study in Policy & Internet by Heft et al. described Spiked as populist, saying that it has "roots in the radical left‐wing scene, but now oppose the political establishment from a position on the right side of the spectrum.

[29] By contrast, digital media scholar Jean Burgess and James Bowman of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center have referred to the site as left-libertarian.

[32][33][34][non-primary source needed] Spiked saw the UK's vote to leave the European Union as a demonstration of democracy against ruling elites and has celebrated Nigel Farage's Brexit Party and Boris Johnson's Conservative government for their stance on this.

It calls The Observer's Carole Cadwalladr, who has won a string of prizes for exposing the opaque spending surrounding the Brexit vote, 'the closest thing the mainstream British media has to an out-and-out conspiracy theorist'".

[31] In July 2020, an exposé by The Daily Beast reported that Spiked was one of several mainly conservative websites that had inadvertently published articles attributed to non-existent experts on the Middle East.

This network of fake journalists promoted the United Arab Emirates and pushed for harsher treatment of that country's opponents.

[9][52] Spiked's editor Brendan O'Neil dismissed such accusations as "McCarthyism" and stated that such funding was used to promote debate about free speech, saying that the Toleration and Free Speech Programme at the Charles Koch Foundation supports "projects from both progressive and conservative groups", naming as examples the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Newseum, the Knight Foundation and the American Society of News Editors.