How liberals lost the internet | Robert Topinka

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There’s a strange tendency to describe social media as something other people use – those young people on TikTok, that conspiratorial uncle on Facebook, the rightwing trolls on X. In truth, we’re all online now. The number of global social media users surpassed 5 billion in 2024. To put that into perspective there are 8 billion people on the planet.

The internet has totally transformed the ways in which we communicate and share information. First the internet came for print. As free online content began outcompeting subscription newspapers, publishers briefly found new audiences on Facebook, only to see referral traffic plummet after the platform began suppressing posts with external links.

Now digital platforms are ending the broadcast era. Just over 15 million people watched England lose to Spain in the final of Euro 2024; the podcaster Joe Rogan has more than 14 million followers on Spotify alone, and another 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Rogan’s reach is global, but there are scores of minor influencers producing weekly or daily YouTube shows that attract audiences that rival and even surpass the nightly viewership for BBC News at Six. This is the era of posting.

The shift is not just a matter of where people get their information (or disinformation): the online world is where we build communities, debate and shape ideologies and policy. Digital platforms alter the form and style of these discussions. Online, whether to drink tap water can be as political as whether to reduce net migration; posting edgy content can shape policy faster than joining a protest; and the appeal of politics is less about meeting material interests than finding what feels authentic amid the fakes, filters and AI slop.

The churn of social media acts as a kind of undertow, pulling political conversations toward ideas and tropes that attract enough engagement to rise to the surface of the attention economy. Traditional political communications, with its emphasis on focus group-vetted messaging, either gets washed away or it becomes fodder for mockery, trolling and conspiracy theorising. The institutional gatekeepers have fallen, replaced by influencers who succeed by navigating the fickle currents of audience attention.

On X, Elon Musk has re-platformed figures such as Nick Fuentes – white supremacist and antisemitic livestreamer – who now has half as many X followers as Keir Starmer. The recently reinstated Andrew Tate’s follower count exceeds the prime minister’s by 9 million. Labour would probably highlight its focus on delivering sensible policies instead of posting online, but as a result it has stumbled into a conspiratorial rat’s nest with its digital ID policy.

In contrast, Reform UK is riding the wave, posting content attuned to ever-changing trends on platforms such as TikTok, where its leader, Nigel Farage, has more followers than all other MPs combined. Like all good influencers, he flogs merch and posts videos of himself either vibing out or “owning” journalists. His audience turns these into supercuts set to “phonk” music, a subgenre of Memphis hip-hop co-opted by online reactionaries.

Russia has been rightly criticised for spreading disinformation, but pro-Kremlin propaganda has begun to evolve from posting ‘“fake news’” toward seeding platforms with shareable TikTok stickers and reusable audio templates, including techno remixes of Soviet folk songs that have become the soundtrack of pro-Russian war posting on TikTok.

The overwhelming liberal focus on disinformation misreads how digital platforms work: misleading content is everywhere, but the real battleground is over emotion and attention, which is what determines whether information – good or bad – finds an audience. This is why cutting-edge propagandists now focus less on policy messaging and more on massaging vibes.

As traditional centrist politicians desperately try to appear sensible, their opposition – occasionally on the left, but mostly on the reactionary right – run rampant, riding an ideological wave directed only by the febrile attention of an increasingly desperate and extremely online electorate.

The way we do politics has changed and politicians need to wake up to this.