In the
In the final part of this series, we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished – and how some progressives are turning the tide
There is politics before the internet, and politics after the internet. Liberals are floundering, the right are flourishing, and what of the left? Well, it’s in a dire state. This is despite the fact that the key political problems of the last decade – rising inequality and a cost of living crisis – are problems leftists claim they can solve. The trouble is, reactionaries and rightwingers steal their thunder online, quickly spreading messaging that blames scapegoats for structural problems. One reason for this is that platforms originally built to connect us with friends and followers now funnel us content designed to provoke emotional engagement.
Back when Twitter was still the “town square” and Facebook a humble “social network”, progressives had an advantage: from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street, voices excluded from mainstream media and politics could leverage online social networks and turn them into real-life ones, which at their most potent became street-level protests that toppled regimes and held capitalism to account. It seemed as though the scattered masses would become a networked collective empowered to rise up against the powerful.
But the model of friending and following put a cap on engagement. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when you could reach the end of your Facebook and Instagram feeds – our friends only had so many lunches to post. Platforms needed to find ways to keep us logged in. Instagram introduced “suggested posts” from accounts users didn’t follow. TikTok took this logic further: just sign up and start swiping, no need to friend or follow anyone. Creators with small social networks could go viral just by posting engaging content, and everyone could lose themselves in an infinite stream of shortform videos. Copycats such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts crowded into this new market. Over on X, Elon Musk reinstated far-right accounts and turned the “for you” feed into a home for racism and hate speech.
In short, platforms that had once offered a space for debate and deliberation shifted toward emotion and immersion.
