In the first part of our series on digital politics, we look at how centrists have lost ground fighting disinformation – when the real battle is over emotion and attention
Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London
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.
