“A computer terminal,” Douglas Adams once wrote, “is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.” In the same way, while the platform known in happier times as Twitter is famously not the real world, that’s never meant it can’t affect it.
One of the less upsetting ways those effects can manifest is outlined in a new report from “reputation management consultancy” Montford Communications. Posting to Policy explores the way wonks, politicos and shitposters alike drive government action through the raw power of their takes. “A niche account posts something punchy. It lands,” the report explains, with more full stops than is acceptable anywhere but LinkedIn. “Traditional media pick it up. Politicians respond. And policy follows. This is the ‘posting to policy’ pipeline and it’s fast becoming the new normal.”
Not all the examples the consultancy gives of this pipeline are entirely convincing. The “Nicholas, 30 ans” meme may have generated discourse, but it has not, as far as I’ve noticed, led to attempts to actually rethink intergenerational fairness; and while Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video made some waves, the shadow justice secretary is not, appearances notwithstanding, a shitposter. The most persuasive example offered is the transformation of Motability from a worthy but obscure scheme allowing those in receipt of mobility allowance to lease cars, to a “something must be done”-level spending scandal through noise on X alone.
Montford’s argument isn’t wrong: it’s abundantly clear by now that things that happen on the internet rarely stay there, and while hacks and wonks hang out on the same platforms as those with actual power it’s unsurprising that ideas sometimes migrate from the former to the latter. That, though, does not mean these conclusions are either new or significant. I can think of things I put on the internet ten years ago that genuinely, if surprisingly, brought change. (You can see one of them on the Tube Map right now.) This report exists largely, I suspect, because writing about people who spend a lot of time online is a great way to guarantee coverage. YouGov used to poll silly arguments I was having on Twitter, on the grounds I was a reliable retweet: this feels like the same trick.
If something has changed here, it’s in who is numbered among the “new class of online actors”. The report breaks these into five groups: policy wonks, Anglofuturists, progressive activists, issue driven obsessives and civic provocateurs, obsessed with “crime, immigration, housing, and public order” (quite the most flattering euphemism for “people creepily obsessed with Sadiq Khan” I’ve ever read). As you read the report, pictures of these people follow you down the page whether you want them to or not. This is a pretty apt metaphor, but remains intensely irritating when you’ve been around a while and know these people personally.
What’s really striking, though, is the pool of broadly centre-left online opinion havers who are conspicuous by their absence. “While the dynamic is most advanced on X,” Montford writes, “we’re seeing similar shifts on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond.” At no point does the report mention BlueSky.
Did the centre-left bit of UK politics Twitter make an error in decamping en masse to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Twitter? The old site, now remade as X, remains significantly larger than the new, and much of the political class have failed to make the jump. Did those of us who went let our desire for a comforting liberal bubble undermine our actual influence?
Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that that is the reason why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.
The story of social media in the last few years is not one of a self-righteous liberal flounce, but of fragmentation: network effects are a thing, and if most of the people you like to talk to switch platforms, there feels little point in remaining behind. If we have lost influence, that’s at least partly down to the government’s reluctance to use its convening power to reshape the information environment, and its odd commitment to a site owned by someone who wants Keir Starmer in prison.
Those who stayed behind have lost something, too: the ability to not have their worldview shaped by some of the maddest people on the internet. One of the Tories’ big conference announcements was the promise of an Ice-style border force that would deport [citation needed] 150,000 people a year. That mass deportations of most existing migrants is not actually popular in the UK – that such a policy places yet more distance between the Tories and the mainstream centre which deserted them last year – seems not to have occurred.
It’s hard not to connect this to the fact that much of the political class remains on a platform now dominated by the political extremes. They might do well to remember: Twitter is not the real world.
[Further reading: Birmingham doesn’t like Robert Jenrick either]
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