Like it or not – online politics is real politics now.

Why do politicians tweet so much? To a layperson, it seems that many in the world of politics spend far too much time online – politicians and journalists alike. Most high-profile politicians pay people to run their social media for them, though sometimes it’s hard to tell. The language they speak has become so barren of content, their public personae so one-dimensional that it’s not all that hard to convey their facsimile of character through online posts. But recent years increasingly show us an unfortunate reality - politics happens online.

In her 2017 book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle chronicles the development of the contemporary radical Left and Right online, and how the specific online culture of Tumblr and 4-Chan respectively were integral to the creation of those political movements and the personalities which constitute them. The initial battle lines of the 'culture war' which seems to structure all contemporary political discourse were actually drawn more than a decade ago on platforms most have never seen or heard of.

The convergence of the online with real politics has ceased being a phenomenon exclusively of the radical fringe, and is now the mainstream – especially since the Covid pandemic forcibly moved all politics online. Some observers note the existence of the ‘posting to policy pipeline’ – whereby getting your online writing and posts a large enough reach can eventually result in major national politicians picking up on your ideas. Only this week, Weald of Kent MP Katie Lam posted on X that she was at an event hosted by LFG – a campaign for economic growth founded seemingly by and for online policy wonks. Its name stands for Looking For Growth, but is a knowing nod to the acronym’s online meaning of ‘let’s f*****g go’.

Posting can also clearly help get you a job. Robert Jenrick’s widely publicised recent videos challenging train fare dodgers and criticising the record of Attorney General Richard Hermer are rumoured to bear the fingerprints of Sam Bidwell. The former Adam Smith Institute staffer recently became an aide to Jenrick – and while the ASI to Tory party is a well-travelled pipeline, his X threads seen by hundreds of thousands, no doubt will have helped his CV.

As a young aspiring politician or campaigner these days, X is where you have to be, unless you can get in through old school nepotistic family connections. It’s where your writing will be seen and where your name can find its way to the right pairs of eyes. It’s where you signal your allegiances, and a facet of your public life you cultivate just so when looking for the next step in your career. Many politicians of the future, and some of the present, will have more experience dealing with online “pile-ons” than with making speeches in public and arguing their case to a crowd of actual faces. No doubt this will further degrade the already dismal standard of rhetoric in the political class.

Everything we hear a national politician say must be coloured by this reality. When they say they have been ‘campaigning’ on an issue, more often than not it means posting. When they say they recognise “public concern” over an issue – they mean they have seen it online, or had online content distilled into briefings for them by their staff. For most politicians, their perception of the state of politics is in one way or another entirely filtered through the web.

Sufficiently popular posting can get you a job or get your policy considered in Whitehall. Most importantly, almost all young people who aspire to public office are politically socialised online. David Cameron once said, “Britain and Twitter are not the same thing,” but it is now a real and inescapable part of the political world. The question now is whether this is something to oppose or accept. Should those who want to change politics log on, or log off?

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