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. Reactionaries and rightwingers have adapted their stories about who is to blame for the daily indignities of late capitalist life accordingly. Emotionally charged stories of elite villains and dangerous minorities resonate in algorithmically tailored spaces designed for doomscrolling through the permacrisis.

Meanwhile, liberals were still focusing on old media platforms such as newspapers and broadcast debates, as well as follower-focused platforms such as Bluesky. The left remains committed to residual media forms, launching new print and online journals. It also does a delicate dance between appearing on traditional media outlets and critiquing them – but whether it likes it or not, it has a symbiotic relationship with the liberal media.

Their critiques are often excellent and politically consequential: Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar is the rare leftwing wit on televised panels, and Jacobin helped lay the groundwork for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign by offering a space to hash out democratic socialist ideas in a country where socialism is still a dirty word. But even Chapo Trap House, a key podcast from the US’s “dirtbag left” (a loose group of anti-capitalist and deliberately irreverent content creators) spends many a podcast roasting the New York Times. This may be cathartic, but it’s hardly a match for what we are seeing coming from the right.

The right has established its own parallel media universe. It eschews most real news and instead tells convincing tales about how the shadowy functionaries of the Cathedral, or the matrix, or cultural Marxism lie to you in the media and try to control your every action. The reactionary right is not just xenophobia, racism and misogyny. This online subculture also offers camaraderie, new diets, natural medicine, exercise regimes, all of which arrive in new communicative forms such as memes and live streams.

Instead of building an alternative new media ecosystem and amplifying each other’s work, the left focuses more on competition than the right. As the right convenes the intellectual dark web and manosphere, leftwing digital media is a scattered landscape of Substacks and X-to-Bluesky hot-take artists. The demands of the attention economy exacerbate the age-old leftist tendency toward infighting – it’s not just moral purity at stake. The rent is also due.

Take one of the more interesting creators on the left who releases work on YouTube, Natalie Wynn, known as ContraPoints. She has elevated her YouTube video essays to auteur status, combining cinematic lighting with French theory, camp dialogue and compelling political analysis. She is often put on a pedestal, only to be knocked down by others on the left. If you disagree with Wynn, you can say it’s because she sold out, and you might even be able to make your own “drama” YouTube video about it.

On top of that, the centre right is often happy to engage with ideas from the right, but liberals and the left actively balk at exchanging ideas. Take, for example, the tussle between the socialism of the left and the theory of “abundance” being forwarded by the centre in US Democratic circles at the moment. More time has been spent posting teardowns instead of focusing on the pretty big thing they have in common: state intervention in the economy. Like it or not, the “abundance” agenda has created an opening for progressive politics. The right would exploit this momentum. The left looks for flaws.

Still, there are signs of life on the online left. The Irish comedian and “toxic spirit guide” Frankie McNamara has elevated the social media vox pop into a vehicle for deadpan takes on cultural types from “hot new dads” to “wellness warriors”. The Elephant Graveyard’s YouTube documentaries on the cult of Joe Rogan – in the style of Adam Curtis, but funny – have shown that disdain is a more powerful weapon against the manosphere than moral panic.

There are even signs that the posting-to-policy pipeline can work for the left. The Palestinian-American influencer Kat Abughazaleh is carrying the same arguments about Maga, ICE and the genocide in Gaza from TikTok into her surprise frontrunner congressional campaign. Win or lose, her campaign shows that the real power of online politics is about waging the fight over how people view the world – and what they see as politically possible. The online right has had its sights set on this fight for a decade. Now, many on the left are leaving internal battles behind and entering the fray.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London