Digital politics: Why a footprint doesn’t look like a boot

Today’s digitised world knows, and today’s digital world remembers. As our entire lives are mapped onto the online sphere, so is our politics, increasingly centred on the posts of various ideological and partisan leaders and the bureaucratic institutions they lead.

The recent Mandelson saga brought this home for me, as various X-savvy friends delivered the news before even the likes of the BBC had learned of it. While the digitisation process seems natural, merely reflective of politics moving with the times, the implications of digital democracy are far grander in scale and deeper in impact.

the lines of accountability and clarity on what ‘truth’ is have become eerily blurred

Though sirens do not blare and the bombs do not fall (for us in the West, at least), we all remain in a constant state of war. Information war, to be specific. The digital political epoch has facilitated more direct communication channels with the electorate, in which the lines of accountability and clarity on what ‘truth’ is have become eerily blurred. But that’s not a particularly rare perspective. The notion that digitised politics has expanded the scope of debate to include the very truthworthiness of various facts and statements isn’t hidden; it’s right in front of us every time we engage with it. It is this intrinsic everydayness that obscures the obviously damaging, all-consuming subjectivity of modern post-truth politics. It’s so bog-standard and uniform, it doesn’t try to hide its consequences, nor does it need to. Instead, it openly embeds them in personalised feeds of political content that make you equal parts passionate and enraged, but never allow you to lose your focus for very long.

digital politics is less about winning an argument through facts and more around emotions and bias

And this feeds back into political behaviour: given that digital politics is less about winning an argument through facts and more around emotions and bias, we can enter a volatile cycle of frustration and fear. Such a process only elicits polarity and undoubtedly feeds political violence and the erosion of constructive inter-partisan dialogue. While this causal line is, in many regards, simplistic, the telling truth of the matter is the political landscape around us. Coinciding with the rise of mainstream political social media, the past 10 years have been perhaps the most turbulent in modern British political history. From Brexit to Partygate, current polling indicates how political extremes have, in many ways, become the mainstream; from the Greens on one end to Reform on the other. Such an eventuality would have been rather unthinkable only a few years ago, and yet so much has changed in such a short span of time.

Indicative of this metaphorical speeding up of political time, we return to my opening anecdote. Scandalous revelations about Mandelson first came not from traditional media sources but from the digital sphere, which raises a few alarming questions. Has the age of political spin and internal government sources become so comprehensive that any information can be formally released? While openness is, of course, a political virtue, there is an extent to which it strays too close to the sun. Especially since this could give undue political influence to digital actors, or to the owners of digital platforms with disruptive political agendas. Maybe it’s my journalistic-career aspirations talking, but there is evidently a value to the more reliable, accountable, and fact-driven allure of mainstream media, and further, in allowing the government to lay out its own stall from time to time: if governance is half-narrative, half-policy, in this current age of political apathy, it’s worth hearing their side of the story.

These two conflicting understandings, that social media is an apt form of news and that social media is a battleground for objective information, coexist.

While Orwell references frequent sanctimony, his concept of doublethink is worth mentioning here, which refers to two contradictory views being held simultaneously. Recent polling indicates that 43% of Britons use social media for their news, and while not all of that engagement is problematic, it’s still a solid proportion of the population (especially if we exclude those of a particularly anti-social media generation) who evidently see its informative merits. Yet, two in five users regularly see inaccurate content, and that obviously doesn’t include unnoticed mis-(or dis)information, which often centres around inflammatory and/or politically sensitive content. For example, two four-year-olds who died in the Israel-Gaza war become subjects, not of digital mourning, but of a horrifically morbid information battle as to whether their passing even really happened. These two conflicting understandings, that social media is an apt form of news and that social media is a battleground for objective information, coexist.

I’d argue that any form of political engagement is better than none

To give the digitised political sphere a fair crack of the whip, it has to be noted that it has clear-as-day upsides. Despite the problematic nature of social-media-driven political engagement, I’d argue that any form of political engagement is better than none, citing a somewhat classical ‘for the people’ conceptualisation of democracy. As mentioned, we are in a politically apathetic time. Further, there are some ways in which the power of the digital sphere, or more accurately, the power of digital memory, holds politicians who use loose, overly hostile rhetoric to account. Several choice words exchanged via social media have been brought back to the fore in light of new defections to Reform, with its leader, Farage, Yusuf, and newcomer Jenrick, having previously spat on social media. It wasn’t one and done either, with former Conservative Chancellor turned Reform politician Zahawi once tweeting that Farage was an offensive racist. The joy of digital politics is that it’s all catalogued, and thus won’t be easily forgotten.

The debate over digital politics is very much a live one, and as with almost anything, it is far from binary. From Orwellian contradictions in terms to government leaks, the issue is, on one positive note, beginning to be taken more seriously as the Starmer ministry entertains an under-16s social media ban, which I would welcome on the basis explored throughout this piece. Regardless of the means, however, we need not underestimate the complex consequences of digital politics, which cannot be simplified to the modernisation of the political medium. To do so leaves the state of our politics in grave danger, and as mentioned, this is an (information) war; one in which we cannot afford not to take up arms.