How the left can win back the internet – and rise again | Robert Topinka

In the final part of this series, we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished - and how some progressives are turning the tide

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

• Part one: How liberals lost the internet

• Part two: How the right won the internet

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.

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