Rising political power of social media influencers and unreliable sources of news are damaging democracy – John McLellan

It wasn’t something about which I got particularly hot under the collar, and if there are personality cults, look no further than the wagons circling around Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. What binds them together is supporters who are prepared to either set their hero’s flaws to one side or ignore them altogether. And everyone has an opinion about them; one person’s determined and charismatic leader is another’s polarising demagogue.

The spectacular downfalls of Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson are perhaps too extreme to illustrate a general point about political opinion-forming, but those who inhabit social media create an impression of sharp division which is not necessarily reflected in the wider population, and the blunt instrument of approval ratings can further distort the picture of what people actually think. If social media commentary was a true reflection of society, then it’s a wonder civil war hasn’t broken out here over independence, in the south over Brexit and in the USA when Donald Trump wakes up in the morning.

The 2023 Digital News Report, from the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, paints a more nuanced picture. Very worrying for people like me in this business, it shows that 47 per cent of people do not participate in news at all, so-called “passive consumers” and 36 per cent actively avoid news altogether. If they have opinions, and they surely will, it can’t be based on anything they read in the papers or hear on the TV news. Programmes like Question Time are therefore representative of people with an opinion, not the public at large.

The report also detects a decline in sharing and commenting on news after peaking in 2016-19, driven mainly by Facebook as a conduit for opinion during Donald Trump’s election, the Brexit referendum and, interestingly, the Catalan independence campaign. Presumably because people got fed up hearing other views they didn’t like in open platforms, political participation is shifting to “closed networks” like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Discord, where they can have private conversations with friends in “a less toxic environment". Otherwise known as an echo-chamber, they will only be exposed to what they want to hear or read, and opinions with which they already agree and become more entrenched in their views. And the more distanced and obscure opponents become, the more threatening and sinister they might seem.

In the UK, only nine per cent of people take out any kind of subscription to a mainstream news provider, and although papers like The Times (438,000 digital subscribers), Daily Telegraph (586,867) and The Guardian (no subscription but with over a million paying supporters) are making a good fist of it, they are dwarfed by the BBC which is by some considerable way the dominant provider of online news, accessed by 45 per cent of the population three days a week for free through the licence fee. The research also shows the number of people very interested in news has fallen 15 per cent from 2017 to just 48 per cent, despite threats like the cost-of-living crisis.

This is where it becomes more problematic for political debate, because Reuters believes fewer but more hardened participants in online platforms are having increasing influence over decisions made by news providers. “A relatively small group of engaged users has a disproportionate influence over political and cultural debates – and... this group has become smaller and more concentrated over time,” says the report. They found that in the UK just ten per cent of the population were active contributors, who “often seem to heavily influence the mainstream media agenda and shape wider debates”.

The same pattern was found in all news markets, with the active groups tending to be “male, better educated, and more partisan in their political views – the same, unrepresentative demographic profile many news media cater to”. Hardly surprising, given the way political parties organise activists to bombard social media with agreed lines and messages. This all adds up to a vicious circle in which more voters obtain initial information from unreliable platforms, but seek validation from a single source which is itself vulnerable to direct political pressure and indirect activism through social media.

It’s just one element in the political tool kit, but the research indicates its effectiveness might be waning because more people are disengaging from mainstream news, put off by the very thing political parties want them to notice. But strategists have already woken up to the need for new tactics, as younger people move away from Facebook and Twitter, where news and journalism still drives the conversations, in favour of new providers like Snapchat and Instagram where they pay more attention to information from influencers or celebrities and where independent regulation is much more lax. It should be a matter of international concern that Chinese-owned TikTok reaches 44 per cent of 18-24-year-olds in all markets and, according to Reuters, is the fastest-growing platform in parts of Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific rim.

Social media influencing played a significant role in the 2020 US presidential election yet, unlike commercial influencing, it remains unregulated. With an imminent election here, UK parties will be working out ways to harness the subliminal power of influencers while electoral commissioners struggle to keep up. Influencers don’t feature in last year’s Elections Act and Electoral Commission guidance even suggests influencer content doesn’t necessarily need a political “imprint” like party broadcasts.

And I’ve not even mentioned news generated by artificial intelligence, “Wikipedia on amphetamines” according to News Group chief Robert Thomson. TikTok, the democratic clock is edging closer to midnight.