Are you, dear reader, coconut-pilled? Do you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you? Are you, as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, Kamala Harris put it, unburdened by what has been? Are you, like Vice-President Harris, "brat"?

Don’t worry, this isn’t a column written to explain internet culture and niche references. To paraphrase EB White, explaining a meme is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better but the frog dies in the process. Besides, the moment Britain’s growing cast of political podcasters and commentators got their hands on the phrase "brat summer’" its cultural relevance on this side of the Atlantic went into a tailspin. Rather, this is a column about internet culture and social media politics, and why we should discount neither.

Social media is not real life, but a great deal of real life happens on social media. The phrase "Twitter isn’t real life" isn’t wrong, and we certainly can’t make generalisations about the public based on what a minority of political obsessives post online. But it has also become a rather glib dismissal of online political activity, failing to recognise how much social media and online politics matter.

Let me frame this a different way. We have all come to accept the role that the internet has played in poisoning the well of public discourse, enabling radicalisation and polarisation. Social media platforms operate according to the rules of the attention economy - the longer you spend on a site or an app, the more adverts you see, and the more advertising revenue that platform will receive. Platforms are incentivised to keep your eyes on the screen, and almost every aspect of the algorithmically-driven user experience is designed to keep you scrolling and consuming content.

The content that is most likely to keep you on a platform is content that provokes a strong, emotional reaction, and so algorithms privilege content that triggers those reactions. That could be joy and laughter, or it could be outrage and anger. Unfortunately, outrage is much easier to cultivate than joy.

Thus, outrageous and angering content, whether true or (more often) not, runs rife on social media, usually homegrown but also routinely encouraged by foreign adversaries through networks of bots. People descend into social media rabbit holes and become trapped in echo chambers, repeatedly exposed to the same content from the same influencers. These online bubbles easily become hotbeds for conspiracy and, ultimately, create an alternative reality for the people trapped in them.

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That "reality" does not remain online, as we have seen this week. The riots that followed the tragic and horrific murder of three young girls in Southport are a case in point: a fake name and claims that the attack was an act of Islamist terrorism spread almost immediately from the lips of people like Andrew Tate and Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon through the far-right social media ecosystem and culminated in riots in Southport, targeting a mosque. That violence spread across the country, with clashes from Hartlepool to Downing Street.

Social media is not real life, but a great deal of real life happens on social media and what happens on social media matters very much to life off social media. In the past decade, what we have seen of the role of social media in politics has been overwhelmingly negative, and the privilege given to outrage and anger by content algorithms is a large part of why. But as divisive as social media has often been, its potency as a space for political mobilisation is not limited to the forces that would undermine and divide our society.

As President Biden’s cognitive decline became apparent during and after his debate with former President Trump, a range of pro-Kamala Harris memes began to go viral across TikTok, Instagram, and X/Twitter which featured clips of the Vice-President’s word salad speeches and unusual laugh. Most of these clips surfaced in Republican attempts to discredit the Vice-President but were now being turned into ironic, comic, and at best semi-serious material by Democrats dealing with the psychological blow delivered by President Biden’s campaign going off the rails.

But little ironic on the internet remains ironic for long. When the President announced that he was withdrawing from the race, young and online Democrats were primed to swing behind Harris. In combination with party stalwarts uniting behind the Vice-President, the explosion of online enthusiasm for her has driven a tectonic shift in the shape of the contest. Energy has supplanted despair, and the momentum is suddenly with the Democrats.

In its first week, the Harris campaign (in reality the repurposed Biden-Harris campaign) raised over $200m, two-thirds of which came from first-time donors, and more than 170,000 Americans signed up to volunteer for her. The polls have shown a clear shift towards the Democrats. In the latest YouGov poll for The Economist, Vice President Harris’ net favourability rating has improved from -12 to -4 compared to their last poll conducted entirely before President Biden dropped out; in comparison, former President Trump sits at -7.

There has been an explosion of online enthusiasm for Kamala HarrisThere has been an explosion of online enthusiasm for Kamala Harris (Image: Getty)

In the same polling series, a narrow Trump lead of +2 over President Biden has become a narrow Harris lead of +2, a shift replicated across much of the polls. Polling in "battleground states" suggests that the two main candidates are neck-and-neck, where President Biden had fallen behind Trump.

There is a great deal yet to happen between now and the Presidential elections in November. Maybe the Harris bounce will fade, or events will intervene to reshape the race once again. But for now, the Democrats are back in the race for the White House, and the tide of meme-fuelled enthusiasm for their new presumptive nominee played a significant role in shifting momentum in their favour.

Social media is not real life, but a great deal of real life happens on social media, including political life. It is a space in which activists can mobilise, motivate, develop messaging, and generate momentum. It is a wellspring from which many of the vibes that shape society and politics emerge. And as much as it has been such for bad actors intent on sowing division and destroying communities, it retains the power to also be such for campaigns to defend democracy and build a better tomorrow.