The Internet vs Real Life: How Separate is Online Discourse from Real Life Impact?
By Comrade Cú Cosanta
The Internet “versus” Real Life
How separate is online discourse from real political impact?
I am, for all intents and purposes, “not online,” and never have been. I don't have Twitter, BlueSky, TikTok, Facebook, what have you. I don't watch YouTube. I technically have an Instagram, which I log into maybe once every few months to check times and dates for art markets, because for some reason we've relegated local event planning and organization to a site that requires an account. Probably shocking no-one, I'm also abysmal at texting back.
One would presume I'm the exact kind of person who says things like “I'm not chronically online enough for this,” or “who cares about online discourse,” but I'm very much the opposite. I believe it matters a great deal and that it is an egregious mistake to overlook the importance of online influence on politics and public opinion.
According to Pew Research, 84% of Americans watch YouTube, 71% use Facebook, and half use Instagram. 64% of children aged 8-12 regularly use YouTube and TikTok, a vulnerable age for them in terms of absorbing ideas about the world. The University of Maine found that about 60% of the world's population uses social media and that the average person spends roughly 2.5 hours per day (nearly a month per year) on social media. Over half of Americans get their news from social media. When the overwhelming majority of Americans engage with social media for both entertainment and news on such a regular basis, how could this not impact our everyday lives or influence mainstream viewpoints?
Overwhelmingly, more and more research is being conducted about the impact of social media on different aspects of our lives. The Oxford Internet Institute states that “social media manipulation of public opinion is a growing threat to democracies around the world,” after finding that $10 million was spent on political advertisements and that 93% of countries had political actors engaging in disinformation. This is to say nothing of issues like YouTube algorithm's alt-right pipeline or of issues like dog whistles being turned into memes a la “reject modernity, embrace tradition,” among others. Turning Point USA began with a speech at Benedictine University, which has a student body of about 3,000 students. Their social media following, on the other hand, had over 10 million. In 2025, influencers were paid to the tune of $8k each to shill for the Democrats. We are increasingly seeing a monopoly of social media ownership, in combination with billionaire ownership of news outlets, thereby enacting further control of the types of information available on these platforms.
Beyond propaganda, 54 countries have imposed internet blackouts during political unrest and are increasingly criminalizing, barring, and scanning for certain political opinions on social media. Many bills have been introduced attempting to regulate content on the internet, whether they do or do not succeed. North Dakota, Texas, and Florida introduced bills barring furries from public schools, with more politicians in states like Colorado and Tennessee discussing the topic. On the surface, this is a ridiculous head scratcher. Why is this even an issue that anyone needs to legislate over? The source is an internet rumor that public schools were putting litter boxes in bathrooms for students who “identify as animals,”--not-so-ridiculously a satire regarding trans people and bathroom usage. Since this debacle, Texas and Florida successfully passed anti-trans bathroom bills despite these bills failing in previous legislative sessions.
For better or worse, we live in a time where most people we engage with in real life have and actively use social media. A time where people are inundated multiple hours a day with propaganda, disinformation, dog whistles, influencers, and more. We are, factually, seeing the internet impact proposed bills and policy changes and *be* impacted by legislation. We are seeing journalism be throttled by corporate ownership and the monopolization and surveillance of social media as a whole. And it is clear that multiple systems of government recognize the internet as both a potential threat to control and a means through which to enact control.
To be clear, I am not advocating for one to sit and spend a full work shift in 300 comment threads, endless video stitches, and video essay responses with people hailing from niche internet subcultures obsessed with using 4chan terminology and who are clearly not engaging with the desire for open communication. I am saying that the internet *is* the “real world” insofar as these are real life people you go to work with, people you see on the streets, children in your community. Rolling our eyes at and ignoring these issues because they're “just online,” sets us up catastrophically for allowing these small pockets of the internet to fester into a larger problem down the road. It is increasingly important to spend time and effort improving our community's literacy levels so that they can identify when they are being persuaded and what they are being persuaded into: literacy is not just about being able to read the words on the page but the ability to analyze, to connect ideas to existing bodies of information available to you, and evaluate this information. And it is increasingly important for us to honestly engage in conversations in productive ways.