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........

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