Like so-called cybernats, those Corbynista zealots desperately want a saviour

TO look at Jeremy Corbyn, on his bike and off to tend to his allotment, you wouldn’t think he has commanded a support on social media that nothing can seem to knock down. Twitter and Facebook became important early on in his campaign for leadership, the course of which ultimately took us all by great surprise. While mainstream parties like Labour had, up until then, struggled to capture anything like the support on social networks enjoyed by parties such as the SNP, the reaction to Corbyn’s campaign was immediate, and it has been enduring.

Inevitably, Corbyn’s supporters, “Corbynistas” as they’ve been termed, have become more and more controversial as time has gone on. We are often confronted by stories about crazed pro-Corbyn Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, and warned of how dangerous it is for UK politics.

I can’t help it, but I’m getting a touch of deja vu in all of this. It goes without saying – so much so that I’m sick of saying it – that any kind of abuse on social media is out of order, wrong, unacceptable, abhorrent, etc.

The problem arises when the line between “abuse” and a political opinion becomes blurred. It may feel overwhelming to Labour MPs, sympathetic commentators and supporters to suddenly find this mass movement of people on social media who passionately, often angrily, disagree with them, and use all the virtual campaigning tools at their disposal to support Jeremy Corbyn (the petition supporting Corbyn when shadow Cabinet members began their post-Brexit resignation party and declared no confidence in him – which gathered almost 270,000 signatures – is a perfect example).

Non-abusive Corbynistas – also just known as relatively normal folk who happen to be politically engaged – have been a thorn in the side of Labour MPs trying to choreograph a takeover of the party machine. They have been loud to the point of deafening on social media, and their apparent ability to attract other people to their cause and belief in Corbyn is quite impressive.

They have blindsided the New Labour faction with their Twitter trickery, and the party establishment isn’t happy about it. Angela Eagle, for example, was angered during a recent BBC radio interview when a journalist began questioning her voting record. “Hang on a minute, you’re not going to repeat a Corbynista meme that’s going round Twitter are you?” she said.

Corbynistas are an absolute inconvenience, and when they can’t be beaten down – and they can’t be where they congregate so social media offers the open platform that newspapers don’t – the narrative around them begins to change.

I can’t help but think about the coverage the infamous “cybernats” often got during the Scottish independence referendum campaign. Sure, there are people who cross the line, and there are those on social media whose views are pretty “out there”, but never in a month of Sundays did that tiny minority of people represent the buzzing, vibrant, knowledge-hungry, debate-happy Scottish independence movement.

However, you wouldn’t know it to read some of the newspapers. That’s where an alternative version of what was really happening on social media was formed, and I see a lot of similarities with today’s Corbynistas.

To me, the Corbynista “movement” on social media is a bit annoying: it’s often tribal and absolute in its view of what’s happening in UK politics, it doesn’t appear that there’s much room for nuanced thinking, and so it’s not something I engage an awful lot with. I prefer curious observation.

What I do see, and what is similar to the cybernattery which took the eventual form of unending, unquestioning devotion to the SNP, is desperation from mass groups of people who feel abandoned by the political system, and hope that a saviour may have been found. Whether it’s the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn or Brexit, there’s a pattern.

There’s also a pattern in the way these groups are humiliated and dismissed in mainstream debate, as though they’ve simply become props in a political game. But what’s abundantly clear about these mini-political movements on social media is that they no longer care about how they’re represented in the formal debate. The disconnect with the political and traditional media establishment and the grass roots is so great neither harbours much desire to understand the other.

The main problem for the grass roots continues to be the echo chamber effect: as successful as Corbynistas have been in dominating social media with their messages, is it effective on any other level? I suspect they might find that when they step away from their screens, they too feel as out of touch with the streets of Britain as the country’s political elite.