JD Vance told a funny story at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington this week. He recalled a Silicon Valley dinner he and his wife Usha attended, before he became vice-president, where the talk had been of machines replacing humans in the workforce. According to Vance, an unnamed chief executive from one giant tech company said that the jobless of the future could still find purpose in fully immersive digital gaming. “We have to get the hell out of here. These people are effing crazy,” Usha texted him under the table.

Why Vance thought it a good idea to tell this story is puzzling, given it contradicted the central theme of his speech — but at least it got a laugh. As Usha Vance colourfully implied, the worldview of the techno-libertarians and ordinary workers appears antagonistic. But her husband’s main message was the opposite: that the tech sector and ordinary workers had a shared interest in promoting the “great American industrial renaissance”.

Vance’s speech was a clear attempt to reconcile the two warring wings of President Donald Trump’s political movement: the tech bro oligarchy — or broligarchy — led by Elon Musk, and the Maga nationalists animated by Steve Bannon. Bannon has denounced globalist tech leaders as anti-American and described Musk as a “truly evil person” and a “parasitic illegal immigrant”.

Vance declared himself a “proud member of both tribes”. He may be right that Musk and Bannon have much in common in spite of their pungent differences. They are both elitist anti-elitists with a shared mission to overturn the power of the administrative state and the mainstream press.

Historians once described the three ancient estates of power as the clergy, nobility and commoners. A fourth estate — the press — was later added. And a fifth estate — social media — has since emerged. But the fifth estate could be seen as a software update of the third one: commoners armed with smartphones. In that view, Bannon may be a tribune of the third estate while Musk is a champion of the fifth. In the Trump movement, the two have fused.

In his book The Fifth Estate, William Dutton argued that social media represented a new and mostly positive form of power allowing individuals to access alternative sources of information and mobilise collective action. He sees Greta Thunberg, the Swedish schoolgirl who emerged as a global environmental campaigner, as its poster child. “It is the scale of the technology that changes the role of the individual in politics and society,” he tells me.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has also declared the fifth estate to be a global public good giving voice to the once-voiceless. “People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world,” he said in 2019.

That all sounds great in theory. But the negative effects of social media have become increasingly striking: misinformation, incitement to hatred and the emergence of an “anxious generation” of teenagers. Social media has mutated from a technology of liberation to one of manipulation. It has corroded the political process and been hijacked by anti-establishment populists. 

One study of 840,537 individuals across 116 countries from 2008 to 2017 found that the global expansion of the mobile internet tended to reduce approval of government. This trend was especially marked in Europe, undermining support for incumbent governments and boosting anti-establishment populists. “The spread of the mobile internet leads to a decline in confidence in the government. When the government is corrupt people are more likely to understand that the government is corrupt,” one of the co-authors of the paper Sergei Guriev, now dean of London Business School, tells me.

Populist politicians have been quick to exploit voter dissatisfaction aroused by social media and use the same technology to mobilise support in cheap and interactive ways. “It is normal for anti-elite politicians to use new technologies that are not yet embraced by the elites,” Guriev says. 

The fifth estate has certainly rattled the old gatekeepers of information in politics and the media. But new digital gatekeepers have emerged who control who sees what on the internet. Trump’s “first buddy” Musk bought Twitter, now X, which promotes or demotes posts in unaccountable ways. The free-speech absolutists who denounce moderation and government “censorship” are often providing cover for more insidious forms of algorithmic control.

Progressive campaigners acknowledge they are on the back foot on social media but they have not abandoned hope. “It is more important than ever to fight for the future. We need to use these tools as well as we can,” says Bert Wander, chief executive of Avaaz, a crowdfunded global campaigning platform. With 70mn members in 194 countries, Avaaz mobilises action against corruption and campaigns for algorithmic accountability, as included in the EU’s Digital Services Act. “We need to communicate in technicolour with all the emotion and resonance that the nationalist populists use,” Wander says.

For such progressives, three bracing truths emerge from this debate. The power of the fifth estate is a disruptive force that is not going away. Populists have been particularly smart in their use of it. And to compete, progressives drastically need to up their game.

john.thornhill@ft.com