Por Lucas Malaspina
There is a lot of talk about the “culture war,” but little about its architecture. Here I attempt to answer a practical question: how do we build political communication today that is capable of reaching across communities, translating messages, challenging conventional wisdom, and turning cultural circulation into a political advantage?
A group of accounts publishes. An ecosystem distributes, translates, amplifies, legitimizes, and mobilizes
The backbone of this text took shape while I was visiting Spain in September 2025, as I observed the challenges faced by the PSOE and Pedro Sánchez in digital communication, in contrast to the rise of Vox. I also noted the challenges faced by the Partido Popular itself, which was (and still is) grappling with similar issues. Shortly thereafter, this situation began to reverse somewhat for Pedro Sánchez, as the PSOE leader (as my colleague Jordi Sarrión-Carbonell has been tracking)made a complete turnaround in his approach to digital communication. However, the same phenomenon continues to play out among progressive, centrist, and conservative parties in Latin America and Europe. Across most of Latin America, in Spain—as mentioned above—as well as in France and Germany, the new right is causing disruption. Parties that emerged in the 21st century itself have become outdated.
In the case of Mexico (which I visited in February of this year), the ruling party has no major competitors at the federal level, but there is concern about the strong influence of the Citizens’ Movement among young people, as well as the future of Mexico City (a historic bastion of Mexican progressivism). We see how the leading figures of the local and continental right will seek to capitalize on all of Morena’s mistakes to build a political space capable of challenging the country’s leadership, for which the Mexican “manosphere” could serve as an excellent foothold.
While Claudia Sheinbaum, the president, enjoys impressive support, the Morena party’s image is not faring as well and is showing worrying signs of erosion. Sheinbaum recently pushed for the resignation of party chair Luisa María Alcalde and has just replaced her with Ariadna Montiel Reyes, tasked with getting Morena in order for the 2027 midterm elections. When a power group focuses on draining its leader’s popularity rather than nurturing and building it, we’re in trouble.
Political parties, even the oldest ones, are constantly reinventing themselves. They open accounts on all social media platforms, create videos, posts, Reels, threads, and podcasts, and now they’re also using artificial intelligence. But all of that can coexist (and does coexist) perfectly with a structural impotence: the message almost always circulates among the same people, it doesn’t reach out to peripheral communities, it doesn’t mobilize supporters, it doesn’t reach undecided voters, and it doesn’t shape the cultural climate.
The new right-wing movements, on the other hand, understood better that a collection of social media accounts is not an ecosystem. While a collection of accounts simply broadcasts, an ecosystem distributes, translates, amplifies, legitimizes, and mobilizes: it is an architecture of influence. And the difference between the two is not one of scale or budget: it is one of conception.
There is no opposition between TV and social media, but rather interdependence, blending, and recombination between the two. The distinguished British researcher Andrew Chadwick offers the broadest and most innovative framework for understanding this issue. An ecosystem belongs to the logic of the hybrid media system, where political influence is not produced through a single channel but through circulation across traditional media, social media, creators, activists, closed groups, cultural communities, and interpersonal conversations (Chadwick, 2017). Chadwick is an indispensable intellectual for understanding how political messages circulate amid socio-digital chaos: through nonlinear assemblages involving multiple actors, rhythms, and temporalities. He studied political science in Birmingham while also taking courses in cultural studies—at the renowned Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) directed by Stuart Hall—and approached the study of the Internet with that background.
When an old-school political party invests in its digital communications, it is generally improving its social media channels and content. When the new right makes inroads in the digital sphere, it is generally building an ecosystem.This asymmetry explains much more than the aesthetics of posts or whether a particular piece of content “goes viral.”
An ecosystem doesn’t just manage messages—it manages relationships
Three layers of communication within the ecosystem
To understand what a digital ecosystem in politics is, it is necessary to distinguish three layers that almost no one clearly separates. They are not simply different audiences: they are different functions within an architecture of influence.
The idea of an ecosystem does not start from scratch. Rather, it revisits—in a digital context—a classic insight from the sociology of communication: political influence does not simply flow from a mass sender to isolated individuals, but rather through intermediaries, conversations, relationships of trust, and opinion leaders who translate messages within their own social environments (Lazarsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet, 1944; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). What changes in the contemporary hybrid system is the scale, speed, and diversity of these intermediaries: activists, influencers, streamers, journalists, fandoms, closed groups, cultural communities, and algorithms.
The first layer is activist communication: the kind that reaches those who are already convinced, those who share out of conviction, and those who amplify the message without being asked. This layer does not win over anyone new, but it organizes and sustains the energy of the core. If it is poorly structured, the core disperses or becomes demoralized.
The second is sympathizer communication: communication that reaches those who sympathize but are not activists—those who vote for us but might just as easily not, who follow our accounts but also follow others. Very often, this layer does not seek to politicize them but merely to retain them: to keep them close, to solidify their affinity with an identity that is not always perceived as partisan. In contemporary digital politics, much of the support is organized through personalized forms of participation and shareable affinity: what Bennett and Segerberg called “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).
But the community of supporters isn’t organized solely around ideas. It is often organized around figures, styles, communities of belonging, and parasocial bonds. That is why an ecosystem does not merely manage messages: it manages relationships. Recent literature on politicians as celebrities, fans, and digital communities shows that political engagement can also function as emotional belonging, imagined community, fandom, and relational participation (Peytibi, 2025; Dean, 2017).
The third is “gray” communication: that which reaches people who lack a clear political identity but consume mass digital culture. This layer does not seek to convince them of anything directly. It seeks to shape the cultural landscape within which they will eventually make political decisions. It is the realm where politics manifests as humor, lifestyle, everyday outrage, entertainment, masculinity, consumption, security, urban mobility, parenting, fitness, gaming, music, or gastronomy.
This “gray” layer of communication is pre-political or sub-political: it operates in areas where audiences consume entertainment, lifestyle content, or everyday conversation, but where values, rejections, aspirations, identities, and interpretive frameworks are also normalized. The book *Influencers and Political Communication* (UOC Press) offers a very useful insight: many influencers are outsiders who pretend not to talk about politics—or who do not perceive themselves as political actors at all—but who function as ideological intermediaries because they introduce interpretations of the world through seemingly everyday content (Martí-Danés & Pont Sorribes, 2025; Arnesson, 2023).
That is why, in the gray zone, direct partisan messaging often fails: it arrives with the watermark of propaganda. In contrast, a cultural framing can work because it does not present itself as propaganda. The less explicitly politicized a channel is, the greater the potential reach of a political message embedded in entertainment, lifestyle, or everyday conversation.
What many parties have is only the first layer—and a poorly executed one at that. Official accounts that speak only to their own supporters, a handful of figures who post with varying degrees of success, and, at best, activists who spontaneously amplify the message. That is not an ecosystem. It is an echo chamber with little capacity for expansion.
Asymmetry isn’t corrected by better game footage. It’s corrected by building the distribution layer that the team lacks.
The problem isn’t just the content. It’s the architecture.
When a centrist, progressive, or conservative party loses ground in the digital sphere, the usual response is to improve its content: get on TikTok, make more dynamic videos, tone down the institutional language, and speak in a “more relatable” way. All of that can help, but it doesn’t solve the structural problem. The new right doesn’t always produce better content, but it often has a better grasp of the cultural architecture of circulation: who translates, who amplifies, who legitimizes, who radicalizes, who entertains, and who introduces politics without seeming political.
The problem isn’t just what is said or how it’s said. The problem is that there’s no infrastructure for that message to travel beyond the core. In the digital ecosystem, messages do not travel linearly from an official account to a mass audience: they pass through creators, activists, communities, algorithms, media outlets, private conversations, fandoms, and seemingly non-political cultural spaces. The contest is not just about communicating more effectively, but about creating the conditions for a message to be translated, legitimized, and redistributed by voices that the audience accepts as their own.
Let’s imagine that a political party posts a very good video about the housing crisis (a problem that is practically ubiquitous throughout the West). Since it comes from a party account, the algorithm shows it first to those who already follow the party. Those followers share it with contacts who often belong to the same political sphere. The content may be excellent, but it bounces around within an already politicized community and reaches few new audiences.
Now let’s imagine that, a week later, a popular streamer culturally aligned with the rival party discusses the same issue without mentioning any political party. They don’t present an electoral proposal: they simply say—with humor or indignation—that it’s impossible for a young person to rent an apartment, that working no longer pays the bills, and that politics has turned everyday life into an obstacle course. If they also frame that frustration as a consequence of bureaucracy, taxes, regulations, or the failure of traditional politicians, the content not only reaches a wider audience—it establishes an interpretation of the problem that favors the rival. The political gain doesn’t come from the streamer asking for votes, but from translating social frustration into a cultural framework that the rival can later capitalize on. The party speaks from a political perspective and reaches its own supporters; the creator speaks from the perspective of everyday life and prepares non-politicized audiences to accept a political explanation compatible with the opponent.
This asymmetry isn’t corrected by better videos from the party. It’s corrected by building the distribution layer that the party lacks.
The central point is that circulation is an organizational capacity. David Karpf demonstrated early on that the most effective digital political organizations were not simply those that “used the Internet,” but those that managed to convert attention, data, evidence, and accumulated learning into the capacity for action (Karpf, 2012). Daniel Kreiss, in his study of U.S. campaigns, framed it from another angle: relevant digital innovation does not lie in the isolated tool (that would be a form of fetishism), but in the organization that learns, prototypes, coordinates, and distributes (Kreiss, 2016).
To maximize infotainment, we need to ask: Through what human, technical, and cultural infrastructure will that content circulate once it is published?
There is no better communication without better architecture
It is a common analytical mistake to attribute the rise of the new right in the digital sphere to the fact that they “communicate better” or that “hate goes viral more easily.” There is some truth to that, but it is a very one-sided explanation that leads to the wrong solutions. The advantage lies not only in the message, the tone, or the aesthetics. The point is that architecture is communication when it organizes the social, technical, and cultural conditions that allow a message to circulate.
The new right doesn’t necessarily produce better content. Often, it produces content that is more rudimentary, more repetitive, and more brutal. But it tends to create better conditions for circulation: nodes with distinct roles, creators with their own audiences, activists capable of amplifying messages, communities willing to defend them, “gray” channels that introduce political values without explicit party affiliation, and circuits of outrage that turn adversarial reactions into new visibility.
What the new right-wing movements built—in Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany—was not merely a more agile communications team. It was a three-layered ecosystem where each node plays a specific role. Organized activists amplify and confront. Supporters—influencers, content creators, YouTubers, podcasters—uphold the narrative from seemingly neutral cultural territories. And a more diffuse layer of “gray channels” reaches segments of the mass audience without any visible political affiliation.
Not all of this is directed by a central command. Some nodes are coordinated; others align based on ideological affinity, platform incentives, community belonging, shared antagonisms, or the pursuit of attention. The ecosystem’s effectiveness does not always depend on a command, but rather on a convergent orientation. This distinction is important: it prevents us from interpreting everything as a conspiracy and allows us to understand how real ecosystems operate.
Recent literature on political influencers confirms this asymmetry. Martí-Danés and Pont Sorribes point out that the far right has been particularly adept at creating networks of political influencers capable of covering different ideological currents—anti-feminism, racism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, and “rojipardismo”—and shaping the public debate online. Lewis, in his report on the American alt-right, had already demonstrated how these networks can function as an infrastructure for radicalization, victimization, and amplification (Lewis, 2018; Martí-Danés & Pont Sorribes, 2025).
Javier Milei’s presidential campaign in Argentina offers a particularly clear example of this logic. His digital performance cannot be explained solely by the candidate’s official account, but rather by a constellation of content snippets, streamers, meme pages, libertarian accounts, political influencers, and users who adapted his anti-political narrative to formats native to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Recent literature on Milei on TikTok and on Argentine political influencers confirms the central role of aesthetics, emotionality, content curation, and para-partisan circulation in the construction of his visibility (Ariza, 2023; Slimovich, 2025).
France offers another example. Jordan Bardella (Marine Le Pen’s heir apparent) and the Rassemblement National achieved a particularly strong presence among young people in 2024, with Bardella becoming a ubiquitous figure on TikTok and enjoying very high support among those under 35 in the European elections. In Bardella’s case, the para-partisan sphere does not appear as a closed parallel structure, but rather as a layer of lateral circulation: third-party accounts that take material from the candidate, edit it using fandom codes, and return it to TikTok as cultural content rather than propaganda. That is the difference between an account and an emerging ecosystem: the official account broadcasts; the para-partisan accounts turn the leader into a shareable figure. The fancams barely mention the RN’s platform; their focus is on Bardella’s charismatic personality, his everyday gestures, his selfies with young people, a glass of wine, or even a simple scene like eating an apple—which surpassed five million views and was later reused for new edits (Bouchet, 2024). Following the 2024 European elections and the dissolution of the Assembly, supporters of the New Popular Front (a left-wing coalition) began adopting codes of fandom—edits, fancams, K-pop aesthetics, humor, and viral montages—to challenge a platform where the radical right had arrived first and gained more traction. A new chapter in this battle will unfold in the 2027 presidential election, where Bardella is emerging as the favorite.
The Paradox of the Ruling Party
There is an additional, specific problem affecting governing parties: institutional visibility does not always translate into useful political visibility. A president or minister may have millions of followers, but a large portion of those followers are not their most committed voters: they are a passive audience, and what we need is a community that can be mobilized.
Furthermore, everything that comes out of official government channels is processed by the recipient with the same initial skepticism applied to any institutional communication: “They’re saying this because it’s in their interest to do so.” The credibility of the official channel is structurally lower than that of an independent creator who says the same thing from their own perspective.
That’s why relying exclusively on official communication is a trap. Not because official communication doesn’t matter—it does—but because it cannot do what only an ecosystem can: reach audiences who aren’t expecting a political message, through voices that aren’t perceived as political.
The ruling party has a real advantage—access, visibility, the agenda—and tends to squander it because it uses it to improve its own channels instead of building the bridges that connect those channels to communities that currently don’t notice it.
What changes if we think in terms of an ecosystem?
Shifting the focus from “how can we communicate better” to “what kind of architecture do we need” raises entirely different questions.
It’s no longer (just) about: How do we make more engaging videos? That’s key—as we’ve been emphasizing—because first you have to entertain; otherwise, you can’t communicate effectively. Now, to take it a step further, let’s ask: Which influencers in non-political segments have a genuine affinity for our values and could be cultivated as sympathetic nodes? In which digital communities—gaming, music, comedy, fitness, food—are our potential voters that we’re currently failing to reach? Do we have activists with real digital skills whom we’re not training or organizing? Is there a coordination structure that connects all these layers to the central strategy, so that when it’s necessary to take action, the entire ecosystem springs into action?
Those questions cannot be answered by a political party’s communications team. They require a separate structure, with its own logic, that works for the party but is not conflated with it.
You can’t just wing that during a campaign. It has to be built up gradually, before the campaign even starts.
Every important message must have a distribution path: who issues it, who translates it, who validates it, who makes it engaging, who defends it, who brings it to non-politicized audiences, and what political gain it yields once the conversation ends.
Whoever is the first to weave that cultural infrastructure—with their own distinct stamp but without a visible party affiliation—will have a huge strategic advantage ahead of the next election. Not because it will convince anyone at the moment of its creation, but because it will build bridges that, at the decisive moment, allow the right message to reach the right people.
This is built slowly, over months, before the campaign begins—and keep in mind that it isn’t achieved by simply paying a group of influencers. It is urgent to work on this.
References
Ariza, A. (2023). Javier Milei’s Political Communication on TikTok. Intersecciones en Comunicación. https://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?pid=S2250-41842023000200006&script=sci_arttext
Arnesson, J. (2023). Influencers as ideological intermediaries: Promotional politics and authenticity labor in influencer collaborations. Media, Culture & Society, 45(3), 528–544. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221117505
Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739-768.
Bouchet, B. (2024). Campaigning online. The case of political “fancams” on TikTok and Twitter. German-French Institute. https://www.dfi.de/fr/actualites/dossiers/dossiers-archives/elections-legislatives-francaises-2024/faire-campagne-sur-internet-les-fancams-politiques
Chadwick, A. (2017). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford University Press. 2nd edition.
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Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1948). The People’s Choice. Columbia University Press.
Lewis, R. (2018). Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube. Data & Society.
Martí-Danés, A., & Pont Sorribes, C. (2025). Evolution, Challenges, and Potential of the Influencer as an Intermediary in Political Communication. In R. Besalú & S. Castelo Heymann (Eds.), Influencers and Political Communication. Editorial UOC.
Peytibi, X. (2025). Politicians as Celebrities and Their Relationship with Fans. In R. Besalú & S. Castelo Heymann (Eds.), Influencers and Political Communication. UOC Press.
Slimovich, A. (2025). Argentine political influencers on X during the 2023 presidential campaign. Comunicación y Sociedad. https://comunicacionysociedad.cucsh.udg.mx/index.php/comsoc/article/download/e9045/6890
