Half the people we encountered after the shocking murder of the controversial right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had no idea who Kirk was. Many were told about him by their children. You may have had no idea who Kirk was. But if you’ve been following news in recent weeks you’ve learned that he was one of the most consequential media figures in the US. We now live in very siloed information ecosystems where an ideological media figure who has the ear of the president of the United States can be unknown to huge chunks of the population.

As the old media world of newspapers and what are often called “mainstream” broadcasters has waned, something new has been happening online. In the past decade, social media has politicised hugely. This is partly because divisive content generates more “engagement”. As a consequence, there’s now a heady ferment of political influencers, all striving to be the next Charlie Kirk.

The biggest of these figures are on the right and are, by most Irish standards, far right. This is partly because if you wanted to say something beyond the pale, something that many people five years ago might consider racist, misogynistic or homophobic, then you need to go to an unmediated space. For a decade, right-wing figures have been building platforms away from the constraints of traditional media.

As these platforms have grown relative to traditional media, they have been dragging the political centre rightward. Their audiences are huge, dwarfing the audiences of traditional Irish news outlets or even the recently deposed then reinstated US late-night-television host Jimmy Kimmel. It’s no longer really accurate to describe traditional media institutions as “mainstream”.

The difference with this new online “mainstream” is that somebody might be huge for you or your son or your grandmother online but no one else in your family will have heard of them as we consume increasingly persona