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"There have been heated debates on the left over the last few years on the role of the internet and social media through web based communication (WBC). In an article in International Socialism two years ago Jonny Jones reviewed these debates and correctly highlighted the dangers of overestimating the impact of social media on social movements.1 While new information and communication technologies, including social media, have undoubtedly aided the organisational efforts of social movements, they have not created them-and it would be technologically deterministic to put the cart before the horse in assessing their value. Writing from a Marxist perspective against “techno-centrism”, a leading academic on social media, Christian Fuchs, has criticised explanations of rebellions in which social media is perceived as the engine, claiming it to represent a “fetishism of things…a deterministic instrumental ideology that substitutes thinking about society with a focus on technology”.2
