By Sophia Knight, Senior Researcher (Digital Policy) at Demos
Despite the well-documented flaws of social media platforms, one of the most powerful qualities of the internet is the freedom to create new communities and shared spaces. In the cracks between official state provision and the over-burdened charitable sector, we find people navigating poverty and financial hardship coming together to provide community, encouragement and advice in online spaces. This offers a valuable resource for communities to connect with one another and a window of insight into the ongoing barriers, challenges and aspirations of people living in financial hardship, which policymakers and charities can draw on to better respond to these concerns.
Over the past 18 months, Demos and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) have been working in partnership to dive deep into these online support spaces where people are sharing their experiences of poverty and financial hardship. Guided by JRF’s Grassroots Poverty Action Group (GPAG) – a group of advocates with lived experience of financial hardship – our analysis has shed light on how people in poverty talk about the challenges they face, as well as highlighting the solidarity and mutual aid that forms the bedrock of these online communities.
Our Social Media Listening project forms part of the JRF’s Insight Infrastructure, which brings together diverse sources of qualitative and quantitative data to inform data-driven decisions to solve social and economic inequality in the UK. The project started as an experimental pilot, to test what could be learned from social media about people’s experiences of poverty and hardship in the UK.
In 2024, we scaled up the pilot into a full programme of four waves. The first three waves provide a periodic ‘dip-in’ to online discussions, revealing emerging topics of conversation as people respond to current events, as well as the consistent challenges of daily life on a low-income. Wave One: “This system is rigged” highlighted how housing instability leads to greater reliance on family and other support networks. Wave Two: “Fight Like Hell” centred the experiences of disabled individuals, who are over-represented among those living in poverty. Wave Three: “It can’t get any worse” reflected on the 2024 General Election,
exposing an overwhelming lack of trust in the political system, as well as anger towards the Department for Work and Pensions, which looms particularly large in the lives of many of those on low incomes, or who are unable to work.
This February, we will launch Wave Four: “I need help now”, which uses historical forum data to look back at the previous 14 years of Conservative government. We hope to provide a wider context for how the policy and economic shifts of this period have shaped our current landscape, and how these changes are reflected in people’s lived experiences over time. One of our most compelling findings concerns the complex relationship between policy events and their impact on the ground.
Some events, such as the recent energy price shock in 2022, had an immediate impact on the online conversation, as people searched for advice in managing the sudden financial hit and navigating various government support schemes. However, other topics of discussion, such as those relating to disability, evolved and became more salient gradually, indicating the cumulative impact of multiple factors over a 14-year period. We have seen again and again throughout our research how the longer term, systemic roots of poverty have profound intersections and impacts across all areas of people’s lives, from poor housing conditions exacerbating heath conditions, to benefit systems that fail to adapt to the complexities of family life and relationships.
Moving forward into the rest of 2025, our project will resume its regular drumbeat of updates, allowing us to follow emerging trends and provide up-to-date insights for policymakers and organisations working to tackle poverty. Our innovative methodology allows us to provide valuable insights into how people are talking about financial hardship now, elevating the voices of people with lived experience and offering a unique window into digital communities of support, which are a lifeline for so many who are struggling. You can find more of the details of our methodology in the reports linked above, and we look forward to sharing Wave Four with you very soon.
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This article is featured in our 22 January newsletter.
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