Influenced: How politics intersected with social media in the final campaign week
This is the influence content creators had on the federal election campaign trail this week – including an unlikely endorsement from the Tiger King and our video of the week.
From 12am on Thursday, May 1 until 6pm on election night, May 3, a political advertising blackout applies to TV and radio. If somehow your social media channels haven’t been flooded with political campaigning and you’ve been reading this column with bewilderment, then the next three days could change that.
As Hannah Ferguson put it in an Instagram Reel posted to Cheek Media, for the next three days the influencers “have clear air to distribute the message we want to share”.
At this point in the campaign, the podcast appearances aren’t slowing down either, with two new episodes in the past 24 hours.
These include Albanese Government Climate Minister Chris Bowen appearing on the Punters Politics podcast and Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb on Abbie Chatfield’s It’s a Lot. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton also made his second appearance on Mark Bouris’ podcast Straight Talk.
Unlike the other politicians who are simply appearing on podcasts and influencer accounts, Van Den Lamb will be one to watch on Saturday night to see if his 91,000 Instagram followers are enough to follow him to the polls and into the senate.
Mental ill-health in young men linked to influencer content
As the campaign is on its last lap, the Albanese government extended an invite to social media-based news outlet The Daily Aus onto the campaign bus. The Daily Aus’ political reporter Harry Sekulich even found his way onto the Coalition’s campaign bus, after the outlet previously shared their long-running battle to get Dutton on a youth-led leaders’ debate or even an interview.
Sekulich asked Dutton about men’s mental health and masculinity social media influencers at a press conference, off the back of research that found young men who watch masculinity influencers are more likely to report poor mental health.
Movember surveyed over 3000 men between 16 and 25 across Australia, the US and the UK and found that while masculinity influencers were entertainment, viewers reported feelings of worthlessness and sadness.
Masculinity influencers often present as having solutions and roadmaps for men to overcome challenges, and are criticised for rhetoric that upholds patriarchal values and shares messages that men who can’t control their emotions are “weak”.
Tiger King endorsement
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Zoo operator Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also known as Joe Exotic, rose to fame on the 2020 Netflix documentary Tiger King and this week he’s endorsed Anthony Albanese for PM.
Maldonado-Passage is currently an inmate in a Texas prison and posted to Instagram, telling followers in Australia to “keep Australia safe and awesome” by voting for Albanese.
He then replied to comments on the post asking how much Labor paid him for the endorsement, saying “some of his [Albanese’s] people reached out. The others could do the same” and then that he was paid “nothing”.
After it was picked up widely by mainstream media, he made another post asserting that Albanese did not pay him.
“I made a public offer to work for their zoo for free for 6 months or any other wildlife conservation if he would call President Trump and ask for me to be released based on the American governments witnesses have admitted to perjury,” the post read.
“Will make the same offer to President Trump or the President of Mexico.”
He then made a second AI-generated poster to “Elect Albanese for Australia” with himself and Albanese pictured with kangaroos, tagging Sydney radio duo Jimmy and Nath, which he spoke to on Thursday morning. It’s not the first AI-generated election ad we’ve seen this campaign, but it’s certainly up there with the most unsettling.
We watched the influencer debate so you don’t have to
Last week, we crowned video of the week to a snippet from SBS’ The Feed promoting its influencer debate, which is now released in full on YouTube and clocks in at 41 minutes.
On one side of the debate, they’ve teamed up Konrad Benjamin (known online as Punter’s Politics), Cheek Media’s Hannah Ferguson and Abbie Chatfield.
On the other, Menzies Research Centre’s Freya Leach, Turning Point Australia’s Joel Jammal, and Centre for Independent Study’s Trisha Jha.
However, of the six debaters, only five of their names appear in the YouTube video’s title, with Jha missing out. She’s also got the lowest follower count of the participants, with her account, the Feed, tagged on Instagram having 650 followers. Compared to her debate teammates, Leach clocks in at 10.9k, Jammal’s 32.5k, Ferguson’s 74.4K, Benjamin’s 412k and Chatfield surpassing them all with 552K.
Jha identifies as centre right, Jammal as a conservative/libertarian and Leach is a liberal party member.
So did the Feed struggle to find other willing influencers to participate in the right side of the debate? Is this a reflection of a lack of Liberal-leaning influencers, or do left-leaning, greens or independent supporters like Ferguson, Chatfield and swing voter Benjamin resonate more with the audiences that are getting their election coverage from social media?
The debate covered six topics: climate change, nuclear power, immigration, property investors, super for housing and education. The SBS factcheckers were doing the heavy lifting, with a fact check popping up on screen about 28 times in the 41-minute video, with 18 fact checks triggered from the right, and 10 from the left.
The debate overall was a solid attempt from the Feed to introduce these players to an unfamiliar audience and bring viewers from their existing follower counts.
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Ultimately, its value comes from being snipped into Instagram Reels, and watching it in full won’t enlighten you with much more substance.
Engaging with the ‘little social media things’
As we’ve shown with this column, much of the Federal election is being fought online.
Politicians of all stripes are learning how to make Reels, memes and shitposts (or hiring young staff that know their way around editing apps).
It doesn’t mean younger people always enjoy seeing pollies on their feeds, though.
Labor Senate candidate Karen Grogan explained the fine line she and her colleagues have to tread at the University of Adelaide Politics and International Relations Association’s Federal Election Forum on Tuesday night.
“I think there’s this sort of disjoint. You get this sort of media waft that says ‘politicians should engage in young people’, and they should do this and do that. Then we have young people who say ‘we’re not watching the news or reading the broadsheet’. Where are people engaging with us?” she said.
“Then we get onto the influencers and we get onto TikTok and we get into those places where young people get their news and their information and then we get bagged out for going into those places.
“I think you have to be careful. If you say come and meet us where we are then we’re going to have a crack. But are we engaging? Is it appropriate?”
Grogan – Labor’s number two candidate for South Australia in the Senate – said she’d worked with her colleague and South Australia Young Labor president Charlotte Walker (number three on the SA Senate ticket for Labor) on social media, but she came off a bit patronising.
For context, Walker has been posting videos on her Instagram page @charlotteforthesenate.
The videos are decidedly youth-focused, and show the candidate talking up Labor policy while applying makeup, streaming the videogame Minecraft and interviewing other young Labor members on the street.
“Charlotte has had me on a couple of her little social media things and the general view is ‘get her off!’,” Grogan said.
“I’m fine with that. But it’s how we’re going to engage, it’s a two-way street. We’re going to have a crack at engaging with people where they are and how people get their information is changing all the time.”
Video of the week
Both sides of the campaign have been indulging in what’s been dubbed ‘brainrot’ ads, which are summed up in our video of the week.
Brainrot is a symptom of being chronically online and is used to describe consuming large amounts of short, low-value internet content. The phenomenon even reached the ABC’s Gruen Nation, where panellists analysed the bizarre, low-budget, meme formula that political parties have been embracing.
Ferguson, who was a panellist, summed up how this is reaching voters: “People are spending seven seconds, and that’s enough”.
Some brainrot ads from the Liberal Party include dubbed scenes from the animated film Kung Fu Panda accusing Labor of creating a cost of living crisis, while the Labor party favoured Super Mario to accuse Dutton of policy backflipping.
Much of the content is AI-generated; another instance of the technology taking a lead role in the campaign strategy.
