The shallow debate in this 2024 election campaign is being made worse by the decision of all the main parties to embrace aggressive social media strategies based on ridiculing rival leaders.
We can call this process the “meme-ification of UK politics”, whereby party HQs attempt to undermine opponents – and attract younger voters – with smart social media posts, or memes, that they hope will go viral.
Last week, Labour made a video montage of embarrassing clips of the Prime Minister, showing him dropping a rugby ball, failing to dribble a football, and not knowing how to pay in a shop. The TikTok post was sarcastically headed: “Rishi Sunak being a totally normal guy for one minute.”
The Conservatives official TikTok account hit out by dredging up old film of Keir Starmer at the gym, wearing boxing gloves and throwing a feeble combination. “Think the punch bag might’ve won this one,” was the Tory gag, generating a modest 2,840 likes.
The parties might not be as clever as they think. Vic Banham, chief executive of Antler Social, a digital agency specialising in TikTok content, took to LinkedIn to criticise Labour’s “playground name-calling approach” when it is accused of being short on policies. This was “a strategy for a brand … not the [future] government”, she argued.
Atlas SEO, another digital agency, also voices concern. “It looks like the political parties have all decided on the same TikTok strategy. Memes. An aggressive amount of memes,” it said in a blog.
“I would have to assume that no parties believe in their own policies,” commented one of Atlas’s executives, Monica Bondalici. “They are all doing everything to enable engagement, but to what end when those watching and sharing probably have no idea about their policy proposals?”
The parties might be lashing out on social channels because traditional media platforms for campaigning are losing traction. Tuesday’s “Sunak v Starmer” face-off on ITV News pulled 5.5m viewers, barely half the audience of the 2010 election debate.
Tabloid front pages still have the power to transform a campaign, but with every election, social media becomes more influential. Parties must speak in the authentic voice of this medium,- and that is invariably memes. But they need to offer more than spite and malice.
Twitter was once a relatively benign source of breaking news, indispensable and addictive to journalists and politicians alike. This will be the first UK election since it was acquired and rebranded as X by Elon Musk. It is moving closer to the meme-driven TikTok.
To increase traffic, Musk switched X’s format last year so that users were primarily served “For You” viral content rather than posts from accounts they follow. “He has moved us towards an era where you see far fewer of the accounts that you are following,” says Bruce Daisley, who was European head of Twitter until 2020. “If someone posts a tweet and it gets 1,000 likes, it goes into everyone’s timeline in a way that never happened before.”
Such content is often extreme, raising tensions in an election climate. “Social media algorithms strongly skew towards shocking, provocative, antagonistic content, and it seems like X is going strongly down that route,” says Daisley, an author on work culture.
Daisley too observes the “meme-ification of politics”, and argues that X’s rapid timeline makes it a creative hub for memes that spread to Instagram and other platforms. “What will matter is who creates the best memes. But it won’t be the parties – it will be users,” he says.
When Sunak announced his national service scheme, he inadvertently generated a wave of derogatory memes from social media users who usually ignore party politics. “I don’t think I have ever seen people posting excitedly about Keir Starmer, but when we do see a policy like national service breaking through, it spawns an incredible outpouring of creativity.”
One TikToker, The Meme Stream, featured a woman in a furry-coat, putting her conscription letter in a shredder. “We won’t be doing that,” she said. Another scornful TikTok meme, by creator gregjbirks, bemoaned the fate of those born in the Noughties and carried the line: “If you can fix your parents’ iPad, you can fix an Apache helicopter.” It had nearly 300,000 likes.
Labour’s aggressive meme strategy risks reminding voters of its lack of policies. Tory equivalents struggle to land on youthful platforms where they lack support.
Parties will not win on this battle ground by using their official accounts for crude personal takedowns. They should have learned that from the backfiring outdoor “attack” ads of the past, such as the “Demon Eyes” portrayal of Tony Blair, or Labour’s caricature of David Cameron as a 1980s has-been.
They are seeking to persuade us that they can run the country, not make snarky videos.