Abstract
Newspapers blasted Jeremy Corbyn during the general election, but young voters were more interested in Labour's social videos
Donald Trump triumphed in the 2016 US presidential election through upbeat alt-right journalism plus echo-chamber social media activism. He bypassed the mainstream press with targeted, aggressive, paid social advertising, which went viral and overwhelmed stodgy and technically clunky opposition. Commentators cried foul over fake news and supposed armies of mechanised bots, but the social media fight was really won organically. The right made more compelling content, and it made it faster.
In the UK election seven months later, it was same story but the other way around. This time, the newly minted alt-left swept the battlefield with an insurgent playbook and it was the right that looked static. Technical advertising and automation on either side was overwhelmed by the sheer passion and virality of an online movement on the left.
There was really only one key thematic difference in this social media story. Despite all appearances before and since, Labour didn't actually win the election.
“Some cause happiness wherever they go,” observed Oscar Wilde. “Others whenever they go.” Before even policies and technical tactics, the charismatic chasm between the two party leaders was the Ordnance Survey map of social media in the UK's June 2017 election. Corbyn had what SAS soldiers in the desert war called a “battle nose”. Whether talking to someone's iPhone or a 10,000-person arena, he had the believable line for any given occasion to maximise social media engagement throughout the campaign. His would be the most popular election day post, with more than 88,000 engagements and 1.6million views. “This is our day. Our time. Our chance.” Theresa May's characteristically misery-guts election morning message got just 12,000 engagements.
Labour was massively outshared on Facebook versus the Conservatives. Liam Corcoran of Newswhip wrote: “The Labour Party and its politicians outperformed their Conservative rivals in the engagement stakes, on Facebook and elsewhere.” Labour posted more: 229 stories to the Conservatives’ 67, and 153 of them were videos, with higher engagement and shareability. On May 25, Corbyn's Facebook page outranked Theresa May's by 10 times more views, and their growth was moving in opposite directions. Corbyn's Facebook had 4.36million engagements from May 8 to June 8. Theresa May's just 554,000.
Put simply, Labour were millennial, the Tories were so 20th century.
Labour accumulated millennials on Facebook and created registered voters. During the campaign, a record 1.05million 18- to 24-year-olds registered, including a quarter of a million – that's almost three per second – on deadline day alone. Two-thirds of those voted for Corbyn. Then crafty websites such as My Nearest Marginal pointed young people to their nearest marginal seat to go canvassing – for Labour.
Facebook was the consensus social media battleground. An Enders report estimated 56.4 per cent of UK population of voting age are Facebook users: all the young ones. And over a six-week period, Facebook had 16million shares to Twitter's 2million.
Turnout in the election would hit 69 per cent, the highest since 1997. Labour would take student seats like Lincoln, Reading East and Nick Clegg's Sheffield Hallam. Momentum claimed Tory paid digital advertising was outflanked simply by the sharing by young people with friends and family, to the point that by election day one in four UK Facebook users had seen one – not bad for a media organisation with limited budget and no access to the TV stations.
Becoming ubiquitous (on Facebook) was the Tory Britain 2030 scaremongering video, which hit 7.8million views by mid June. A brilliantly simple conceit, typical of the best virals, it was a young girl talking to her dad about the world lost.
“And what's that?”
“That's a free school meal.”
“Why don't I get a free school meal?”
Good question. Asking a question to which there is no positive answer is a sure-fire way to win a debate on social media – even assuming Tory voters were engaged in the social conversation. Theirs was a campaign in which the incumbent prime minister couldn't even be bothered to embrace the 20th century trope of a live political debate.
At the start of the campaign, and fired up by the success of Brexit and Trump and the perceived weakness of the opposition, the Tory plan must have looked great in the PowerPoint. It would feature a relentless, aggressively targeted social marketing exercise; smart media buying (mostly Facebook), some automation and relentless demographically focused attack ads. What could go wrong?
What had already gone wrong were the assumptions lying behind social media targeting. Like a naive medieval general, the Tories were advancing into enemy territory without securing their own. They didn't defend their own marginals, said Sam Jeffers, of Who Targets Me, which, via user permissions, was tracking more than 7,000 Facebook ads to nearly 12,000 voters. He showed that in Amber Rudd's close marginal of Hastings and Rye, Labour advertised heavily, but not the Tories, who were trying to geographically target their investment to marginal constituencies, which might explain their smaller reach and engagement levels. According to the Daily Telegraph, there were also no Tory adverts in Battersea in the final 48 hours of campaigning; it voted Labour, a 7,938 majority for the Conservative Jane Ellison overturned.
Paid-for ads must go viral
Not only that, but they weren't getting the “earned” boost that happens when paid advertising goes viral. Any social marketeer knows if you are paying for all your views and the thing isn't going viral, you are basically pushing a dead donkey up a glacier.
“Remember the golden rule of politics,” Gerald Kaufman said. “Never kick a man until he's down.” That underpinned the Tories’ social media election strategy. Go after Corbyn everywhere because he was weak. But the problem was that just wasn't so. To attack Corbyn on Facebook was like attacking Lionel Messi in the Camp Nou.
The Tories made some questionable choices. May accused Corbyn of being opposed to using “shoot to kill” to deal with terrorist incidents, based on a misleadingly headlined 18-month-old BBC video clip, and the party's social outlets backed it, even buying the Google search term “Jeremy Corbyn shoot to kill”. There was grey area open to social media feedback. The BBC Trust had said “the report had not been duly accurate in how it framed the extract it used from Mr Corbyn's interview”. That was grist to the mill for opposition bloggers.
The Tory campaign was also targeted sub-optimally, sending to swing voters material that appealed largely to current supporters, according to data from the brand agency We Are Social. The material didn't pull in new and undecided voters, and “strong and stable” didn't attract new support on social media.
Meanwhile, Labour was resolute in this election not to be beaten in Facebook advertising like it had been in 2015, according to an Enders report. In the two intervening years advertising targeting on Facebook had seen interstellar evolution. Labour planned to spend £1million on targeted Facebook ads. That meant over 100million news feed ad impressions.
That was the paid bit. What Labour really benefited from was a higher organic share rate. People wanted to send their friends more Labour stories than Tory ones. This worked for Labour-favouring press sites such as The Independent, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. But where it really worked was in the pro-Labour online publishers such as The Canary and Evolve Politics, and even blogs like Another Angry Voice.
Labour also worked with social influencers like grime artists. The hashtag #Grime4Corbyn went viral on Twitter, with Stormzy tweeting to his 710,000 followers: “Please please please vote. It's mad quick. Just go and do it, I used to think nah fuck it it's long what's my one lil vote gonna do.”
Emphasising the cultural divide, an online comment on a Times piece about this complained: “Maybe voting should be limited to those who pay taxes?”
Another user replied: “They'd like to pay taxes but don't earn enough to in Tories zero-hours contract economy!”
Lest the impression were created that Labour stuck to purely positive messaging – in fact out of 2,314 Labour Party messages seen by Who Targets Me?, 60 per cent criticised other parties. Labour made an ad about the “dementia tax” in more than 200 constituencies. Through Momentum, Labour had an insurgent force to deal the toughest attacks out – in the same way as Trump had been helped in the US by the numerous hard-core outlets of the alt-right, Breitbart included.
“Momentum were pushing out slick attack ads which allowed the Labour Party to stay above the fray,” the former press adviser to David Cameron, Giles Kenningham, told The Guardian. “The Tories didn't have the equivalent third-party campaigning group in the right-wing space.”
A prescient Buzzfeed piece by the political editor Jim Waterson a month before the election christened the “alt-left”; sites such as pay-as-you-feel blog Another Angry Voice run by English tutor Thomas G Clark: “The most viral political journalist in the entire country.” The site regularly gets 1.5k likes on individual stories on its Facebook page, and video views are in the hundreds of thousands. The featured video in June 2017, a rant about May's argument that she should be judged on her record, hit 1.1million. The anger, presentation, social media-driven approach are all exactly reminiscent of the US alt-right. Even the fonts are similar. Waterson dubbed them “Corbyn's outriders”.
Buzzfeed analysis, just as it had done with pro-Trump social media in the US the year before, picked up that alt-media power: The Canary, Evolve Politics, Skwawkbox. A Labour MP described them as “the six nutters who sell the Socialist Workers Party newspaper in any town centre”.
Alt-right lessons learned
As if the alt-right comparison were not clear enough, Skwawkbox described the media on its homepage in a way Trump would recognise: “We're proud that this blog has a track record of revealing news long before the ‘MSM’ either take an interest or care.” MSM is alt-right for mainstream media.
In the spring of 2017 there were claims that the Trump and Brexit campaigns had won in 2016 partly via the use of automated tools and fake users, but the case is far from proven than anything automated drove the massive organic social media enthusiasm behind Trump in 2016. For the UK election, Oxford Internet Institute research found posts using Labour-related hashtags dwarfed those featuring content about other parties, ultimately reaching 62 per cent of all tweets mentioning a party. Labour support spiked highest during the debate programmes: the Q&A with May and Corbyn on May 28, the election debate on May 31 that the prime minister opted out of.
But was any of that impact from bots? “High-frequency tweeting” increased in the same period, with more than 100,000 tweets sent from accounts that posted more than 50 times a day on just one hashtag. Such rapid rates of posting indicates automation, the Oxford authors say, although it may also just be a user with too much time on their hands.
Meanwhile, and unlike in the US the year before, outright fake news sites flopped in the UK. An Oxford Internet Institute study found lower levels of linking to “junk news” stories than in the US election, at 11.4 per cent of the links shared compared with 33.8 per cent in the US sample.
So there is a bit of evidence of automation. There is limited evidence of fake news linking. There is no evidence at all that it made much of a difference.
“A newspaper should have no friends,” said Joseph Pulitzer. He wouldn't have said that about social media followers since they are fast becoming the primary source of clout for newspapers, a quarter of whose web traffic derived in the election from Facebook (according to Comscore as reported by Enders). Building “likes” is of existential commercial value, and not having enough likes can put the seal on your irrelevance.
Like Trump, Labour used alternative news channels. Enders pointed out that pro-Labour online publications with no direct print equivalents (The Canary and Evolve Politics) were reaching larger Facebook audiences for their content than most national news brands. Overall coverage weighted by distribution was more left on social media than in print or on major news websites.
In his otherwise brilliantly insightful May 6 piece about the rise of the alt-left, Waterson said: “If polls are correct and Labour loses heavily, there will need to be a new narrative – and the early signs are that the mainstream media and Labour right will get much of the blame.”
Labour didn't lose heavily and it wasn't the alt-left that ended up needing a new narrative at all. It was the Tory party, it was the government and it was the mainstream media – left scratching their heads. After what hit them in June 2017, they will never be the same again.
