We’re just over a week into the formal election campaign and the parties have set out their digital stalls. But, as is so often the case in politics, there is a chasm between the messages politicians want us to take away and our reactions to them.
In the latest instalment of our twice-weekly guide to the digital election trail, we look at what people are actually talking about. Are political party messages cutting through? Are campaign groups, thinktanks and commentators having a greater influence than parties on what is shared online?
Using data from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics platform, we have examined which material is generating the most attention across Facebook and Instagram. Separately, we have also taken a look at political content trending on YouTube.
TV is supposedly a dying medium among younger audiences but the popularity of current affairs clippings is undeniable in this election cycle: several of the most popular election-related Facebook and Instagram posts of the week are UK broadcast TV clips.
Here are three examples of repackaged videos that have generated online attention in the past week.
Conservatives accused of inventing costs of Labour policies
Views 1.7m
Comments 2,500
Shares 38,000
Posts from the Labour-affiliated campaign group Momentum consistently do well in terms of Facebook engagement. On Tuesday the group used a clip from BBC Politics Live, in a post accusing the Conservatives of “making stuff up” about the costs of Labour’s as-yet unpublished manifesto.
In the segment, the programme’s presenter, Jo Coburn, takes Conservative Helen Whately to task over one of her party’s ad campaigns, which relies on largely invented figures for the cost of the Labour party’s policies.
Question Time audience member on antisemitism
Views 856,000
Comments 1,500
Shares 17,000
BBC Question Time’s Facebook page posted a clip of an audience member accusing media organisations of exaggerating antisemitism allegations against Jeremy Corbyn because they disagree with his policies.
The clip, which was taken from the programme’s most recent edition, has been viewed more than 850,000 times.
Pro-Brexit group promotes Ian Austin’s Corbyn criticism
Views 346,000
Comments 750
Shares 8,000
A third election-related link that has attracted high engagement over the past week clips an interview between Kay Burley of Sky News and the former Labour MP Ian Austin.
This was one of a series of interviews in which Austin, who announced last week he would not run for parliament in this election, described Jeremy Corbyn as “not fit” to be prime minister, a view strongly endorsed by this pro-Brexit Facebook page.
The former MP for Dudley North accuses Corbyn of “defending extremists” and “parroting Putin propaganda”.
National security has also emerged as a key line of attack, with the Conservatives putting out multiple versions of a clip of Emily Thornberry being grilled by Piers Morgan on what Corbyn would do in the event of a nuclear missile strike.
Hard-right channels do better on YouTube
While leftwing pages are performing better on Facebook, the YouTube landscape skews to the right.
The 10 most popular channels on the video-uploading platform were a mixture of professional news organisations and highly partisan rightwing content, according to a Guardian analysis of political videos posted on it in the last week.
A sample of 350 videos showed the Guardian, Sky News and the Sun had the most popular political content, with around 700,000 views each. In fourth place was a channel called “WE GOT A PROBLEM” which regularly posts pro-Brexit videos with confrontational titles, which received more than 600,000 views.
The former Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin, who uses the name Sargon of Akkad on YouTube, and Mahyar Tousi, a Conservative party activist who describes himself as a “free market fundamentalist”, were also among the top channels.
In one popular video, Tousi criticises the Liberal Democrats’ use of charts and polling data, recycling broadcast clips and using an aggressively worded title, a ploy that often helps to increase views on the platform.
View counts of election-related video content on YouTube are still far lower than on Facebook or Twitter, however: no video posted by the Labour party in the last week has received more than 5,000 views, and the Conservatives’ peak of 57,000 is much lower than their average viewerships on the other social media platforms. This may explain why the parties are choosing not to focus their efforts on YouTube. The Conservatives have posted just five videos there in the last seven days, compared with more than 30 on Facebook, while Labour has posted nine videos on YouTube, compared with more than 20 on Facebook.
These posts are selected from a CrowdTangle list of election-related Facebook and Instagram posts, sorted by total interactions (a sum of reactions, comments and shares). The number of views, comments and shares were accurate as of 12pm on Thursday 14 November. The sample of YouTube videos was gathered through the API with keyword searches on the afternoon of Wednesday 13 November.
Digital dashboard team: Michael Barton, Pamela Duncan, Niamh McIntyre, David Pegg and Joseph Smith
