If you’ve been unlucky enough to stumble on to Twitter or Facebook and you have more than one friend who engages with politics, you might have noticed the mood online over this election has become… turbulent.
Among the usual pictures of smiling canvassers and reports of a “great reception on the doorstep” are increasingly furious claims and counterclaims of dirty tricks, dodgy memes, misleading adverts and dozens of other kinds of misbehaviour.
Online campaigning has been a feature of the last few UK elections, but 2019 is something else, with a bad-tempered and increasingly badly behaved social media ground war. Here are some of the tactics seen in the field.
Google-jacking
This simple trick has been used as standard by most major parties for several elections now, but seems to be attracting anger this time around. This is the simple trick of, say, the Conservative party bidding for adverts when voters type “Labour” or “Labour manifesto” into Google.
This gets them a slot at the top of Google results that some users may not notice is an advert. Parties can also target these by area and basic demographics, to try to advertise most heavily in marginal constituencies and with likely floating voters.
The Conservatives have been most aggressive with this tactic this year, registering labourmanifesto.co.uk for an attack site promoted against Labour search terms, provoking a large Twitter backlash. Though the party can claim the tactic is allowed and the advert shows who is promoting it, this has not won over many of its critics. Given that the party’s Twitter account faked the appearance of a neutral fact-checker during a leaders’ debate, it’s unsurprising they don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
Dead squirrel strategy
This tactic is one used by passionate supporters of a party, usually Labour, rather than parties themselves, which (sensibly) stay well away from it. The trick begins with “extremely online” party supporters creating a “fake news” meme with some ridiculous claim about a politician, then circulating it with a sense of faux outrage among a group of people in on the joke.
The catchier of the memes, such as a claim that Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson enjoys murdering squirrels with a catapult, eventually catch on with regular internet users who believe the story, are outraged by it and share it.
When this goes really well, it leads to journalists (unable to ignore a good viral story) asking the politician about it, and if the politician really screws up, they then deny the viral claim and send it through the mainstream too. Who knows if it wins any votes, but it’s certainly an effective wind-up.
Creative charting
One of the easiest ways to spot a true political nerd is to ask them their feelings on Liberal Democrat bar charts. Any real nerd will have very strong opinions on them and probably a few particular favourites.
Liberal Democrats know that they do much better when voters believe they have a viable chance of winning in a particular seat, a reasonable intuition that has been backed up by numerous specific polls. That means convincing voters the party has a viable chance in their seat is a major hurdle for the Lib Dems in a way that it isn’t for Labour or the Tories.
As a result, Liberal Democrats will use almost any data to give the result they want, sometimes using EU election results or even partial local council results, rather than the previous general election, to try to paint the picture they want. Even if these don’t work, the party has been known to meddle with the relative heights of the bar charts to get the result they want. Amazingly, this breaks no rules whatsoever.
‘The BBC won’t tell you’
The quickest way to get anything to go viral across Labour Twitter and Facebook groups is to claim that the BBC isn’t reporting a particular story or, even better, has worked to deliberately distort it to favour the Conservatives.
Sometimes, this is done entirely cynically. Momentum’s Twitter account claimed the BBC had deleted a damaging video of Priti Patel and left the post up (attracting thousands of retweets) long after it was noted that it had been very briefly deleted and reposted to fix a typo (a line had been wrongly presented as a direct quote)..
Others clearly believe the BBC is up to no good – claims that the corporation deliberately altered footage of Boris Johnson laying a wreath went viral, as did another edited clip (of footage the BBC aired in a debate) apparently muting audience reaction. The public broadcaster certainly isn’t above criticism, but for anyone wanting to get a message out, it also doubles as the perfect punchbag.
Fake the figures
Politicians using questionable statistics is a tactic as old as politics itself, but the modern Conservative party has become very good at using the online reaction to its dodgy figures for its own benefit.
Largely as a result of witnessing the backlash to Vote Leave’s “£350m a week” figure during the 2016 referendum, the Conservative party seems to have realised a figure that starts arguments is one that can capture the online conversation.
One claim, issued long before Labour actually issued its manifesto, was that the party’s manifesto would cost “£1.2tn”, provoking lots of Labour figures, journalists and fact checkers to take the bait, debate and tweet the big number and draw attention to the issue of Labour spending.
The party has tried similar tactics with immigration figures and will probably be ready to deploy the trick again. It’s a high-wire act if the tactic provokes a backlash from the general public, but until then the party might feel it works to focus attention on “their” issues.
Unskew the polls
This tactic isn’t brilliant at winning over floating voters, but can help keep the activist base motivated and – possibly also useful – sceptical of non-partisan experts.
The trick here is to argue that pollsters are either deliberately, because they’re “owned by Tories”, or accidentally – due to some outside factors – miSsing what’s really going on with British politics.
Given the high-profile polling misses in recent elections, this is an easy sell. What replaces the polls tends to be pretty weak science, though; some just tweak the sample based on what they think it should be (which funnily enough always works in favour of their intended outcome), while others point to the “much larger sample sizes” of totally meaningless Twitter polls.
Anyone tracking these accounts will get very used to seeing a Peter Hitchens quote talking about how polls are used to shape public opinion, rather than track it, despite him having said they’re vastly misinterpreting the extent of his meaning on that several years ago.
What can we do about it?
For the activists in this year’s election, these tricks will just become a fact of life, deploying the right one can draw tens or hundreds of thousands of eyeballs in your campaign’s direction, and no party is going to voluntarily tie a hand behind its back less than two weeks from election day.
For those actually trying to make up their minds on how to vote, the law and the rules aren’t going to help – or at least not much. Political advertising isn’t regulated by advertising watchdogs; the only strictly regulated political speech is making false claims about a candidate and that law is rarely enforced.
In practice, being watchful for anything too good – or too annoying – to be true is key and learning how to see a range of news and views to shape our opinion. In time, we may realise that we need some kind of new system to regulate speech, perhaps some new political settlement to make us all less angry. Just don’t expect to see any sensible steps in that direction in the next 10 days or so.
