It's been called the Facebook election.

The major political parties are spending more money than ever before trying to follow young people who are abandoning TV and radio, onto places like Facebook and Instagram.

More often than not, their weapon of choice is the meme.

We road-tested some of them and here's what happened:

Skip Instagram Post FireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame. When a dank meme isn't dank. A video posted by triplejHack (@triplejhack) on Jun 7, 2016 at 12:14am PDT

Getting in on the memes are the Liberal Party:

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Whatsapp Liberals Party meme.

The Australian Workers Union:

And Young Labor:

Australia's oldest political party, Labor, has a whole team devoted to their online strategy.

Hack went along to the party's NSW headquarters to meet them.

Here's some of their handiwork:

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Whatsapp ALP Spicy Meme Stash.

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Whatsapp ALP Spice Meme Stash.

Most of the team is in their 20s, but Dylan Williams, the youngest at 20 years old, is the guy they run things past to make sure whatever they're publishing will pass the sniff test with young voters.

"I say something and he'll be like, 'Nah, you're wrong'," Rose Jackson says, who is 31 and the oldest person in the unit.

Humour is a big part of their strategy but Young Labor president Todd Pinkerton, also in the digital team, says there's more to it than that.

"[Like] the long form video about the person who is deeply affected by cuts to healthcare. Stuff that is really really bad," he said.

"And you have to be really sincere and honest and bit deep and meaningful to get that message across."

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Whatsapp NSW Labor Digital Team.

It's not just about young people either. They're trying to reach your parents and your grandparents and whoever else happens to be on Facebook.

The difference is, social media might be their only shot to convince you.

"When you think about traditional campaign techniques like door-knocking or phone-calling. How many young people are answering a landline?"

"The best way for us to get through to them is that stuff that they're constantly absorbing which is their newsfeeds and what's on Twitter."

But for all their talk of being funny - they're still a political party, so they have to play it safe most of the time:

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Whatsapp ALP Spice Meme Stash.

The same rules don't apply to their supporters.

From April this year the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (or AMWU's) Twitter account started churning out so-called dank memes.

That means memes that are intentionally bizarre or cliched; the basic idea is to trade on the irony of being deliberately a bit shit.

Here's some of what they do - and yes, pretty much everything features Malcolm Turnbull.

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Remember: there's only one party that has no plan to save the Great Barrier Reef. pic.twitter.com/9FtLpESHJi — The AMWU (@theamwu) June 4, 2016

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Remember: there's only one party that doesn't support live Australian music. pic.twitter.com/rR2lsPWip6 — The AMWU (@theamwu) June 6, 2016

"It's just a group of young people experimenting with creative content," AMWU's communications director, George Simon, told Hack.

"We've been given creative license and we've taken dank and we've doubled down.

"Like most [triple j] listeners, my bosses are baby boomers. They appreciate the fact we're getting all this popularity but they do not have a clue what the content is that we're creating and what it actually means.

"They just don't get it. We see dank memes, whereas they see a frog on a unicycle.

"So there has been some risk taken for us to do that but clearly it's paying off."

The AMWU Twitter account has about 7,000 followers.

Even if the major parties aren't nailing digital yet, Richard Basil Jones from advertising analytics company Ebiquity says they'll be relying on it more as the election gets closer.

This is partly because in the final three days of the campaign there's a ban on electoral advertising broadcast on radio and TV, that doesn't extend to social media.

"It is absolutely a lag [in the laws] in my view it's a total disconnect," Richard says. "For many people online is the medium in which they take long-form video or short-form video and the like. That's where they read their newspapers, that's where they take their radio feed, so yeah it's a little strange."