WIRED

The Conservative Party is not known for its fluency with social media – an impression that was strengthened by a recent Twitter escapade involving the official @Conservatives account sharing a doctored image of Jeremy Corbyn wearing a chicken suit.

The surrealism slid up a notch when the account tagged @KFC_UKI with the caption “We’ve found a bigger chicken than you”, prompting confusion over whether the Conservative party was unaware that KFC was not, in fact, one giant chicken. The tweet provoked a retort from the fast food chain, as well as unleashing a Twitter-wide tidal wave of scorn. However, the tweet did make an impact – it was widely discussed and reported on.


Navigating meme culture might not be the Conservatives’ strong suit, but in the last two general elections, the party’s spending on social media advertising far outstripped other parties. In 2017, the party spent roughly £2.3 million on Facebook advertising, with the closest behind, Labour, spending just over £500,000. With the prospect of a general election looming ever larger, the social media spend of all political parties has ramped up in recent months – totalling a collective £1m as of mid-June.

Since Boris Johnson has taken the helm, a reshuffling of the Conservative Party has placed a cadre of media savvy advisors front and centre. How can we expect the Conservatives to ramp up their social media offensive in the run-up to any potential election?

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Because of its smaller and older membership base, the Conservatives have historically suffered from a less active canvassing operation compared to other parties, making social media an appealing strategic tool. “When digital campaigning came along, for the Conservative Party it seemed to be this real breakthrough moment – it provided a way they could communicate their message more broadly, without needing that activist base,” says Kate Dommett, director of the Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield.

The Cummings effect

With Dominic Cummings positioned as senior advisor to Johnson, the party’s social media campaigning could be set to shift up another gear. Cummings was formerly campaign director of the Vote Leave group – the Brexit campaign Johnson became a figurehead for – which was known for its sprawling and hyper-targeted social media campaign. The group spent more than £2.7m on Facebook ads, many of which contained the claim that £350m a week sent to the EU could be spent on the NHS instead.


Stoking the idea of a Cummings-led social media blitz, Johnson’s arrival in Number 10 triggered a flurry of Facebook ads. These were mainly variations on the same advert, featuring images of Johnson alongside text stressing a commitment to Brexit on October 31 and investment in public services. Data from Facebook’s transparency register shows they were targeted mostly at older voters in England.

Martin Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London, says trialling different versions of the same ad is common practice among political parties. “They can start to map potential supporters across the country, and start to get an idea of what types of issues and messages those people respond to,” he says. “Even more nuanced, they can start to get an idea of the types of formats that people respond to – the types of music and images.”

Although that initial ad campaign was small-scale, the reactions may go on to shape a wider online campaigning strategy in the run-up to a general election. Moore suggests that the Conservatives have been more strategic than other parties, who appear to be going about business as usual on social media.

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Another important outcome of Cummings’ appointment could an increasingly data-driven campaign strategy. Cummings’ camp has a history of engaging data analytics services. The Vote Leave campaign spent 40 per cent of its budget on the services of AggregateIQ, a relatively unknown digital marketing firm in British Columbia, Canada, that has links to Cambridge Analytica.


The privacy statement on the Conservative Party website says it uses a myriad of citizen data, including financial transaction data, opinions on topical issues, family connections and political opinions from sources that include information made public on social media, and from commercial organisations with whom the party has a contract guaranteeing data protection compliance. The latter can include commercially available consumer data and that obtained through commercial data brokers. All these data sources are collated to create the clearest picture of the voter possible.

This is common practice, but the new Johnson ministry contains elements that hint at the potential for a less than scrupulous approach to electioneering. During the Vote Leave campaign, Cummings earned a reputation for his ruthless attitude, coming under scrutiny for the group’s self-professed “nasty” tactics; in 2018, the group was found guilty of breaking electoral law by overspending.

Johnson’s links to CTF (the Crosby Textor Foundation) also signal this possibility. The political consultancy is headed up by Johnson’s close ally, Lynton Crosby, and has worked with Johnson on numerous campaigns – most recently his bid for Conservative Party leadership. A recent Guardian investigation found that CTF exploited a loophole in Facebook to create a series of unbranded “news” pages that shared propaganda in service of clients ranging from the Saudi government to major coal and gas companies.



PM of the people

An influx of young, digitally minded staff has seen the Conservatives experimenting with new approaches to social media. Johnson announced in August that he would use Facebook Live – the platform’s live streaming video function – to stage so-called ‘People’s PMQs’. The idea was reportedly masterminded by Chloe Westley, Downing Street’s new digital adviser, a former Vote Leave campaigner who until recently was at right-wing think tank, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and has been involved with Turning Point, the British arm of a pro-Donald Trump youth group.

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The first People's PMQs took place on September 11. The live audience for Johnson’s initial Facebook broadcast attracted fewer than 50,000 viewers in the first half an hour.

In contrast, Labour has focused on growing its organic reach on social media by encouraging their supporters to share party materials. “I would be surprised, however, if that's the Conservatives’ approach, because they don't have the presence and activists online,” says Dommett. “Whereas Labour has a lot of left sympathisers that share and amplify message, the conservative don't have people who are willing to do that.”

This is corroborated by data compiled by social media agency 89up, that showed in the first few weeks of the new Conservative government, Facebook posts by Jeremy Corbyn were shared three times as often as posts by Johnson.

The ‘Boris unfiltered’ approach might be construed as a pivot to a personality led campaigning approach. However, this strategy was also deployed, less effectively, with Theresa May. Dommett, who has interviewed widely within the Conservative Party for her research, says this was down to CTF, who placed a heavy emphasis on May’s personality. “It was the consultants who were determining the messaging around her personality, rather than her and her advisors,” she says. Dommett says that the feeling within the Conservative Party is that last time, the party was too reliant on outsourcing communications work, so this time it's hiring more people in-house.

Initiatives like the People’s PMQs might seem like a gimmick, but disregard for mainstream media channels is an approach that’s gained widespread traction among politicians in recent years. “It’s not just Donald Trump; this is a strategy by many politicians to say, ‘Listen to me, don't listen to them’ – and ‘them’ can be anything from the opposition through to mainstream media,” Moore says. This is something that chimes particularly well with Johnson’s camp, who capitalised on this approach during the Brexit campaign, and continues to depict itself as championing the people’s will (i.e. Brexit) in the face of opposition from the ‘establishment’.

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Betting big on Brexit

Brexit can't be ignored. Typically, in a general election the most intensely targeted voters are in marginal seats. But Moore suspects that the Conservatives will instead focus on targeting constituencies that weren’t formerly considered marginal, but which voted strongly for Brexit.

“It's a strategy that goes against the traditional party lines, where Boris appears to be assuming that people will vote more along the lines of they feel around Brexit,” he says. “Which is a huge gamble.” A gamble that could pay off, given January 2019 research from UK in a Changing Europe, which shows that Brexit identities were more strongly-held than party identities among British voters.

This could see the Conservative Party run a general election campaign dominated by Brexit. “Trying to make it almost like a second referendum – except it’s an election,” says Moore. “The Tories have this theory that they're going to have to let remain supporting seats go in order to win a whole bunch of leave supporting ones,” says Sam Jeffers, co-founder of WhoTargetsMe, a group that tracks political messaging on Facebook.

No approach has been confirmed, but the likelihood of a Brexit-first strategy is bolstered by the language Johnson has used when talking about the subject (such as ‘capitulation’ and ‘surrender'). “If you look at the pro-Brexit discourse, the whole modus operandi is hawking back to the days of British Empire or the Second World War, where Britain was this great power,” says Marc Owen Jones, assistant professor in Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, and an independent Twitter researcher who has carried out a large scale analysis of Johnson’s tweets.

“This is designed to evoke this idea of a Britain that no longer exists, but is somehow very appealing to a certain right-wing voter base, with this nationalistic, militant ideology and war-mongering, jingoistic language.”

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If hammering this group is the approach it takes, the Conservatives may focus on encouraging people to go out and vote, rather than informing them on policies. In the referendum, pro-Brexit campaigning managed to galvanise an additional three million people who wouldn’t have voted otherwise – meaning this same strategy could prove effective in a general election.

Facebook in focus

Although the Conservatives have spent more than other parties in the past few months, as of writing, the party’s Facebook homepage hasn’t run an ad since September 16 (although there is an ongoing ad campaign run by Johnson’s page highlighting his work in his constituency). The party was found to have altered a BBC News headline in a Facebook ad at the start of September. The ad said an extra £14 billion was being spent on schools, while the article itself said the figure was £7bn.

Following the incident the party said it was reviewing its ad process, but a hiatus of this length of time is unusual, especially if the Conservatives anticipate an upcoming general election. “It means you're not building up a database of supporters; it means you're not asking for money from anyone on Facebook; it means you're not getting people to sign up to do canvassing or volunteering,” Jeffers says.

Heavy reliance on Facebook is practically guaranteed going into a general election – it remains the platform that political parties spend the heaviest on. Mark Zuckerberg's firm has faced increased scrutiny since election interference was discovered around the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook has since increased its efforts to cull "inauthentic" behaviour on its platform, but could we see more disinformation if an election is called?

“Certainly, in terms of electoral law, almost nothing has changed since May 2015-16,” Moore says. In addition, none of the parties have published a code of ethics around personal data usage – something that Moore says is due to their strategic reliance on personal data. “They'll just be more careful about how they collect that data, and they’ll be more conscious about whether and how they share that data,” he says.

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Jeffers says that on Facebook’s ad registry, it’s generally easy to recognise the top 40 or so organisations spending the most on these kind of ads, reducing the likelihood of shady organisations getting in on the act. However, Jones doesn’t rule out the possibility of interference by third parties, of the kind we have seen more explicitly in American elections, where the likes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been tied to funding Trump’s campaign, for example.

“They don’t have to consult with the UK Government,” he says. “The whole thing with these influence operations is that they’re de-spatialised. I could create a network of bots from Calcutta in English against Brexit, say.” Despite Facebook now requiring checks for individuals buying political ads in the UK, security analysts estimate that roughly 40 per cent of paid-for partisan content still falls through that net. That the announcement of a general election would unleash all-out social media warfare is pretty much assured, but just how “nasty” could it get?

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