More people, according to our figures, shared stories about the Conservatives’ decision to back a free vote on bringing back fox hunting than about the future of the UK’s relationship with the EU.



Nine out of the top 20 most-shared articles came from nontraditional news outlets. The most popular article of the entire campaign was a post on a site called Films for Action which was shared 177,000 times and read by 4 million people, simply entitled “This Facebook Comment About the UK Election Is Going Viral”.

“On Facebook positive messages get shared much more widely,” said Charlie Beckett, a journalism professor at the London School of Economics, who said pro-Corbyn outlets combined with viral posts by individual users to reach a large and varied audience with messages they weren't seeing elsewhere. “Labour are adopting a classic corporate marketing technique.”

Beckett said that, pre-election, his hunch was that the relentlessness of pro-Corbyn social media would put off swing voters, but this seems not to have happened. Instead, the Conservatives’ attack lines on Corbyn’s alleged fiscal irresponsibility and IRA links struggled to cut through online. “On Facebook you don’t want to be frightened,” he warned.

For decades the UK political news agenda has been remarkably homogenous, largely set by a small group of lobby correspondents chasing the same stories – albeit from different political angles – and covering the same agreed set of political events. Their findings, their analysis, and their understanding is then fine-tuned and presented to the public, shaped by the presence of a major public sector broadcaster in the form of the BBC.

But now hyperpartisan sites have upped their output and gained audiences that rival the print circulation of the biggest newspapers. As a result, more and more people are rejecting the mainstream news agenda, enabled by the widespread adoption of smartphones and articles produced by sites that have a deep understanding of how to go viral on Facebook.

That’s led to right-wing newspapers pondering their relevance, less than a year after celebrating their key role leading the charge for Brexit in the EU referendum.

Joey Jones, a former Sky News political correspondent who ran communications for May when she was home secretary, told BuzzFeed News it is increasingly hard to tell where the power lies in political media.

"A year ago the blanket coverage in the Mail and The Sun felt like it moved the dial on the referendum and was really important,” Jones said. “From my position within the Home Office, for those ministers fighting the Remain campaign, it felt like a siege mentality. Now it feels like everyone’s discounted the papers. If I was the papers who 12 months ago felt like they were masters of the universe, now they must be asking some serious questions.”

Meanwhile, broadcasters still command enormous audiences but are struggling to capture younger people with their news coverage, with the average age of a BBC One viewer stuck at 61 years old. At the same time, social media during this election was so utterly dominated by pro-Labour articles that it has even led some Tory campaigners to question whether there’s any hope for the party being able to get its message across online in the future.

Clark, who acknowledges the British tabloids still sell huge numbers of papers, said: “I don’t want to see them shut down – that’s censorship. They should be held to account.”

But he has a warning that it’s time to adapt or die: “The mainstream media’s not going away, they’re just going to have to change their approach.”

The approach that has worked for sites like Clark’s is to blend activism with elements of journalism. The outright viral lies that caused a moral panic in the wake of Donald Trump's election were largely absent during the UK campaign, possibly because the current output of the UK media left no room for US-style fake news. Instead, it has been hyperpartisan left-wing content that has dominated people’s social media feeds.

"The blurred line between activism and journalism is something that people have actively demanded as of late," Matt Turner, deputy editor of pro-Corbyn site Evolve Politics, told BuzzFeed News. The site consistently scored viral hits during this election and claims 18 million people worldwide saw at least one of its posts in their News Feed in the final week of the campaign. "It's an interesting new dynamic and a market that has opened up over the past few years."