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AI-generated content on apps such as TikTok is seen as the next big thing in political messaging, with Gen Z the target for the next federal election. By Jason Koutsoukis.
How major parties plan to use AI at the next election
AI-generated content is expected to dominate social media platforms during the next federal election cycle as political parties, independents and campaign pressure groups across the spectrum quietly experiment with new tools to attract voters’ attention.
Senior political strategists have told The Saturday Paper that AI-generated content is still in the testing phase, but there is a growing belief AI products cannot be ignored.
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“What I am seeing all around me right now is AI being used to generate all kinds of different attack lines that are being thrown out there to see what sticks,” said a campaign strategist aligned with the conservative side of politics. “Everyone is doing it, even independents, testing what works and what falls flat, and it’s all being driven by AI, which is now here to stay in Australian political campaigning.
“It’s all just lowest common denominator stuff,” the strategist added. “It’s all just shooting to very low-base perceptions and playing on the default perception that everyone’s cynical, that all politics is corrupt and that you can’t trust anybody.”
Two examples of AI-generated content currently playing on TikTok hint at the kind of material voters can expect in the lead-up to the next federal election.
In the first video, officially authorised by the Labor Party’s national secretary and clearly tagged as AI-generated content, Liberal leader Peter Dutton is shown dancing awkwardly in a makeshift room beneath the headline “Dance if you want to build nuclear power plants in everyone’s backyard”.
In another video, authorised by the Liberal National Party in Queensland, where voters will go to the polls on October 26, Premier Steven Miles is also shown dancing, in this case happily indifferent to the rising cost-of-living pressures identified in the headline “POV: my rent is up $60 a week, my power bill is up 20%, but the Premier made a sandwich on TikTok”.
“A lot of professionals working in this space are using AI to help develop ideas that would otherwise take a very long time to produce, and then require a large team to come together to really manipulate those ideas into something that would work,” says Dr Susan Grantham, a lecturer at Brisbane’s Griffith University whose research focuses on the use of trending social media, in particular TikTok.
Because AI makes it so much easier and quicker to develop ideas, Grantham believes, it’s not unexpected that political campaigning will also use AI to assist in developing content.
“There’s a fine line between the development of ideas using AI, where instead of having five people in a room and discussing it for hours, you have a conversation with an AI tool and get to the bottom of your idea in a much quicker way but it’s still your idea, versus AI-generated content where there is manipulation of a person’s identity, face or persona in a way that suggests something that is not necessarily the full truth,” Grantham says.
“That’s where there is a need for this sort of content to be tagged with an AI tag to say that it is AI-generated. The problem, of course, is that that tag is quite small and very easily missed.”
Trying new ways to reach voters is not limited to experimenting with AI. Grantham argues 2024 will be looked back on as the year of TikTok elections not just in Australia but worldwide.
“In Queensland, ahead of the state election this year, we’re seeing a massive uptake in the use of TikTok and short-form video, some of which is going across to other platforms as well,” Grantham says. “If you rewind to the 2022 federal election, the effort the ALP put into their TikToks was just outstanding, and that obviously then pushed them forward to a very specific audience, and now we’re seeing the LNP putting a lot of effort into that style of campaigning.”
Earlier this week Peter Dutton joined a growing list of federal MPs and senators trying to leverage TikTok’s dominance among the Gen Z and Millennial demographic cohorts, where raw, candid videos that lack polish and emphasise authenticity do best, helping to build a level of intimacy that is difficult to achieve on other social media platforms.
“I know my first TikTok is supposed to be something fun, and I probably should say something that is or isn’t demure, but I really joined TikTok for one reason: it’s to tell you that we do not have to live in a country where you spend your whole life renting. Owning a home is not just financially a smart decision, but also a truly foundational part of your life,” Dutton says in his first video.
“And I get it, there are more exciting things on TikTok than listening to me talking about housing, but Labor’s inability to balance migration and build enough homes is killing the Australian dream for an entire generation.”
In April 2023, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, acting on advice from intelligence and security agencies, authorised his department to issue a mandatory direction under the Protective Security Policy Framework banning TikTok on devices issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies. Politicians and their staff can access TikTok through their privately owned devices.
Analysis conducted by The Saturday Paper this week found 58 out of 151 members of the House of Representatives had TikTok accounts, as did 25 out of 76 senators.
Only 15 accounts had more than 10,000 followers, with Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather attracting the most followers, at more than 160,000, and Labor’s Julian Hill second-highest at more than 143,000. The Liberal MP with the most followers was opposition housing spokesman Michael Sukkar, with 6167.
In terms of party accounts on TikTok, the Greens have the highest number of followers, on 107,800, followed by the ALP with 104,700 and the Liberals with 77,600. Senator Pauline Hanson has 84,200 followers, Senator Jacqui Lambie has more than 27,000 and teal MP Monique Ryan has 53,500 followers.
The federal parliamentarian with the most momentum on TikTok though is former Labor Senator Fatima Payman who, since she moved to the cross bench as an independent in July, has built a following of 93,600 people largely thanks to a video of her “skibidi” speech in the Senate – a two-minute speech filled with internet slang used by Gen Z, which attracted 8.1 million views on her account, with an aggregated 40 million views online.
“The idea for the speech came up when we were brainstorming ways of engaging young people,” Payman tells The Saturday Paper. “Nobody really watches Senate proceedings, and sometimes that chamber can be boring with all the jargon and the technicalities and all the words that go into procedural matters and we thought, How do we make sure that the younger generation are also plugged in?”
The message behind the speech, Payman says, was acknowledging how rising cost-of-living pressures were affecting young people, as well as addressing the housing crisis.
“I don’t get many people watching a whole two-minute statement,” Payman says. “But they actually just watched everything, and they were plugged in, just glued to every single word. I’m trying to indicate to the younger generation that there is a space for you. Your voice should be heard because you’re the Gen Zs who are going to be crucial in the upcoming election.”
According to research published in January this year by creative content agency We Are Social, Facebook remains the social media platform with the largest potential audience reach in Australia, with 16.65 million people, or 62.7 per cent of the population, compared with 14 million people for Instagram, or 52.5 per cent of the population, and 9.7 million people, or 36.6 per cent of the population, for TikTok.
Data like that makes the proposition that the next federal election will be won and lost on TikTok only half-right, one senior Liberal Party operative tells The Saturday Paper.
“Both major parties are likely to put a big focus on TikTok. Its audience is growing rapidly, and it skews to an important younger demographic,” the operative said, pointing to the 2023 New Zealand election as an example where campaign messages delivered through TikTok helped deliver victory to conservative National Party leader Chris Luxon.
“But,” the Liberal Party operative added, “TikTok has a political ad ban, so your reach and engagement all has to come organically.”
Another potential drawback for TikTok is the platform’s legal troubles in the United States, where it is fighting a law passed in April that would force the platform’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok or see it banned in the US due to national security concerns.
According to Robert Potter, co-founder of the joint American and Australian cyber security company Internet 2.0, if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November then it is highly unlikely the US will force ByteDance to divest TikTok or ban the platform.
If Trump loses, Potter says, the case will ultimately end up in the US Supreme Court, where TikTok would most likely lose, in which case the Australian government would probably move to institute its own ban.
“I’ve always said that Australia should never go first on this matter, but we should always go with our allies,” Potter tells The Saturday Paper.
“I think at the end of the day, the question you have to put to the politician is, yes, there’s voters on that platform, but it’s a town hall environment where not everybody is welcome. So are you comfortable getting onto a platform where Hong Kong protesters, Tibetans, Muslims from Western China, or anyone that’s been critical of China and human rights is not welcome?
“My simple view is that Australian politicians should not be on TikTok.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 21, 2024 as "Screen grab".
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