The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.
Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms; there are also substantial changes to the data access models implemented by various platforms, with the disappearance of the Twitter API and the transformation of the Meta Content Library.
In gathering data, then, we focussed in part on the activities of election candidates on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, as well as on public debates on less personalised platforms like Reddit. Candidates’ campaigns on Facebook were centred around their campaign pages, and from a practice mapping based on distinct keyword use and domain sharing practices Labor, the Greens, the Liberals, the LNP, Teal Independents, and One Nation all appeared as distinct clusters engaging on Facebook, while the Greens and (less so) Labor tended to dominate on Instagram.
On Reddit, we were able to identify some of the key themes during election discussions; across some 20 Australian political subreddits, our practice mapping showed a number of key themes: overall election discussion, discussion of campaign activities and polling, specific discussion about the housing crisis, metapolitical discussions, and the performance of the Greens during the campaign.
On YouTube, we examined the themes emerging from the entities named in YouTube content, and the keywords used; here we saw some discussions of international politics (the Canadian election, and the Trump tariffs), some talk about voting processes in Australia, some pro-Labor and pro-LNP themes, general election contests, and a cluster of influencers.
Further, we also analysed themes in Australian news content, and an analysis of similarities based on named entities and keywords shows themes including PM Albanese and Opposition Leader Dutton, the overall campaign, the economy, budget, polling results, the Greens, and various topics related to international politics. The Pope’s death and the supposed plan for Russia to lease a military base in Indonesia also appeared as distinct topics during the election.
All of this shows the significant issues with gathering and analysing data on unlicensed discussions during elections at present. There is deliberate obfuscation by the platforms, and researchers are increasingly forced to take very creative approaches to gathering data on election communication from multiple diverse sources. Connecting all of this together is highly complicated.
