DCDPS 2022

The COVID Election: Political Campaigning on Social Media in the 2022 Australian Federal Election

Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Timothy Graham, and Ehsan Dehghan

• 9 May 2022 – Paper presented at the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium, Villa La Collina, Cadenabbia, Italy

Presentation Slides

Abstract

The 2022 Australian federal election, to be held at a date yet to be determined between February and May 2022 (Muller, 2021), is the first to take place against the backdrop of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, and is expected to serve predominantly as an assessment of the current conservative Coalition government’s handling of this health crisis in Australia. At the time of writing, the federal government is under considerable public pressure, inter alia, for its slow rollout of vaccine and booster shots (‘strollout’ became the Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year for 2021; Burnside, 2021); its inconsistent approach to lockdowns, travel restrictions, industry and income support; and its failure to provide adequate PCR and RAT testing facilities – however, by embracing a ‘small target’ strategy which offers few explicitly alternative policy solutions the centrist Labor Party opposition has failed to convert such frustrations into a substantial and sustained lead in the opinion polls. The 2022 election is expected to remain a tight contest between the two major party blocs, therefore.

This contest is further complicated by a number of additional factors. Continuing a trend observed in the past two federal elections, major-party candidates (and especially those from the Coalition’s component Liberal and National Parties) are likely to be challenged by a growing number of Independents with strong local support in their electorates, while populist businessman Clive Palmer and his United Australia Party will again seek to attract the votes of those voters who are frustrated with the conservative Coalition yet uncomfortable with Labor’s progressive policies – a spoiler role that usually fails to generate UAP seats but helps Coalition MPs retain theirs.

Tendentious electioneering and outright disinformation, related to COVID-19 as well as to other major issue, are also likely to feature strongly: in past elections, the Labor Party executed a successful ‘Mediscare’ campaign, worrying voters about supposed Coalition plans to wind back universal healthcare in Australia (Hunter, 2016); the Coalition won the 2019 election in part as a result of its ‘Death Tax’ campaign, misrepresenting Labor’s plans to reduce tax benefits for rich retirees (Emerson & Weatherill, 2019); and Palmer and the UAP have already begun their campaign of delivering vaccine disinformation to Australians via an indeterminate SMS texting campaign (Taylor & Karp, 2021). Such campaigns are likely to find fertile ground in a fractious and frustrated electorate that is already affected by substantial volumes of COVID-19 mis- and disinformation.

This paper presents a first analysis of digital campaigning during the 2022 Australian federal election. For this we draw on our established approach to analysing Twitter campaigning (as utilised for our studies of the 2013, 2016, and 2019 campaigns; Bruns, 2017; Bruns & Moon, 2018; Bruns et al., 2021); on our translation of that approach to the analysis of campaigning via candidate pages on Facebook (as developed for the 2020 Queensland state election; Bruns & Angus, 2020); on the Australian edition of the PoliDashboard (Mai & Gruzd, 2021), harvesting Australian political advertising data from Facebook’s Ad Library (capturing ‘official’ political advertising); and from our Australian Ad Observatory project (ADM+S 2022), an Australian implementation of the browser plugin data donation approach also employed by the NYU Ad Observatory and related projects (additionally capturing ‘rogue’ ads that were not formally declared as political and/or affiliated with mainstream political actors). In combination, these efforts produce as comprehensive a picture of social media campaigning in the 2022 Australian federal election as possible. Our paper builds on the rapid analysis we will conduct, in partnership with Australian election watchdogs, fact-checking organisations, and mainstream media outlets, over the course of the election campaign itself, and presents a detailed and timely review of the campaign at a time of unprecedented political and social dissonance and discontent.

References

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Bruns, A. (2017). Tweeting to Save the Furniture: The 2013 Australian Election Campaign on Twitter. Media International Australia, 162, 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X16669001

Bruns, A., & Angus, D. (2021, 30 Oct.). 2020 Queensland State Election: Week 4 Update. QUT Digital Media Research Centre. https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/30/2020-queensland-state-election-week-4-update/

Bruns, A., Angus, D., & Graham, T. (2021). Twitter Campaigning Strategies in Australian Federal Elections 2013–2019. Social Media + Society, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211063462

Bruns, A., & Moon, B. (2018). Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(2), 425–448. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018766505

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Emerson, C., & Weatherill, J. (2019). Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign. Australian Labor Party. https://alp.org.au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review-2019.pdf

Hunter, F. (2016, 5 July). Australian Federal Election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull Takes Full Responsibility for Campaign. Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-malcolm-turnbulltakes-full-responsibility-for-campaign-20160705-gpyx9z.html

Mai, P., & Gruzd, A. (2021, 2 Sep.). This Federal Election, the Liberals Are Outspending All the Other Parties Combined When Buying Ads on Facebook. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/this-federal-election-the-liberals-are-outspending-all-the-other-parties-combined-when-buying-ads-on-facebook-167109

Muller, D. (2021, 9 Dec.). Timing for the 2022 Federal Election. Parliament of Australia. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2021/December/Timing_for_the_2022_federal_election

Taylor, J., & Karp, P. (2021, 7 Sep.). Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly Using Spam Text Messages to Capture Rightwing Vote ahead of Election, Expert Says. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/08/clive-palmer-and-craig-kelly-using-spam-text-messages-to-capture-rightwing-vote-ahead-of-election-expert-says