The Strange Performances of Queensland State Politicians on TikTok

The final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session for today starts with Susan Grantham, whose focus is on the political uses of TikTok. Here, she is focussing especially on the use of the platform by individual politicians in the last Queensland election – which continued even though there were increasing moves to ban the platform in Australia, especially by political actors.

Susan’s study explored the political uses by the past Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and new Premier Steven Miles (both Labor), and opposition leader David Crisafulli (LNP); their videos were analysed for their immediacy, consistency, and ordinariness; their visibility labour, their topical focus, their metadata, and their use of humour.

Crisafulli focussed on immediacy and consistency in more than 40% of videos each; ordinariness was less prominent (18%), but often combined with humour. His key themes were youth crime and cost of living issues. Palaszczuk took a similar approach, but humour was aligned here fully with immediacy and not ordinariness; a key theme was the promotion of Labor government policies. Miles as a new Premier had fewer videos, with a thematic focus on the natural disasters that occurred in his first months in office, and the cost of living.

Palaszczuk engaged in a great deal of visibility labour by utilising the performance features in the way they were designed; Crisafulli used a very ordinary, typically Australian sense of humour (there is a great deal of deliberate cringe content), as well as highlighting his Italian and earlier-generation migrant heritage. Meanwhile, Miles engaged in a kind of odd, ‘ambivalent ordinariness’ – engaging in ordinary activities, like peeling carrots while outlining his political agenda.

And the next Queensland state election is coming up in October 2024; it will be interesting to see how these TikTok personas are going to evolve over the course of the coming months…