9

BE SOCIAL

You are still on the couch in the cave. Your phone, at the end of the couch where you tossed it earlier in disgust, is calling to you – figuratively, of course. The promise of colour and movement, connection (if only virtual), and the occasional dopamine spurt from a retweet or a new follow or two keeps you coming back again and again just like everyone else nursing their phones the way evangelicals cradle bibles. Here’s a tweet about how your opponent’s social media operation smashed yours during the campaign. Is that right? Your social media always looked pretty good when you peeked at Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Now you think of it, you didn’t see any benchmarking of your social media game against theirs, let alone tracking of it as the campaign unfolded. Was it even done? Probably. The campaign team likely never gave it to you because you knew, and they knew, you were going to win. But you didn’t win.

Be social – it sounds so ‘optional extra’. It is not. It is central. It is crucial. Like US President Donald Trump said of Twitter, ‘it’s like owning your own newspaper – without the losses’.¹ Trump made this comment in 2012. Since then social media has become way, way more powerful than that.

We think we understand the shift from the industrial era to the information era via digital technology, but mostly we don’t really – not without devoting a lot of time and specific effort to it. Perceiving the architecture of the digital world, seeing it evolve and getting a feel for its dynamics, is different from knowing how to do a good tweet or Facebook post or simply having lots of followers. If you want to win an election, you have to understand that landscape and its dynamics, otherwise you miss an entire field of battle already dwarfing the others.

Technology is restless. Digital media is constantly changing so digital campaigning does too. Barack Obama’s cutting edge digital operation from his successful 2012 presidential election campaign was already superseded by the time Hillary Clinton ran in the 2016 presidential election. Complacently, the Clinton campaign didn’t notice: it failed to meet and overcome the challenge of the Trump campaign’s specific digital campaign tactics.² This was an important factor in Clinton losing despite beating Trump decisively in the popular vote: 65 853 514 votes (48.18 per cent) to Trump’s 62 984 828 votes (46.09 per cent).³

Labor’s 2019 election review describes how the Shorten campaign fell into the same trap without making the connection with the Clinton campaign’s similar failure.⁴ Shorten’s digital campaign at the 2016 election bettered Malcolm Turnbull’s, but in 2019 it was decisively beaten by Scott Morrison’s which, as we will see later, was networked into contemporary developments overseas. Like Clinton, Shorten failed to notice that digital campaigning had moved on from what had been cutting edge and successful at the previous election. Complacency is the enemy of success.

The social media spawned by digital technology is an epochal development, comparable to the combined impact of the Gutenberg printing press and development of mass literacy. It connects us virtually to each other. It makes us transparent to and targetable by, in extraordinarily fine-grained ways, companies, political parties and other groups and individuals who want to manipulate us for their own ends.⁵ It transcends geographical and nation-state boundaries creating visceral, virtual connectivity in ways never experienced by human beings before. At the time of writing, one-third of Earth’s population are active Facebook users.⁶

While unprecedented in its reach and impact, social media is merely the latest wave of technological change transforming a key aspect of how politics is practiced. In the coffeehouses of Georgian London and the Paris of the French Revolution, printed pamphlets were cutting-edge political media. Over time, newspapers displaced their influence. In Australia, until radio and cinema newsreels arrived in the 1920s, voters only knew their politicians via word of mouth, doorknocking, public meetings, or through newspapers and printed flyers. Radio technology drove the next wave of change. Labor’s John Curtin was the first Australian prime minister to harness broadcast media to major effect. Journalism academic Caryn Coatney notes Curtin communicated more often with Australians via radio than Americans were communicated with by Curtin’s contemporary, US president Franklin Roosevelt, whose ready uptake of radio is recognised as important to his presidency.⁷

Then came television. In the US, televised debates in the 1960 presidential election between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon ushered in the television era.⁸ The telegenic Kennedy correctly banked on it giving him the edge over Nixon in a country where 90 per cent of households owned televisions, and he carefully and consciously cultivated the best look and angles for the cameras.⁹ Kennedy won, narrowly beating Nixon whose saturnine ‘5 o’clock shadow’ and poor television presence was the most remembered feature of his losing campaign.

In Australia the 1972 election – where Gough Whitlam led Labor to a historic win ending 23 consecutive years of conservative rule – marked the beginning of the television era here.¹⁰ Without television, the ‘singing celebrities, hip T-shirts and dazzling leader’s increasingly fluffy mane’ prominent in Labor’s 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign would have been pointless, historians Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno have observed.¹¹

The beginning of the social media era in Australian politics was marked by Labor’s Twitter-savvy Kevin Rudd ending John Howard’s run of four consecutive election victories at the 2007 election. Even today Rudd has five times the Twitter followers of Bill Shorten and six times the followers of Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Labor is considered to have bested the Liberal and National parties on the digital media front fairly consistently since then, until the 2019 election.

Antisocial social media behaviour for political gain emerged as a visible concern for the first time in 2016 when Russian social media operatives helped Donald Trump win the US presidency. A US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation found that Russian operatives associated with the St Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency (IRA), tasked and supported by the Russian government, used social media to spread disinformation and inflame division, part of a ‘broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society’.¹²

The US Senate Select Intelligence Committee report is chilling. Contrary to the widely held perception that Russian troll attacks were directed only at Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, it found they also targeted Republican candidates during the primaries who had ‘adversarial views towards the Kremlin’, including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.¹³

The extraordinary investigative reporting of British Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr subsequently exposed private companies conducting their own information warfare for paying clients on the right wing of politics in what became known as the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested tens of millions of individuals’ Facebook records to microtarget online political messages for the Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.¹⁴ The now defunct company claimed to have ‘won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’.¹⁵

Communication researchers Samuel Woolley and Philip N Howard have termed the kind of bad faith, often illegal, social media moves made by Russia’s IRA and by Cambridge Analytica for the Trump campaign as ‘computational propaganda’.¹⁶ It is the single biggest threat to contemporary democracy. Computational propaganda has already demonstrably damaged democracy by aiding Trump’s surprise presidential election win.

Early research by the Oxford Internet Institute found that pro-‘Leave’ Twitter bots played a ‘small but strategic role’ helping the ‘Leave’ campaign to its unexpected Brexit referendum win too.¹⁷ Carole Cadwalladr’s investigative journalism subsequently found that misleading Facebook ads had a significant impact on the way people voted in the Brexit referendum. Further, Cadwalladr revealed intimate links between Brexiteers, the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica.¹⁸

What of Australia? We lack an Oxford Internet Institute and a local journalistic equivalent of Carole Cadwalladr to investigate whether such techniques played a role in the 2019 election result – but the ‘surprise win’ is common to the Trump, Brexit and Morrison victories. Trump’s Republicans, hard Brexit Tories and Australia’s current Liberal Party are all friends on the same side of politics. What are the odds on them sharing, directly and indirectly, social media campaigning techniques too?

Shorten’s campaign was leapfrogged by Morrison’s in 2019 partly because the nefarious social media developments in the US and UK described earlier made Labor cautious about digital campaigning – a good reflection on the ethics of both Shorten and the party while hurtful to its election chances. Unwavering adherence to ethical campaign practices must continue, in relation to social media and beyond.

That’s the admirable part of the explanation. The rest lies in the Labor election review’s excoriating conclusion that a ‘reluctance to embrace “digital first” campaigning left it flat-footed and falling behind its opponents’ due to a ‘top down, risk averse culture’ flowing from ‘the lack of digital literacy within Labor’s senior ranks’.¹⁹ Labor’s digital campaign effectiveness went backwards despite a 160 per cent increase in its digital advertising spend, pointing, the Labor review correctly says, ‘to the need for a change in Labor’s campaign culture and how it thinks about digital’ since money alone is demonstrably not sufficient to solve the problem.²⁰ Labor needs more digital specialists, the review continues, and should not leave the digital campaign to junior staff: ‘Few, if any, Party officials have genuine expertise in how digital platforms work and how progressive organisations can make the most of the opportunities they offer.’²¹

This is a deep structural issue inside Labor, not prone to a superficial fix. Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett has written about the same deep structural problem in the Clinton campaign where ‘Democrats were divided into many different teams with rigid protocols’ following ‘established ways of doing things’ rather than looking to innovate and achieve a winning edge.²² Even though voters have decamped from traditional broadcast media and now live online, Tett writes, many senior Democrats are still ‘digital dinosaurs’ making it possible that its next presidential campaign will be as complacent as Clinton’s, continuing to pour concentrated spending on television advertising. The hope is that new entities like Acronym, the Washington start-up created by ex-Clinton campaign staffer Tara McGowan to ‘build the digital infrastructure needed to power the progressives’, will show the way forward. Tett quotes McGowan on the critical need to ‘meet voters where they are – online, on their devices – and we can do this without stooping to the immoral level of Republicans in spreading lies and encouraging voter suppression’.²³

This is the right goal, but achieving it is a major challenge. The Acronym-associated firm Shadow flubbed the rollout of a new app for voting in the Iowa Democratic primary in early 2020 which, embarrassingly, delayed the result and made the Democrats look incompetent.²⁴

The episode underlined the scale of the tech catch-up facing social democratic parties, but also the need to get their priorities right. An old-fashioned voting system that works isn’t broken so don’t try and fix it. Concentrate on voter relationship-building, fundraising and defensive and offensive moves against weaponised disinformation instead.

Labor has faced and risen to challenges in the past like the one now dramatically confronting it on digital campaigning. Gough Whitlam probably had to stare down party dinosaurs between the 1969 election, which Labor lost, and the 1972 election, which he won dragging Labor into the television era that swept US politics more than a decade earlier. John Curtin may well have had to stare down party dinosaurs between the 1940 election, which Labor lost, and the 1943 election he won having brought Labor into the radio era.

To win an election you have to fight the current war, not the last one. You have to use the latest technology and techniques, not rely on the old ones even if they won elections for you in the past. Strategy and resources have to be rejigged around the latest technology and techniques or you will be roadkill come election day. Right now that means digital has to be at the centre of your campaign, not a dinky add-on.

That is all at the crucial campaign level. What of individual politicians?

Donald Trump was right when he said back in 2012 that Twitter is like owning your own newspaper without the losses – and he rode to, and runs, his presidency off its back. Trump is an unpalatable example to cite, but social media can be used by politicians for good instead of evil. Setting aside the content of Trump’s social media, it is a compelling example of what is possible in terms of reach. His @realDonaldTrump Twitter account has 72.1 million followers with whom he is in regular direct, unmediated contact. His followers get the real him, not a cardboard cut-out. He is not just being authentically himself – crucially, he is not being boring. Voters want colour, movement and action. They don’t want bland, dull and worthy.

The same goes for the journalists. It may be unfair but, as we saw at this book’s outset, politicians have to do the substance and the theatre of politics to win. I hate Trump’s politics and deplore his lies, bile and gangsterism, but am also in awe of his harnessing of social media in the pursuit and exercise of power. What Australian politician even vaguely approaches it? Think what could be achieved if that kind of social media performance were practised for good, not evil.

Then there are voters themselves. As the east coast burned in the Great Conflagration of 2020 a virtuous circle of good journalism and ordinary voters expressing outrage via social media forced Scott Morrison back home from his secret Hawaiian holiday. It was a brilliant example of citizens combining online with persistent journalists to force action from a disengaged prime minister, seemingly indifferent to suffering and environmental destruction on a vast scale. To his chagrin, online citizen activists rebranded Australia’s supposed ‘daggy dad’ prime minister as #ScottyFromMarketing, a moniker that lives on well beyond the crisis.

Social media is the great unrealised upside of Australian politics waiting to be deployed for good. What’s more the Murdochs don’t own it or control it. Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg partly does, and that’s a problem as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, among other things, shows. But there’s more than one social media space to occupy and harness, and rich political returns for those who understand that and do.