The Tiktok election: Can memes really move the polls?

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Labour and the Conservatives have been throwing their best memes at each other, but will Tiktok actually sway the election? Anna Moloney investigates

In Cleavage, the new ‘bonkbuster’ novel from Boris Johnson’s former aide Cleo Watson, the Conservative party manages to quash Labour’s record polling lead through a rather unconventional strategy: mapping UK voting intentions via porn-watching habits, and targeting campaigning accordingly. It’s an idea so ridiculous you can imagine the Tories could just do it, and indeed this year’s real campaign – an official party meme war – is perhaps no less absurd.

Hailed as the first ‘Tiktok election’, both Labour and the Conservatives hurriedly joined the platform last week. With political ads banned on the site, both parties have no choice but to get creative, pumping out dozens of clips designed to go viral.

And it’s no wonder why. Over half of 18-24 year olds will get their 2024 election news from Tiktok according to recent polling by Charlesbye, while the number of views garnered by political parties on Tiktok now rival the average daily circulation statistics for the country’s biggest newspapers.

What’s more, as Charlsbye partner Lucia Hodson suggests to me, these viewers could be particularly susceptible to its messaging. “Those who told us they were ‘undecided’ were more likely to be tuning into social media channels to follow the election than those who had already made up their mind,” Hodgson says.

So who’s likely to win them over? The numbers alone leave little doubt, with Labour’s official account having so far garnered 3.5m likes compared to the Tories’ measly-in-comparison 475,000.

While both parties’ strategies have favoured making jibes at each other over saying anything meaningful about their own party, Labour’s preference for virality over policy has put them ahead on the “edgy meme playground” of Tiktok, former 10 Downing Street head of digital Reuben Solomon tells me.

“Labour understands this audience well, and they have prioritised tongue-in-cheek satire, and rapid-response posts over detailed policy exposition,” Solomon says. Their most-watched post – a Tiktok of Cilla Black singing ‘Surprise! Surprise!’ captioned “POV: Rishi Sunak turning up on your 18th birthday to send you to war” – suggests the strategy is working in terms of exposure. Whether it’s actually endearing voters is another matter: “On the official labour Tiktok is wild,” reads one comment on the video, while another revels in how “unserious” that state of UK politics is.

According to PR gurus though, this is all part of the method, with former Downing Street spin doctor Giles Kenningham referring to the intentional “uglification” of social media as practised by the Tories to gain exposure during the last election. “They would make posts almost on purpose, which were not that polished, but it actually made people share the message all the same” – this supposedly worked regardless of whether the sharer endorsed the message or not.

And this strategy continues to dominate, with Solomon describing “the cunning use of intentionally low-quality, meme-style posts” of this election as designed to “exploit the tendency of the public to share outlandish content even in jest”. As he sums up: “The tactic: Spread the message, no matter the means. The reward: Engage a cohort of younger voters, often elusive to political campaigns.”

But likes do not mean votes. If they did, we’d be talking about Count Binface, whose Tiktok follower count is more than double that of Rishi Sunak’s, as a frontrunner,. So there is a risk that the importance of Tiktok has been overstated.

After all, the young are cynical, especially towards older generations trying to be ‘cool’. Politicians can try all they want to manufacture virality, but if we know anything about Gen Z it’s that they want authenticity, and overly contrived messaging is unlikely to land. The Milifandom phenomenon of 2015 worked to boost Ed Miliband’s profile because it was wholly organic, but even that didn’t win him the election. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s hiring of an official meme manager in the US is unlikely to win out against Donald Trump’s natural media mastery, which this week saw him gain 5.5m followers with a single Tiktok – dwarfing the 359,000 won by Biden over the last four months.

Moreover, algorithm-dominated channels like Tiktok famously create echo chambers, meaning unless you’re an active Tiktok politico, you’re unlikely to be exposed to this content anyway. The ever-increasing fragmentation of the media also means there is no longer a single platform that can sway an election and politicians must employ far more wide-ranging strategies. For the Tories, whose older voting base are unlikely to be onTiktok, favouring the platform would be a mistake, with it likely to just further alienate the overwhelmingly liberal young. Platforms like Facebook and Mumsnet, where the Tories’ target swing voter ‘Whitby Woman’ seems more likely to hang out, are a far better use of their time, and indeed Meta spending remains a staple for both parties.

Overall, the effect of Tiktok campaigning is likely to be more about awareness raising than winning votes. As behavioural analyst Gabriela Serpa Royo tells me, “cringeworthy social media posts” are unlikely to actually make anyone change their political allegiances, but they do “expand the reach of political discourse, which has value in itself”. “It will make GenZs think twice about ditching the polls, if only because turning a blind eye is less available to them.”

So, all in all, will Tiktok sway the election? It seems unlikely. But it’s at least providing some young social media managers with some fun summer work experience and may well relieve Gen Z apathy.