The influencer election that wasn't: Amid Trump trauma, Australian voters logged off

Straits Times

05-05-2025

A supporter of Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wears sunglasses with the words 'Albo 2025' written on it on the day of the Australian federal election, in Sydney, Australia, on May 3. FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
SYDNEY - When Australian podcast host Nigel Marsh booked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for an interview on his show Five of My Life, he expected a surge of listeners due to his guest's high profile and the fact that an election was looming.
Instead, his audience numbers came in at half their usual level.
'I was expecting a bump in the figures,' said Mr Marsh, who first posted the 35-minute sitdown in the lead-up to the last election, in 2022, and again three weeks before the M ay 3 vote which returned Mr Albanese to power.
'Truth be told, I was surprised that the listener downloads for the prime minister were noticeably lower than for other popular culture figures.'
A campaign dominated by podcasts, TikTok and other non-mainstream media was widely credited with US President Donald Trump's win in 2024.
But an attempt by Australian politicians to do the same fell flat in 2025, according to publicly available data and an analysis of social media activity conducted exclusively for Reuters.
Australia's 2025 election was its first where all major party leaders went on podcasts and ran personal TikTok accounts.
But voters largely tuned out of online political discussions after the campaign began in March and particularly since Mr Trump sent geopolitical shockwaves by announcing sweeping tariffs on April 2, the analysis shows.
'While there is no question that social media and podcasts do play an important role, I think in this particular election, that has to be viewed as secondary to the most dominant political trend in the world, and that is Trump,' said Professor Gordon Flake, CEO of foreign policy think tank, the Perth USAsia Centre.
After Mr Albanese's March 26 appearance on lifestyle podcast Happy Hour with Lucy and Nikki, 'comments per 100 likes' for the show's TikTok account - a closely watched measure of audience engagement - fell by two-thirds by late April.
A 48-minute interview with Mr Albanese on popular YouTube channel Ozzy Man Reviews ranked 18th out of the channel's last 20 videos. It had about one-third the views of a video about Olympic breakdancer Raygun, according to data published on the streaming website.
Ozzy Man presenter Ethan Marrell said the decline was due to fewer overseas viewers and his Albanese interview reached the same number of Australians as his other content. 'I'm pleased with how it performed,' he said by phone.
Likes are not votes
The opposition conservative coalition generated one-third more likes on its heavily meme-driven TikTok page than the governing Labor Party, according to published data, but still lost Australia's first election where most voters were aged 44 and under, the platform's main demographic.
The left-wing Greens party also performed poorly despite some high-profile influencer support, losing at least two of their four House of Representatives members, including TikTok's most-followed Australian lawmaker, Mr Max Chandler-Mather.
'Often social media is a useful way of setting the agenda in mainstream media,' said Dr Jill Sheppard, a political scientist who works on the Australian Election Study, the country's biggest research project on voting behaviour.
'That doesn't seem to have happened in this election.'
Australia's compulsory voting system effectively overrides the need to encourage non-voters to the ballot box, as Mr Trump's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience and other podcasts was credited with doing, Dr Sheppard said.
Plus, Australian influencers were typically inexperienced political interviewers and candidate campaigns had become 'so risk-averse and so scripted that the audiences can't be really enjoying it', she said.
Behavioural disengagement
After the conservative opposition led most polls for nearly a year against a government accused of failing to fix a living cost crisis, an abrupt turnaround coincided with the start of the campaign and Mr Trump's constantly changing tariff regime which roiled markets - and pension fund balances.
Engagement with politics on social media plummeted around the same time, according to US disinformation tracker Cyabra. Analysis conducted for Reuters showed an 84 per cent decline in Australian election-related posts, likes and comments from the start of April, compared to the month before, from 13,000 posts across 6,000 accounts on Facebook and X.
The downturn suggested 'a deeper behavioral disengagement from political discourse in Australia's online ecosystem', the company said.
Decisions by social media giants including Facebook and Instagram owner Meta and X to cut content moderation had enabled more misinformation, 'creating voters that are sceptical and, frankly, exhausted by the deluge of political messaging being aimed in their direction', said Mr Adam Marre, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf.
On Reddit, concern about Mr Trump was 'strongly observable' across 20 Australian political forums analysed by Queensland University of Technology's Digital Observatory. Users frequently drew parallels between opposition conservative leader Peter Dutton and Mr Trump, particularly in the campaign's early stages, said data scientist Mat Bettinson.
'Trump is probably having more of an impact than any single influencer online at the moment,' said Mr Finley Watson, a researcher of social media and politics at La Trobe University.
'Economic uncertainty tends to favour the incumbent and Trump has been probably one of the more dominant salient aspects of this election.' REUTERS
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