Australian voters tuned out online politics this time

New Straits Times

06-05-2025

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 Marsh, who first posted the 35-minute sit-down in the lead-up to the last election in 2022, and again three weeks before last Saturday's vote which returned 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 last year.
But an attempt by Australian politicians to do the same fell flat this year, 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, particularly since 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 Gordon Flake, chief executive officer of the Perth USAsia Centre, a foreign policy think tank.
After 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 Albanese on popular YouTube channel "Ozzy Man Reviews" ranked 18th out of the channel's last 20 videos.
It had just over half the views of a post called Why Sheilas Live Longer Than Blokes and 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.
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, Max Chandler-Mather.
"Often social media is a useful way of setting the agenda in mainstream media," said Jill Sheppard, a political scientist who works on the Australian Election Study, the country's biggest research project on voting behaviour.
"That does not seem to have happened in this election."
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.
After the conservative opposition led most polls for nearly a year against a government accused of failing to fix a cost-of-living crisis, an abrupt turn-around coincided with the start of the campaign and 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 with the month before — from 13,000 posts across 6,000 accounts on Facebook and X.
The downturn suggested "a deeper behavioural disengagement from political discourse in Australia's online ecosystem", the company said.
Decisions by social media giants 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 Adam Marre, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf.