I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.
Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly are online metrics telling us, then? Engagement does not represent persuasion, and visibility does not represent influence; high engagement does not mean political support. Policy-making has adapted to a platform logic, though: immediacy, personalisation, emotion, and algorithmic visibility have become strategic goals, but they do not necessarily result in electoral success.
This study conducts a comparative case study of Australia and Singapore, then; it examines the social media campaigns’ communicative strategies, and the social media comments they received, and triangulates them with election results. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all critical to Singapore, while in Australia Messenger also played an important role; and the focus here is especially on Facebook. Additionally, the research also examined spending on election advertising.
In Singapore, digital media served as a secondary amplifier rather than the campaign core; in Australia, digital media were a core strategic battlefield, especially also through platform-specific advertising. Singapore’s online enthusiasm was real but democratically narrow; in Australia, digital engagement collapsed, while the Labor Party secured a landslide. Overall, symbolic participation online did not translate into behavioural intent; and high engagement reflects interest rather than electoral choices.
Engagement is also platform-skewed and tends to emphasise responses from younger users. Visibility of content is algorithmic rather than democratic, and campaign effectiveness still depends on offline structures. Advertising spend does not necessarily shift engagement. Ground operations, message disciplined, and legacy media performance still shape election outcomes. This might represent a digital decoupling between online engagement and election results. Online engagement reflects who talks, not who votes.
But to study all of this effectively in future is becoming increasingly difficult, given the severe limitations to data access now in place for most major social media platforms, and the significant lack of transparency in online advertising.
