Elections

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Kieran McGuinness, Hannah Adler, and Susan Grantham, further exploring the role of influencers in the TikTok and Instagram campaigns of the major parties during the 2025 Australian federal election. This project surveyed Australian voters for their experiences with political content on these platforms during the election, some months after the election. It received some 1661 responses from a diverse group of participants.

Participants used these platforms at minimum several time a week; around 50% used them several times a day or more. There were no substantial gender differences …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Susan Grantham, focussing on the 2025 Australian federal election campaign on TikTok. TikTok is now also a political campaigning tool; it was present in the 2024 US election campaign, and again in the 2025 Australian election. This study collected some 289 TikTok posts from the Australian Labor Party, 112 from the Greens, and 154 from the Liberals; the interest here is in the content and communication strategies that such content reveals.

The Greens had some 80 positive and policy-focussed videos; some 46 covered traditional political procedures …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

The final speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is David Nolan, whose focus is specifically on constructions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the 2025 Australian federal election, in the wake of the Trump administration’s cancelling of DEI programmes in the US. Such interventions were seen as having the potential for a ‘Trump effect’ during the Australian election, too – with attempts by conservative politicians and others to create an ‘anti-woke’ groundswell.

Attacks on DEI programmes tend to misrepresent what such programmes aim to achieve: procedural and distributive justice in organisations and institutions. DEI is …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ashleigh Haw, who shifts our focus to the qualitative aspects of encountering and engaging with mis- and disinformation during the 2025 Australian federal election. Participants here were 35 voting-age residents of the Deakin, Dickson, Gilmore, and Werriwa electorates who had also participated in the survey and diary components of the research project. These were interviewed for the project, exploring their information resilience, civic reasoning, and critical media literacy.

This enabled the researchers to further explore the reasons that participants had for identifying certain content as mis- and disinformation …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Jee Young Lee, whose focus is on a content analysis of mis- and disinformation examples from the 2025 Australian federal election. Australian voters remain highly concerned about such problematic information, but fewer than one third of voters actively engage in fact-checking themselves; they rely instead on their gut feeling about the veracity of information rather than on concrete evidence of its truthfulness.

In that light: what do audiences regard as mis- and disinformation; how do determine this, and what do they do? This project used a digital diary …

My final session for today at the AANZCA 2025 conference is a panel on mis- and disinformation in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with Kieran McGuinness, whose focus is on a survey of Australian adults during May and June 2025, conducted on behalf of the project by YouGov.

Respondents were asked about their access to and understanding of news during the election, Mainstream news, face-to-face discussions, political ads, and social media were the most prominent sources. Amongst social media users, mainstream news brands, politicians and parties, ordinary people, individual journalists, and alternative voices on YouTube were most prominent …

The second speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Luke Heemsbergen and Fan Yang, whose focus is on disinformation as a vibe: there is increasing evidence that regulating and combatting disinformation by addressing their factuality is ineffective, since its central effect is to spread a general sense of distrust in government and other authoritative actors, and since disinformation spreaders tend to continue to share such content even in full knowledge that it is incorrect.

Australia still needs more critical disinformation research: this study in particular focusses on Chinese-speaking Australians who encountered disinformation on platforms such as WeChat …

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …