election night is calling

Plus AI video gets sporty with Wimbledon, gymnastics and cycling

Election days are excellent for dogs of all colours and sizes. Photo: Charles Arthur

Famously, The Sun newspaper claimed in April 1992 that “IT WAS THE SUN WOT WON IT”, following the shocking result of the general election ahead of which the polls had all said that incumbent Conservative prime minister John Major would lose. Major didn’t lose; he won a 21-seat majority, which despite being a fall from the 100-plus it previously had, was still success.

The Sun’s claim was that its support had made all the difference. “TRIUMPHANT Tory MPs queued yesterday to say ‘Thank You My Sun’ for sending John Major back to No.10,” reads the first paragraph (which is all that’s legible on the Wikipedia page). After a vituperative series of front pages aimed at the Labour leader Neil Kinnock (including, on the Thursday of the election, “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”), the paper claimed that it had made all the difference.

It wasn’t true, of course, but in those days there was a prevailing belief that readers of papers were enormously influenced by what they read. This belief persisted even when it was demonstrated that the readers of The Sun, one of the most right-wing tabloids, were mostly Labour voters. Yet it turned out that The Sun didn’t make any difference to what happened. What did happen was that the poll forecasts were wrong because people felt embarrassed about telling pollsters their voting intention: this was the first incarnation of the phenomenon of the “shy Tory”.

We’ve moved on since then, of course: we’re in the modern age of smartphones, of 24-hour rolling news (neither of which existed in 1992), and physical newspaper circulations have absolutely plummeted.

These days, I don’t see anyone who really frets about what newspapers are saying about this candidate or that party. The attacks from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and The Sun and the Daily Express are undimmed, but the action has moved elsewhere.

What do we make of the UK election results from last night? What might have influenced them? There can’t be any doubt—really—that it is about social media.

One observation that Carol Vorderman made on Channel 4, as the story unfolded of the utter collapse of the Tory vote, was that she had seen many posts on social media during the day of people at polling stations saying that they were doing it in memory of a deceased relative who they’d been unable to visit as they died in hospital—while the Tories partied. Over the past week, and especially in the 24 hours leading up to election day, social media had been awash in reminders of things the Tories had done, and not in a positive way.

Social media has done surprisingly well in this election at not spreading junk, I think. (Well, with an exception, that we’ll come to.) Despite the best efforts of the Tory party on Twitter, and a lot of ad spend on Facebook, the dialogue was focussed on much the same things that the history of the period would suggest: Brexit, pandemic, corruption, lying, two-facedness, chaos, decline. We’ve become accustomed to these tools, which have become embedded in our societies. Twitter? Facebook? TikTok? (Rather less Instagram and Threads, which intentionally de-emphasise news¹.) We drink from these firehoses with equanimity now.

During the election campaign, The Guardian’s Jim Waterson ran a fascinating series of stories trying to find where the hell the action was. “‘The first TikTok election’: are Sunak and Starmer’s digital campaigns winning over voters?” he asked:

The 2024 campaign has already been badged “the first TikTok election” by some after both parties opened accounts on the social media platform a few days after Sunak’s rainswept Downing Street announcement. By Friday, Labour had posted 54 videos to the Tories’ 14 – a mixture of meme battles, voter reactions and frontbenchers waving their hands earnestly while trying to explain policies in 30 seconds. Among the most watched was a video of Sunak struggling to dribble a football past some training cones with the caption: “You get tackled by a cone but are trying to convince voters you can run the country.”

He continued:

“Labour’s TikTok is like a boxer throwing a combination of punches with a mixture of funny memes, well-produced key messaging and clips of successful media appearances,” said Phil Carr, who posts satirical videos“chronicling Britain” for the 900,000 followers of his @philc84 account. He believes Labour has taken inspiration from Ryanair and other irreverent business accounts with its more popular videos making fun of the national service policy or using popular formats or sounds familiar to TikTokers.

The Conservatives have used more traditional politician-talking-to-camera videos from frontbenchers, and those are harder to judge, Carr said. “People like Sunak and Cameron will attract so many comments on a video that they will always do well in the algorithm. The issue is that the comments might not be positive.

The feeling though is that while TikTok energised kids to make fun of the Tories’ wall-thrown “policies”, it probably didn’t actually swing any views one way or another. Memes are one thing, but persuasion is another.

Another question: “Could the WhatsApp election hurt Labour at the polls?”

In some constituencies – often, but not always, with large Muslim populations – over the past six weeks a parallel WhatsApp election has taken place where the big issues have been Labour’s policy towards Gaza and the party’s tough talk on immigration.

One Labour candidate in a seat with a large Muslim population said the Bangladesh video was a real problem for the party. “Things are flying around WhatsApp in a way they didn’t in previous elections,” they said. “We’re rebutting it on the doorstep but the correction doesn’t fly on WhatsApp.

“When they hear the reply it’s quite powerful – Keir Starmer’s first trip was to Bangladesh. We’re just trying to get people in the know in the community to spread the word.”

Dr Patrícia Rossini of the University of Glasgow, who has studied the effect of WhatsApp on elections in her native Brazil, said the messaging app is a “completely hidden information environment”, which can lead to big surprises when votes are counted.

“It’s virtually impossible to factcheck or remove content once it’s gone viral,” she said. “It’s not even possible to know how viral something has become.”

This is definitely interesting, and there are some signs that it has had an effect in a couple of places, such as Leicester East (where multiple former Labour MPs stood against the actual Labour candidate and let the Conservative candidate in through the middle). But as Waterson points out, you don’t know what’s going on. Certainly I wrote in Social Warming about the effect of WhatsApp in Brazilian elections: Facebook did a deal to zero-rate data sent on the app, so people would share videos pushing them to vote one way or another. Unchecked and invisible, it was probably helpful in the election of Jair Bolsonaro. In the UK, it’s possible that there was an underground WhatsApp effect in Leicester South, where a Labour frontbencher lost to an independent running on a pro-Gaza ticket.

But one of the biggest influences is probably the one in plain sight: BBC News push alerts. “How BBC’s breaking news alerts are giving voters—and political parties—an electoral buzz” pointed out that those little things that pop up on people’s phones—which you probably wouldn’t even think of as a social network—reach seven million voters.

The most powerful person in British media during this election, in terms of having the most direct access to voters, is no longer the editor of BBC’s News at Six or the person who chooses the headlines on Radio 2. Nor are they a newspaper editor, a TikTok influencer, or a podcaster. Instead, they’re the anonymous on-shift editor of the BBC News app, making snap judgments on whether to make the phones of millions of Britons buzz with a breaking news push alert.

The BBC does not publish user numbers, but external research suggests about 12.6 million Britons have its news app installed. BBC newsroom sources say the actual number is higher and the assumption is that about 60% of users have notifications enabled. This means that on a conservative estimate, a typical push alert is reaching the phones of 7 million Britons – more than any other broadcast news bulletin in the UK.

This is so typical: we look around for all sorts of exotic explanations for what we observe happening—is it this new TikTok thing? That WhatsApp thing?—and instead the answer lies on push notifications, introduced by Apple to the iPhone in 2009, which is older than both.

One last thing: Reform did fairly well. (It seems to be on a bit more than 15% of the vote.) Though its social media boosters were plentiful, there were plenty of questions about it: was there Russian bot interference?

There was certainly some fakery:

Just gaze at that face for a moment. And now there’s this:

That’s from December 2023. You have to agree that it’s pretty dramatic work on Reform’s part. Not only can it do [unspecified things to jumpstart growth], it can literally raise the dead and cure their dementia. Then again, when you look at the Reform candidates—and, now, MPs—perhaps she’ll fit right in.

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Glimpses of the AI tsunami

(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)

• Figma disables AI app design tool after it copied Apple’s Weather app. Figma’s purchase by Adobe was blocked by regulators, but it’s jumped on the AI bandwagon. To ill effect, apparently.

• Google News ranks AI spam above original reporting. Google News has always been terrible, but the rise of AI spam is going to be a real problem.

• “The rise of the AI beauty pageant and the complicated quest for the perfect woman”. Just to show that old sexist approaches get embedded in the newest technology too.

• The Turing test for AI video is gymnastics. Take a look at this sequence and tell me whether it’s got it yet.

• Or possibly the test for AI video is the Tour de France. This, too, is utterly wild. And yet: this is the worst that AI-generated video of sports will ever be.

• No such AI-generated video of tennis (Wimbledon is on, you know), but there is this from 2020 which shows AI video of real players, but directed. Roger Federer not missing the forehand he did miss when match point up in 2019? No problem! Federer playing himself? No problem!

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1. I considered writing about Threads this week, but concluded it would be too dull. It’s got 175 million users, but every time I go there it feels like people are discussing junk like “why do British electric plugs have so many pins?” It’s ratio food, but also the lack of violence makes it pointless.