on the conservative party's tiktok account. hi, tiktok, sorry to be breaking into your usual politics—free feed, but i'm making a big announcement today and i've been told that a lot of you already have some views on it. so, first thing — no, i'm not sending everyone off to join the army. what i am doing is proposing a bold new model of national service for 18—year—olds. well, i want to bring in shona ghosh, from bloomberg. everyone here listening to rishi sunak there. give us the basics, shona, because lots of people will think of tiktok as a platform for kids who clearly don't vote, but who is consuming political content on tiktok? so tiktok itself has been trying to dispel the idea that it is mostly a platform, an app used by children. and that seems to be true. erm, it is also widely used by the elder millennials... ..won�*t say which camp i'm in, and also gen z, erm, you know, which is a pretty big cohort and they can all vote and have often very strong political views. so they are on tiktok looking for political content. i don't know that they're necessarily looking to be fed political content by the political parties. so it's been interesting to see some of the reactions to, erm, each, you know, the two major party videos. and it's also important to say, isn't it, that tiktok bans political adverts. so this isn't advertising. so what are the parties doing on there? so, you know, a little like any social media platform, the parties are allowed to have accounts and even issue out content. but what they can't do is pay to disseminate that content more widely to a broader audience on tiktok. so they can't pay for spread. they have to try and go viral naturally, as it were. i don't know if we'll see those videos going particularly viral any time soon, but that's the goal, is that, you know, they can't pay. you know, one drawback is that tiktok isn't necessarily particularly transparent about how it's policing this stuff. so, you know, we don't necessarily know, you know, probably the major political parties are not breaking the rules, but we do know that there are influencers who sometimes skirt the line in terms of what they're posting. so that's not to say that, you know, even though there is this ban on political advertising, you may not see content that sort of skirts that a little bit. 0k, well, it's a perfect moment to bring in sean topham from the creative ad agency topham guerin, because sean is known as borisjohnson�*s social media guru, having worked on his 2019 general election campaign. sean, welcome to the media show. great to be here. great to have you. i think your use of tiktok as a useful election tool actually came later, last year in new zealand. you ran the right—wing national party's social media campaign and that party won that election. why then did you focus on tiktok? and presumably you believe it translates into votes? that's right. you know, we saw a huge shift in the way people were using social media in new zealand. and the best example i can give you is we were, we know we're working in the office and creating our tiktok videos with the now prime minister and he came in one day and he said, "oh, you wouldn't believe what'sjust happened. i've just had someone stop me on the street and say they recognised me from tiktok." and that sort of represented, very simplistically, a watershed moment for the platform's ability to have genuine cut—through with audiences at scale and with voters. and, you know, to be honest, here in the uk, we've already seen that the labour party have racked up, you know, ten million views in the last few days on tiktok alone. the conservatives, you know, a few million themselves. now, to pay for those views on other platforms would be extremely expensive and that's all organic. that's all based on the quality, or lack thereof, in the content that they've been sharing. and, you know, memes are a really effective form of communication. you know, i'd go as far to say half the internet isjust memes. and political parties, you know, are still and clearly needing to embrace them to disseminate their message. so, yeah. 0k, sorry to interrupt. just tell us how it works, then. you're trying to create, you know, you can't buy your way to prominence on tiktok. so you're trying to create these memes, whatever it might be. what are you doing? sitting around with a young team talking about how to do that — how? just talk us through how you do it. yeah, that's right. look, i think it would be helpful to have a young team at the helm of that. a lot of these are sort of trends or internet subcultures that sort of captured different audiences on tiktok. and when you can find a way to mash your political message in with this trend or aesthetic or content style, that's when you can really start to get viral content going. you know, the cilla black, surprise surprise, is a meme that's been going around on tiktok for a while, and labour were able to latch on to that with the national service policy to poke fun at the conservatives. so if you've got a young team who is really well versed with these sorts of subcultures and trends on tiktok, then you can leverage it really hard. but there are other good ways to use, you know, tiktok for content as well, where you can engage with voters and respond to videos. well, we're also joined by sam jeffers, who's the founder of who targets you, an organisation that campaigns for transparency in the way politicians campaign online. sam, what's your reaction to what sean has said? i mean, do you have your suspicions about the online tactics used by political parties? the suspicions, maybe not so much. i mean, ithink, you know,| one of the things that's sort of been a positive over the last few years has been there is now more i transparency at least, right? you can actually see the ads people are generally running, _ roughly the audiences they're trying to reach with those ads. _ you can see what they're saying. you know, tiktok, erm, - you know, has an ad archive, again, although there's no political ads there. - but you can look at the videos people are running and see i what they're trying to achieve with them and so on. - i think, you know, - in a sense, who targets me is a response to that, right? a kind of organisation that's there to try and monitor this content, i point out interesting stuff, - show how people are trying to use it in different ways, _ try and just kind of make people aware of the ways that's - going to going to happen to them over the next six weeks or so. and how much have the parties spent already? i know it's early days, but do you have an assessment of how much they've spent on digital campaigning so far in this election? yeah, i mean, it's a lot of money. i mean, obviously the spending rules have changed for this election. - they've nearly doubled. erm, you know, labour, _ since the election was announced has spent about £375,000 - on google/youtube ads alone, which is half as much— as they spent last time already. so in the first week _ of the campaign, where notionally things are just getting set up - and we're just trying to work things out, they're already 50% of the way to what they did in 2019. _ erm, the conservatives are a bit slower off the mark. _ i mean, certainly theiradvertisingl spend is maybe not even a quarter of what labour have done so far. but, you know, they're _ still significant amounts of money and i think we're going to see both parties absolutely breeze past - what they did last time fairly quickly in the campaign. - and, just, have we got any evidence? i mean, sean, who we werejust speaking to, clearly thinks they do work, but have we got any evidence that micro—targeted digital campaigns actually work? i mean, presumably they wouldn't be spending all this money if they didn't think they did. yeah, i there's a few reasons for this. - i mean, part of this isjust- you have all of these channels available and all of these audiences available to you, there is just - a sort of mutually assured i destruction logic to political campaigning, which is, you know, there is no tomorrow, _ we have a budget, we have to spend i it, we have to reach people, and, i you know, we'll see what the other guys are doing and we'll try - and match it and back and forward we go. i so i think there's some of that. ithink, you know, there is evidence from various places over time where, you know, for example, | it's a while ago now, i but the 2015 campaign, for example, the tories targeted a lot of lib dem—held marginals. there was no transparency. you couldn't really see into- what was going on in that election. and then after they won, - they sort of credited the ability to spend a load of money on facebook in those places — so, you know, ithink there's a kind of mixture of, like, _ you know, mutual logic, - folk folklore, but also the ability to raise money and get volunteers mobilised and do those sorts - of things that help - campaigns move as well. well, we've talked about the role online campaigning might play in the general election here in the uk, but whoever wins, a small number of unelected tech bosses in silicon valley will still have a huge say in the lives and interactions of billions of people around the world. i want to think now about some broader questions about how big tech impacts society. to discuss all this, i'm joined by katy balls, political editor at the spectator, timandra harkness, tech commentator and author of technology is not the problem, and, as mentioned, baroness martha lane fox, tech entrepreneur, co—founder of lastminute.com and former board member of x. and timandra harkness, if i could bring you in, i mean, do you think these ad campaigns contribute positively to political discourse? well, it depends what they are and what they're trying to say. i'm really struck by what sean said, about you've got to talk to voters where they are. if you want to talk to people where they are now, we are on social media. so i think it's less a case of it's a new thing to use technology and it transforms politics, it's more a case of political parties always want to reach us and persuade us and get us to do things. we're not usually members of political parties any more. a lot of the old kind of traditional ways to reach us have maybe fallen away. but what we do have is social media. i'm quite tickled by the mutually assured destruction. like, we've got a budget and we have to spend it! katy balls from the spectator, i mean, ijust said earlier, you've written recently about tiktok. i was saying earlier i was surprised that rishi sunak was doing his, you know, his first tiktok on the conservative party account. but then, of course, that's presumably because they banned tiktok from government phones not very long ago last year, i think, because of security concerns. they did, and i wonder if that's part of the reason that both labour and the tories have been so slow in really getting in on tiktok as a way to campaign or get votes, because if you compare it, we heard about new zealand, but if you look at argentina, if you look even at in america and how the democrats use it, you know, it feels like we're a bit behind also some european countries on that, which might go back to security. i think it's a really interesting medium because in terms of length of time, when you speak to political strategists about how they rank the different social medias, i mean, twitter, i think is really seen almost as the lowest of the lows, where you put your nastiest attacks and just try and, you know, drive the westminster bubble. perhaps i'd be accused of being a member of it, mad for a day on a media row, whereas facebook's much more targeted and there you can do paid targeting, and instagram, i think similarly. linkedln, rishi sunak's team really like, i think perhaps because they think he speaks well to young professionals. we'll see if that pays off in a month's time. but tiktok is where actually you probably get the most screen time if you can get it right. and martha lane fox, erm, katy was mentioning the role of x, formerly twitter, might play in our general election here and how the parties use it. i mean, you were on the board. how much has twitter, now x's, public role changed, do you think, since elon musk bought the company? i would say a great deal. i remember in my interview in 2016 withjack, when i asked him - what the proudest thing had been i for him since founding twitter. i that's jack dorsey. jack dorsey, the founder, one of the co—founders. i he said, oh, the arab spring. now, there's a lot to unpick in that. i but clearly at that point back - in 2016, there was still a narrative that was certainly very strong j injack's head, maybe slightly weaker in the rest of us, _ but still there that somehow twitter had unlocked this kind - of unrest around the world, that people could change the course of political stories _ and histories because of it. and i don't think that feels the case at all now. - katy's just confirmed it _ with a huge, red, enormous pen. erm, you know, i think the thing that i'm much struck— by and i haven't been in the company for 18 months, but the teams that. have been responsible for making. sure that the quality of the content is as good as it can be, _ and bear in mind, twitter is much smaller and more resource constrained than the other| platforms, has been decimated. the interaction with i the civil society groups that they used to talk to a lot, through to the actual- moderators of the content and so on and i think- that does matter. i think it makes the content less reliable, which makes _ it less useful, which, _ you know, feeds the loops that we've all been talking about. and i want to talk to you a little bit more about that, but i do know you haven't spoken that much about your departure from the company. i mean, what i remember is the sort of battle to force elon musk to buy after he signed the contract and then he appeared to want to back out of it. i also remember him tweeting, you know, his arrival, carrying the sink, but you were on the inside. what was that period like? well, it was extraordinary. i think it was kind - of once—in—a—lifetime career—defining stuff in a way, which is a peculiar thing - as a nonexecutive of a companyl because you're not an executive, but it felt as though i did personally kind of cross. into being a bit of an executive because i was chairing - the nomination and governance - committee, when you have to worry about how people come on and off the board and so we firstly- |were thinking about how to get elon| on the board and then off the board, and i was chairing the compensation committee, so that was how - we were going to look after all the staff- and the rewards and the bonuses, and i was on the transaction - committee, which is the committee that worries about how the sale - and the process of selling i the company goes through. and, you know, i still pinch myself because i certainly did notjoin - the board of twitter to uphold the law in delaware, which isi what we ended up having to do. you know, ijoined it because it was kind. of an extraordinary company. i found it interesting. i liked the people and hoped i could bring a european- perspective, but actually - what it was like was extremely, extremely intense, | as you can imagine. because just to explain, the law in delaware is that he had to buy because he'd signed? yes, because he had a contract, because that's where the law. is the law is the law. and i think it's easy to imagine you've got boardrooms full- of lawyers and bankers. but actually, that wasn't the case. you know, there were three of us on the transaction committee. i we did have a stellar team| of litigators and of contract lawyers to help us, and of course, the management team. _ but it was pretty - focused, pretty clear. and when we had our contract, that's what we had to do, - because that's what you have to do for the shareholders. _ so it was so far away _ from what your normal board activity is that it is still, _ i kind of feel i'm still processing it 18 months on, and i would just be very wary of ever doing business - with elon musk. because? - because i don't think he has any. high moral values or much integrity. 0k, he's obviously not here to defend himself. i'm sure he would say something entirely different, but you've hinted, erm, in your answer previously about, you know, how x's moderation apparatus has changed. when it comes to the us election, the election here, how much are you worrying about the impact x, twitter, could have? 0r actually, is it less of an important medium than it was in previous elections already? it feels as though it is less _ important, partly because, you know, despite really reorganising the cost base, the revenues have _ clearly collapsed as well. and advertisers have left i the platform, which again, | means that you don't get the quality| loop that we've been discussing and, you know, deferring to the expert shona on one side and katy- on the other side, but, you know, i i am really struck by how people i underestimate tiktok at their peril, in my opinion — you know, it isn'tjust- children and young people. it is people of all ages _ and i was reading something about al recently that said that one - of the biggest sources of quality content that people are learning about al is on tiktok. _ and that's not just seven—year—olds and 13—year—olds and 18—year—olds. it's, you know, 35—45, _ even 50—year—olds, dare i say it! so i think we underestimate at our peril and that shift i isjust interesting, _ how quickly that can happen and how it's hard as a political party - to keep across all these different pieces of the puzzle. it's been so swift, i remember how important twitter was for journalism, and now i feel like it, you know, i don't look at it nearly as much as i used to. stay with us, please, because timandra harkness, your new book looks at how our anxieties about the power of big tech might be unfounded. it's called technology is not the problem. so what are you saying? what is the problem? well, unfounded might be putting it a bit strongly, but i think what i came down to, i started off writing more about the tech and how our data is gathered and we're profiled and everything is personalised, including political messaging, but then, ijust became curious about why that's the technology we have, and ifinished up saying, i don't think... i don't think we're obsessed with ourselves because of personalising technology. i think we have personalising technology because we're already obsessed with ourselves and insecure about who we are. and so if somebody provides a platform or a service or a company that says, well, everything will be tailored to you, katie, and your uniquely discerning tastes in whatever it is — politicians, biscuits, whatever it is you're looking at... biscuits, definitely. then we will respond to that because it's tapping into our anxieties, which are very particular to now and to western societies now, i think. does that mean you're letting the tech companies off the hook? not entirely. i mean, i do think there's a lot of things that they could be doing better, and certainly they can be quite unscrupulous in the way they do tap into those insecurities in ways that are not healthy. but i also think if we go completely over and say everything is the tech companies' fault, oh, no, i'm completely helpless, the technology made me do it, then you are actually giving up your human agency in a way which is really harmful, and we should hang on to the idea that we do actually have choices about what we do and how we use the technology. i mean, you know, ok, maybe it didn't cause a wave of liberation around the world with the arab spring, but certainly we can use it for our own posi