for 18 year olds, rishi sunak also did his first video 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. mm. ..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
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. erm, i remember in my interview i in 2016 with jack, when i askedl him what the proudest thing had been for him since founding twitter. 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 in jack 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
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 tikt
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
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