Content creator Sophia Smith Galer says politicians are too late to the TikTok party this election

• Journalist and content creator Sophia Smith Galer reflects on how the TikTok will affect the General Election.

The race to Number 10 has offered a different type of campaigning than we have ever seen before with a focus on canvassing in cyberspace.

Dubbed in the media as the "TikTok election", is the type of content parties are uploading to the video app actually going to sway the younger sector of the electorate?

First time voters we spoke to, said no. But what do the experts think?

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist, and one of the first national broadcasters in the UK who successfully made a name for herself back when the TikTok app was in its infancy.

Anyone familiar with the app will recognise Sophia. Often thought of to be the 'face of news' on TikTok, she has amassed 160 million views on her profiles, including Instagram, by sharing updates and explainers online in a format that is accessible to all - and she’s seen first-hand how the app has evolved over time.

"Back in 2019, TikTok was brand new very few people were on it. It was very much a platform associated with lip-syncing and dancing. That's what people always used to say about it.

"I was at the BBC at the time, as a journalist there, and I was the first journalist to get onto the platform and experiment with content that was not singing and dancing, but was very much journalism, news gathering and publishing."As Sophia boasts a portfolio of content on platform accountability and technology reporting, ITV News asked for her spin on how the media has dubbed 4 July as the "TikTok election" - and whether social media will play a part in swaying voters.

Why are politicians on TikTok?

The 30-year-old, who has over 800,000 followers, said: "I wasn't remotely surprised by political parties joining TikTok. I think that if anything, they've been quite late, late to the game.

"There are plenty of political parties around the world and indeed individual politicians, political candidates who have been on the app for a really long time. I was reporting on a TikTok election back in 2020 when that was how we were describing what was happening in the US to put this all into perspective.

"What is interesting is that the parties are not necessarily identical in [their] approaches and certainly not identical in the success that they are or are not having on the platform."

• Did you know...

ITV News is the only major broadcaster to have a dedicated politics channel on TikTok. The itvpolitics account was launched at the start of the year and has already had 3.5 million likes and reached 745 million people

What type of content are they uploading?

"TikTok is a very effective platform for reaching out to audiences - and it is a very effective platform for the two audiences that have come to mind. Now, I'm thinking of political parties getting on there. Why have they chosen to get on there? In what way?

"If we take the Labour Party, for example, we know that the young vote is very influential for them and it makes sense to approach and use and even monopolise a platform like TikTok if they can, because that is why so many young Brits are getting their news and information and their entertainment.

"So it is a real mix of content that they get on there. I feel like Labor has chosen entertainment over news and information or, you know, they've tried, they've tried to sort of channel information in and 'meme culture' way."

"The other thing that TikTok is very good for is reaching fringe audiences, reaching smaller communities, using the hyper-powerful recommendation algorithm to reach people I think this is part of the early success that Reform UK had as a party on the platform.

"You know, very populist ideas, really quite far right for a lot of people. Those kind of communities tend to flourish on TikTok, these smaller fringe quite polarizing communities. So TikTok can be useful for many different reasons and for different political parties as well".

"The parties that were on TikTok before the general election was announced were Reform UK they were the Greens. There was also the Women's Equality Party that actually had far more followers, I believe, than Reform UK -certainly before the election was announced. Then was a sudden flood all in the same week.

But success comes at a cost"If we take the Conservatives and Labour, for example, you will see that the sheer number of TikToks that have been uploaded per day has been a lot higher than the Conservatives - and that has come with a higher follower count and higher engagement.

"So the Conservative TikTok strategy does not seem to be as intense there, frankly, do not seem to be as many resources devoted to it. And that suggests that perhaps the voters that they would like to reach are not in their demographic."

In the fortnight following Rishi Sunak calling the general election, major parties spent more than £2.2 million kickstarting their online campaigns.

Data from WhoTargetsMe? showed that Labour spent almost double the Conservatives.

Not your typical party political broadcast

"One of the most fascinating things that is still mystifying anyone analyzing social media and politics is that you cannot pay for political advertising on TikTok. This was a unique decision that the platform took years ago ahead of the US Presidential election.

"I say this is unique. Instagram allow it. YouTube allow it. Facebook and Meta will allow it. So for TikTok not to allow it, and instead they're demanding politicians make very good organic content, which just does not come easily to everyone expecting them to do that. And you've got to ask yourself, well, why don't they want political advertising on the platform? Surely they would make loads of money?"

"It's possibly the scrutiny that platforms get as a result because they have to make sure not only that these ads are fair, that no one is abusing them, but also that there's no one trying to use them to malevolently influence an election, which is what platforms almost always get accused of doing.

"But the thing is, time and time again, it's often the people who are lying to us and spreading falsehoods actually tend to be politicians themselves. It's quite convenient and easy to blame platforms for it. And of course, they shouldn't be allowing the spread of of bad content."

• Why does TikTok ban political advertisements?

The new way to get news

Sophia is also a published author, and in 2022, she was named as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for Marketing and Media in Europe. Plus, making the short-list on British Vogue's list of Top 25 Most Influential Women in the UK.

She said it does not surprise her that a recent Ofcom report found that 1 in 10 UK adults now use TikTok as a news source: "We've known for a really long time that audiences are increasingly moving towards YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for their news and information content.

"I share my news and my journalism on there, and I also do a bit of 'infotainment', which is what you try and blend information when appropriate with these these sort of high octane, energized, engaging video formats. And lots of us have had success with that. It is obvious and predictable that politicians are going to try and take advantage of that as well.

"We've seen so many news publishers join in and where the news where the newsmakers go, the politicians always follow because they want they want their power to be seen and heard by the general public."

But what about the "TikTok ban"?

Given that all major parties now have a presence on TikTok, it is surprising that only a matter of months since the House of Commons banned the use of the Chinese-owned TikTok from its Parliamentary network over security concerns.

Yet party leaders appear eager to raise their profile on it, even after the app was also blocked from devices issued to MPs who were previously engaging online.

"It has happened in other countries where they cannot access TikTok, India being an example of that. You may have also heard of the United States trying to ban the app or at least trying to host a US-only version of the app in order to protect it from the Chinese government.

"So in order to protect US data from the Chinese government, when we have had calls for increased security concerns over TikTok, it's never come with a solid body of evidence telling us to be worried. Even in parliament, I remember in the House of Commons when they said that they were going to stop civil servants from having the app on their government devices. They called it precautionary. They had to call it precautionary because they didn't actually have any evidence saying "Oh, look, the Chinese government have done this".

Asked what the impact would be if the UK followed suit in banning the app, she said: "It would be immensely damaging to freedom of expression. And for creators, it would be immensely damaging to business and all of the businesses that are making a lot of money in Britain, in the UK from all of this.

"It would be it really would be awful and a really bad decision. I don't see it happening in the UK, to be honest. It's happening in the US because they do not like that. An app not built outside of Silicon Valley is taking over the world.

Are the UK parties too late to the party?

Sophia said British politicians missed the chance to have had greater success on the app: "The political parties have joined TikTok so late into the day that any branding of this or any description of this general election as "A TikTok election" isn't quite as accurate as it could have been a few years ago.

"We are in a social media ecosystem in which most of us are consuming lots of different kinds of content from different kinds of social media platforms.

"It's far more an algorithmic election, I would say."

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