Influenced: How social media affected the election outcome
After Labor’s landslide victory, we take stock of influencer reactions to the result and how the leader’s online presence put them in front of the biggest voting block.
Content creators dubbed “new media” reached mass audiences online in the Gen Z and Millennial voting cohort, which outnumbered Baby Boomers at a federal election for the first time.
They kicked off the election campaign cycle by being invited to budget lockup, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese guested on many of their podcasts and overall, there was a sentiment to teach young voters about the preferential system.
While the Labor party revels in a historic win, influencers want you to know that it was only pulled off because of such large swings away from the Coalition, including to Greens and Independent candidates, which a lot of influencers backed.
We revisited the pages of the creators we said were ones to watch for their election reaction.
Cheek Media’s Hannah Ferguson and media personality Abbie Chatfield were unsurprisingly the most vocal, posting about the ways the result did and didn’t go the way they expected.
“There’s probably only one hill I’ll die on, and it’s that this election was defined by conversations led by young people who are more politically engaged than any generation that has come before,” Ferguson wrote on Cheek Media.
“I have extensive criticisms of the two-party system and how Labor has failed to answer the progressive call for action. But my hope is that this outcome communicates to the Albanese Government that their success on Saturday night is because they ran a campaign that went beyond ‘we are not him’,” she wrote.
“I was seeking a minority government on the weekend that drove Labor left, but in the absence of that: I want Anthony Albanese to be confident enough to return to the values of his earlier political life.”
FriendlyJordies weighed in, in a video filmed in an RSL laundry after one of his live shows, to say about Dutton’s Liberal party that, “I wanted him to lose, I didn’t want him to lose that bad”.
Punters Politics used the win to point out both major parties’ role in cosying up to the fossil fuel industry.
Liberal member and influencer Freya Leach hasn’t made an original post to her Instagram account since May 3, when she posted a video of herself applauding Liberal voters from the polling booth.
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So, looking back, here’s how social media played a role in the 2025 federal election.
Ditched by Dickson
Peter Dutton lost his marginal seat of Dickson, north-west of Brisbane, pleasing Ferguson and Chatfield.
About two weeks before the election, we wondered, since Ferguson nor Chatfield lives in the seat of Dickson and their votes won’t specifically be able to dethrone the Opposition Leader, if the discourse would reach those that could?
It seems, yes.
Ferguson’s slogan t-shirts that read “Good morning to everyone except Peter Dutton” were pictured at polling booths, and Chatfield’s 25-minute podcast episode that included a shout out to a TikTok account named “Get the Dick out of Dickson” had an impact.
“Australians elected a Labor majority government based on the last three months, not the last three years,” Ferguson wrote on Cheek Media.
In the last three months, Labor ran a campaign with policy and personality, while, Ferguson said, Liberal had neither.
Albanese and Greens leader Adam Bandt consistently fronted up to influencers in podcast appearances and their parties made videos targeted at the youth vote.
While the Liberal party jumped on online trends, like making brain-rot videos, Dutton didn’t engage with influencers like Ferguson or Chatfield, or even bipartisan accounts like The Daily Aus.
The Daily Aus tried to secure a youth-publication-led leaders debate, which Albanese said he was up for, but the Liberal party declined.
The now-former Opposition Leader declined interview requests with The Daily Aus, which the account didn’t hesitate to point out after the election result, posting that 100 per cent of party leaders who have refused to engage with them have gone on to lose the election.
Dutton’s two appearances on Mark Bouris’ podcast Straight Talk and January interview with Sam Fricker’s Diving Deep showed that the party knew podcasting was part of the strategy, but lacked an understanding of the relevancy and reach these shows would have.
It’s not easy being Green
The Greens secured their highest ever vote, seeing swings of almost 10 per cent in target seats across the country.
However, the party lost two of its three Queensland lower house seats, which Stephen Bates and housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather won for the party in 2022.
The collapse of the Greens’ appointments has been put down to the sharp turn away from the Liberal party, with preference flows to Labor and disenfranchised Liberal voters more likely to switch to Labor than go Green.
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Chatfield, who campaigned for the Greens and made a number of videos with Bandt, posted a video to explain vote counts in response to troll comments about the Greens losses, which she says is misinformed.
Votes are still being counted to determine if Bandt will hold onto his seat of Melbourne, which he’s had for 15 years.
Socialists ping forward in Senate count
In the Senate, the Greens maintained their balance of power, securing 11 seats nationally, which SA senator Sarah Hanson-Young said showed a “rejection of nasty, Trumpian style politics”.
In SA, Hanson-Young comfortably reclaimed her seat and said the party saw a swing of three per cent towards the SA Greens.
Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb’s 91,000 Instagram followers weren’t enough to carry him into the senate but the minor party did see a record swing.
Van den Lamb, known on Instagram as Purple Pingers, said it was “a much better result than expected”.
“Last election we ran in 11 lower house seats. This year we ran in 4 and tripled our upper house vote, while also recording massive swings to @vic_socialists in the seats we ran,” he posted to Instagram.
“Little social media things” work
South Australia is on track to see its sixth senate spot go to 21-year-old Charlotte Walker – best known to us as the Young Labor president who made Minecraft videos to campaign.
We reported that Labor Senator Karen Grogan explained the fine line she and her colleagues were treading with social media, and perhaps came off a bit patronising to the young creators in the room.
“Charlotte has had me on a couple of her little social media things and the general view is ‘get her off!’,” Grogan said at a Federal Election Forum in the final week of the campaign.
“I’m fine with that. But it’s how we’re going to engage, it’s a two-way street. We’re going to have a crack at engaging with people where they are and how people get their information is changing all the time.”
It sure is, and when Walker joins the senate off the back of this election result, she’ll be walking into a landscape that should be wiser to the impact of social media.
Post of the week
Unlike the other influencers who mobilised their large follower counts to learn about preferential voting and consider candidates outside the major parties, we can’t say for sure that an international endorsement actually meant much, but it certainly got us talking and emphasised the use of AI in political advertising.
So, after last week’s viral and unlikely endorsement from the Tiger King, we had to check back in with Joe Exotic. Of course, he was pleased with the election result and again asked the newly re-elected PM to put in a call to Trump for him.
