By Axel Bruns, Samantha Vilkins, Laura Vodden and Kate FitzGerald.
The 2025 Australian federal election is now less than two weeks away. As in previous elections (2022, 2019) the QUT Digital Media Research Centre team is tracking how election campaigning is unfolding across the social media landscape, with a particular focus on candidate and party activities and engagement. 
This is made considerably more difficult in this election by the substantial changes to the social media landscape itself. Twitter (now X) has declined in use following its take-over by Elon Musk and the massive influx of far-right activists and bots that have driven ordinary users away from the platform; social media data access to Facebook and Instagram is more difficult than it has been in previous elections; and data access and analysis approaches for newer platforms like TikTok, Mastodon, or Bluesky are still emerging. 
In this mid-campaign update we are focussing on trends on Facebook and Instagram, in particular – these remain key platforms in the Australian social media landscape, even though their user populations are gradually aging and younger users are more likely to be found on TikTok and other new platforms. 
For this analysis, we sought to identify the social media profiles of all candidates standing in the federal election, as well as of retiring Members and of continuing Senators who are not up for election this time; we also added the social media pages of parties and associated campaigning organisations (such as the right-wing Advance Australia or the Climate 200 organisation that supports the Teal Independents). 
Amongst this set of accounts, Clive Palmer’s new ‘Trumpet of Patriots’ party is severely underrepresented – under 20% of the 120 candidates appear to have social media profiles. (Family First Party candidates fare similarly.)  
Meanwhile, the major parties are still highly dependent on Facebook and Instagram for their campaigning: only 25 out of 207 Labor candidates and just eight out of 214 Coalition candidates are not on Facebook or Instagram. Greens candidates are somewhat less active here: we found 37 out of 188 Greens candidates are not on either platform, and more likely to only be on one or the other.  
In this update, we cover last four weeks of activity, from Monday 24 March to Sunday 20 April. This is the period just before pre-polling opened on 22 April – the first day of which smashed the previous record set in 2022. We will provide further updates as the campaign continues, and hope to be able to cover activities on other platforms as well. 
Facebook 
In terms of their overall Facebook activities, the candidates and pages associated with Labor and the Coalition are closely matched: both are closing in on 8,000 posts since 24 March. The Greens, Independents, and One Nation are considerably less active in volume, and minor parties post even less than that.  
Both are also comparable in the numbers of views that these posts have generated; those numbers may also be inflated by extensive Facebook advertising campaigns that draw additional views to posts. Together with our colleagues from the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, we are tracking those advertising campaigns through the PoliDashboard, which draws on Facebook’s disclosure of political advertising spending. 

Figure 1: Posts and engagement per party by post count on Facebook. 
The parties diverge notably in terms of reactions, comments, and shares received on Facebook: the Coalition receives considerably more reactions and shares for its content, while Labor receives more comments; this indicates greater (positive or negative) audience engagement with the substance of Labor’s posts.  
Some of the minor parties are also receiving outsized engagement in comparison with their volume of posts: One Nation and former LNP Senator Gerard Rennick’s People First Party are matching Labor in the number of shares received, for instance. This points to a very committed base of supporters, though in both cases their staunchly right-wing political stance might also have attracted followers from outside of Australia whose efforts at amplifying these posts may not have any substantial effect on the outcome of the Australian election. 
As in previous elections, we have also grouped ‘love’ and ‘care’ reactions as positive, and ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ reactions as negative, and calculated the percentage of the total reactions received (also including ‘like’, ‘haha’, and ‘wow’) that these account for in each case. Overall, positive reactions substantially outweigh negative responses, though overall engagement with Greens posts is significantly more positive than with Labor and especially with Coalition posts. This reflects on the various parties’ campaigning styles. 
Top Individual Pages 
These overall patterns hide considerable variation between the individual pages associated with each party, of course. Ranking those pages by the total number of views received, the overall Liberal Party page and the page of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese lead the pack; Gerard Rennick’s page appears in a surprising third place, ahead even of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Labor page. 
Figure 2: Engagement with pages on Facebook by number of reactions. 
The breakdown per page also reveals substantial variation in positive and negative reactions. While reactions on Peter Dutton’s page are overwhelmingly positive, the Liberal Party’s page receives more negative than positive reactions; this points to a divergent strategy that presents the Opposition Leader personally in a positive light while posting more negative campaigning on the party page – and such negative campaigning then produces more negative reactions (which may either be ‘angry’ with a negative post itself, or about the issues raised in the post). 
Negative campaigning also appears to be especially prominent on other election-related pages that are not explicitly aligned with the parties and candidates. Right-wing campaign organisation Advance Australia is behind the pages ‘Election News’, ‘Advance Australia’, and ‘Albanese is Weak, Woke, and Sending Us Broke’, which appear as the top three of these pages by their total count of views. This is almost certainly driven by their high levels of advertising on Facebook; in total, according to PoliDashboard, Advance Australia spent between $461,000 to $781,000 in Facebook advertising during the four weeks we cover here, mostly targeting young men (Facebook reveals only broad spending ranges, not exact amounts). Those views result in further engagement only for the main ‘Advance Australia’ page, however; the other pages have very few followers, and receive few reactions, comments, or shares for their content. 
Figure 3: Engagement with other key pages, outside of the party and politician pages.   
Common to most of these unaffiliated campaigning pages is that they produce largely negative reactions. This is clearly related to their content styles: their messaging is negative, attacking the other side of politics, and thereby also produces negative reactions from both supporters (who react this way to agree with the sentiment of posts) and opponents (who are angry with the post content itself). The notable exceptions here are the Climate Council and the Christian Lobby, both of whom are more likely to post messages directed at their own supporters than criticising their opponents. 
Key Themes 
While a more in-depth analysis of campaign messaging will have to wait until after the election, we have selected several key themes which we expected to see discussed during the election. Using simple keywords to identify these, we have explored the extent to which these have appeared in the campaign posts we have captured to date. 
Figure 4: A timeseries of the occurrence of keywords on Facebook related to selected themes that occur throughout the campaign.  
Notably, housing and Medicare are both ranked highly here, and on any given day account for around a third of all posts matching any of the thematic keywords we have used here; additionally, and in spite of media claims that climate change-related themes are absent from the overall campaign, a number of keywords relating to climate and energy policy (climate, solar, gas, nuclear, and battery) also occur fairly frequently. 
These themes also reveal a strong domestic focus, notwithstanding the global polycrisis with wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the turmoil surrounding the Trump administration that is currently unfolding. Keywords related to any of these issues fail to appear in a substantial number of posts to date, and another imported culture war topic, discussion about ‘wokeness’, is similarly largely absent – despite the Advance Australia campaign page painting the Prime Minister as ‘woke’. 
Unsurprisingly, these themes are unevenly distributed across the parties. While all parties discuss housing policy, Labor campaigns on Medicare, and the Greens are most active in addressing climate change. Keywords like ‘nuclear’ and ‘solar’ are especially strongly associated with Labor, who use them to criticise the prospective cost of the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy. The Coalition itself has gone surprisingly quiet on that policy initiative in their posting activity, by contrast; 56 Coalition posts contain this keyword, compared to 193 Labor posts. 
Instagram 
On Instagram, the posting and engagement patterns are somewhat different: here, the Greens are considerably stronger. Their party and candidate profiles generate roughly the same amount of likes as the Labor Party’s, even though they made considerably fewer posts. Conversely, Coalition profiles posted slightly more than Labor but received far fewer likes than even the Greens. 
Figure 5: Posts and engagement of a selection of parties on Instagram.  
This trend becomes clearer when we examine activity by and around the individual profiles: of the twenty profiles with the greatest amounts of likes received since 24 March, only the official Liberal Party and Peter Dutton profiles belong to the Coalition. Eight of the twenty profiles with the most likes are Greens accounts, and another four belong to the Labor Party and its key representatives. At the same time, the two Coalition profiles receive substantial volumes of comments even in spite of their comparatively low follower numbers; while not all of these comments will be negative, this nonetheless indicates substantial debate around those accounts. This may indicate that overall, Instagram as a platform has a greater affinity for Greens voters. 
Figure 6: Posts and engagement with the top 20 pages on Instagram, sorted by like count. 
Engagement around other campaign profiles on Instagram is also more evenly distributed than it is on Facebook: in addition to several Advance Australia-related profiles, the Australian Unions profile and Climate 200 are also prominent here. These profiles are all overshadowed by the ‘Nuclear for Australia’ campaign, however, which is not especially active but has attracted an outsized volume of likes. Another prominent profile, The Noticer, was identified recently by ABC News Verify as promoting white supremacist ideology, with some of its content shared by federal election candidates. 
 Figure 7: Engagement with other key pages on Instagram, outside of the party and politician pages. 
On Instagram, too, themes like Medicare, housing, and the climate are especially prominent, while international topics and ‘wokeness’ are hardly present. Greens profiles are comparatively more active in thematizing the Trump administration and the war in Gaza – though not the war in Ukraine – but for them, too, other topics are considerably more prominent. 
 Figure 8: A timeseries of the occurrence of keywords on Instagram related to themes that occur throughout the campaign. 
Looking Ahead
This initial overview covers only the broad patterns of posting and engagement as well as general topics in the campaign to date, with a focus on Facebook and Instagram. In future posts during and after the campaign, we also hope to cover developments on other platforms like TikTok – and here our QUT DMRC colleagues are currently asking for data donations from TikTok users to better understand the experience of real users as they engage with the platform on political and other topics. Please join the project and donate your data – you’ll also find out more about your own TikTok experience as you do so! 
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