Hook, line and bile
Air fryers, ULEZ and some unlikely paths to hate speech and conspiracy theories.
One of the many things I enjoyed about my jury service was the window it offered into real people's opinions (real, as in, they don't work in PR or advertising). In a room where we spent nearly two days debating our verdict, two topics brought near unanimous agreement - air fryers (good) and ULEZ (bad).
(Not my opinions on either topic, to be clear).
ULEZ, in particular, hit a nerve with my fellow jurors - especially if friends or family members had to pay to drive their work vehicle into one of the regulated zones. The focus was squarely on the here and now - the cost to the individual rather than the cost to the planet and future generations of doing nothing about emissions.
Even though we don't have as much of a car-worshipping culture as they do in the US - I love Neil Young and Stephen King, but I could take or leave both of their obsessions with big, old cars - anything that messes with people's ability to drive does strike a nerve in the UK. If anyone mentions traffic, roadworks, cycle lanes or pedestrianisation in my local Facebook Group, the comments immediately light up.
It could be because, outside of London, public transport is so terrible and so expensive in this country. Or because cars = freedom. Either way, cars get people going about politics - whether it's ULEZ, petrol prices or the myth of "15-minute cities".
ULEZ, in particular, adds a sense of novelty to the long-term trend of "don't mess with our roads." And in the comms world, we love novelty. That's why the Tories have picked out ULEZ as a key political battleground - mainly in the fight against Sadiq Khan in London, but also because of what ULEZ represents to the broader UK population.
It's the latest hot-button entry point into the ongoing "us vs them" conversation - shifting the debate from the rational argument for emissions regulation into something more emotionally charged. "The liberal elite, with their hybrids and their electric cars, taxing honest working people just trying to make a living."
In comms, we often talk about provoking an emotional reaction - and that's why shifting the debate from the specifics of emissions regulation into what ULEZ represents is another intelligent piece of campaigning from the Tories. It simplifies politics, identifying the point where polarised debate meets the "me agenda" and the cost of living crisis.
It is undoubtedly smart communications - but as companies and CEOs who have spoken out on other polarising debates know, tapping into emotions has repercussions. ULEZ represents not just a gateway into politics but also a gateway into much darker, much more hate-filled conversations.
A recent Observer investigation into some Tory-run, anti-ULEZ Facebook groups uncovered a range of hate speech and racist comments among the anti-ULEZ rhetoric. When questioned by investigating reporters, the Conservatives denied this was a coordinated effort from CCHQ. But even if the Conservatives set up the groups in good faith, with zero moderation from the Tory mods, there's a tacit admission that the party endorses such racist rhetoric.
This tacit endorsement of racism is, of course, nothing new - the post-Brexit, the post-Trump world showed us that, in the words of Kanye West, "racism's still alive; they just be concealing it". Except it's no longer concealed - it's out in the open, with the words of our politicians providing all the legitimacy a racist needs.
The existence and weaponisation of these groups also made me recall a Twitter thread from my former colleague Chris Applegate, which has lived rent-free in my mind for a good few years.
The idea of radicalisation online is another post-Brexit, post-Trump media trope. The majority of studies I've read have debunked the idea. It's improbable that your average Facebook or YouTube user sees some far-right propaganda and disappears down a radicalisation wormhole.
What tends to happen is that people with a tendency to watch videos with extreme views tend to watch more of those videos, with the views getting more extreme. As anyone with any experience of YouTube's algorithms knows, the recommendations are indeed this basic. If you like this, have some more of this.
But what Chris talked about, and what the Tory-run anti-ULEZ Facebook Groups also indicate, is that entry points into more extreme views and the darker side of the internet are often less noticeable.
Chris's example is the kind of post you've probably seen an aunt or family friend share on Facebook dozens of times. Engagement-bait rubbish that gets people who still use Facebook into a froth in the comments. It's also not dissimilar to the anti-ULEZ sentiment the Conservatives stir up in their Facebook Groups - hot-button points of entry designed to stir up heated debate.
But it also has an almost invisible darker side - that everything wrong with society comes from an unspecified "them", with the reader tacitly encouraged to make up their version of who "they" might be. And as Chris points out, the subtle starting points of both these posts and the anti-ULEZ groups mean they're almost impossible to track.
Any research methodology or hate speech-spotting algorithm will struggle to spot the implicit arguments of this kind of post. It's not an obvious path from disapproving of ULEZ to racist hate speech, or from "red ants in a jar" to "Bill Gates and his mates run the world". But these pathways do exist, and if political parties believe they can create such pathways to win elections and step blamelessly away from the consequences, it will leave us in an even more troubling place than we were at the end of 2016.
The challenge with this type of campaigning is that it is often only viewable in the rearview mirror. Thanks to Meta, LinkedIn and YouTube's ad transparency tools, we can see quite a lot of political advertising happening on social. The Advertising Association is running a new campaign to "help the public better understand political ads".
However, this kind of targeted organic campaigning is only possible to spot if someone shines a spotlight on it. Successful political campaigning is most often celebrated in hindsight, the winner's story inevitably being a success story - even if, in reality, it was close to failure.
For brands and businesses, there's a lesson to be learned in picking the topics it's safe to campaign on. Clearly it’s important to be topical and relevant in our campaigns - we need to tap into what our target audiences care about, not what we think they care about.
So first and foremost we need to know what they care about - by getting out into the world and speaking to them, whether that’s consumer or corporate audiences. But when we’re thinking about how we can tap into what people care about, we need to be aware that engaging on hot button, divisive topics can quickly spiral into other realms.
That doesn’t necessarily mean shying away from those areas if that’s the right place to campaign. It does mean being prepared for this backlash, adopting a spirit of fearlessness - that this is the position, and we’re sticking to it. “Brand [x] backs down on topic [y] after online backlash” is the worst possible outcome, generating way more conversation than any initial backlash (often one or two tweets).
Moving beyond the rational arguments into more emotional, subjective territory can be risky - but plenty of psychological studies show that these kinds of stories are the most effective way of winning hearts and minds. The Conservatives know it and are unabashedly unafraid to weaponise it to win. It’s been effective for them, and may well prove to be so again this year.
In comms, we can’t always be that brash - but maybe, as more and more ideas are computer-generated, brashness, directness and brutal simplicity (it’s all about air fryers and ULEZ) will be the human way of standing out from the crowd.