Labor and the Liberals are waging an election meme war – but what is the point?

You wouldn't normally expect political parties to prioritise messages about The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants and Judge Judy in the midst of an election campaign. But as Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese duke it out on debate stages with their competing visions for Australia, there's a battle of a different kind happening online; a battle for attention, eyeballs and shares.

A fascinating meme war is being waged, and it might be more important than you think.

"The parties hope they're funny, but if not they hope they're 'cringe' or infuriating - in hopes of making people feel something," said Jordan McSwiney, a postdoctoral political researcher at the University of Canberra.

Across Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, the Liberal and Labor parties are carpet-bombing social media feeds with dozens of posts a day. There's the standard policy announcements, videos of press conferences and happy snaps from fluffy photo ops. But for every graph on wage growth, there's a Star Wars meme with a cutout of Anthony Albanese's face slapped on it; for every soft-focus video of a politician with their family, there's a Labor gag about Scott Morrison not taking responsibility.

Unsurprisingly, humour rates better than dry policy announcements. On Labor's Instagram page, Simpsons references and callbacks to popular meme formats regularly score three to five times the number of likes than press conference clips or political attacks. But in a political campaign, where most decisions are taken back to the essential question of "will this give us a better chance of winning?", it's fair to wonder why highly paid party operatives have factored cartoon memes into their intricate communications strategies.

"None of these things individually will change minds, but if you have a steady trickle of content coming through with a message, gradually that might adjust your perception," said Prof Axel Bruns, a social media and communications researcher at the Queensland University of Technology.

"The message might be 'Albanese's not up to the job'. If I see it repeated and repeated in different versions, with different arguments, maybe gradually I'll start to believe it or have doubts about him."