The No campaign against the Voice to Parliament is now outspending and outperforming the Yes sides on social media in a shocking turnaround from earlier this year, as both sides drastically increase their efforts to reach voters.
While both sides have been campaigning for months now, the federal Parliament’s passing of the Voice to Parliament legislation today is a milestone that marks a new phase of the campaign.
Crikey analysis shows the official No campaign run by Advance (formerly known as Advance Australia) is now outmuscling its opponent Yes23 on Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram in both organic and paid posts, in a reversal of what was happening in the period prior.
While the performance of organic posts (normal, unpaid Facebook posts, that is) is a rough indication of how messages are broadly resonating with supporters, paid advertising is used by political campaigns to send targeted messages to specific voters like undecided voters.
Between April 18 and June 18, Advance spent up to $147,750 on Facebook and Instagram advertisements that were shown more than 14.7 million times, according to Meta’s advertising library. More than 8.4 million views were from the No campaign’s main page Fair Australia. The remaining views were on the Facebook pages of the progressive-framed campaign Not Enough (3.9 million) and the anti-Voice “news” Referendum News, two campaigns that Crikey first reported were being run by Advance. It’s a dramatic increase from the $18,000 that Advance spent in the three months prior.
Yes23 has spent up to $136,000 to show its advertisements more than 17.4 million times during that same period. This is up from the $26,000 spent to show its posts 2.8 million times in the three months prior.
On Facebook, Advance’s Fair Australia page is outgunning Yes23’s account. Over the two-month period, the No campaign’s main social media presence received twice as many likes, comments and shares (103,900 versus 50,000) and more than three times the amount of shares alone (18,700 compared with 6400).
Advance’s two other pages received a negligible amount of organic engagement. Even when including Yes23’s superior Instagram presence, which has accrued 37,600 interactions over the two-month period, with Fair Australia’s negligible presence, the No campaign still has the upper hand.
Meanwhile, Advance has spent $19,400 on YouTube, Google Search and display advertisements over the past two months, according to Google’s political ad transparency centre. The Yes campaign’s side has also been running ads but Google has not marked them as political (despite changing its own rules to explicitly ensure they were included), meaning Crikey is unable to get further information on the advertisements.
Google has been contacted about the Yes campaign’s ad categorisation.
