Labour ran more Facebook adverts last week than during the entirety of last year’s election campaign, it has emerged, as part of attempts to overhaul its online and digital operations. Party insiders said that it had about 2,700 Facebook adverts running over the past week as it tried to exploit the exams fiasco that engulfed the government. They said that only about 2,400 such adverts were run by the central party during last year’s election. Labour has been using the exams issue as a dry run in its attempt to overhaul its digital operation, with particular focus on targeted Facebook ads in marginal, Tory-held seats. An internal review of its digital operations is already taking place. It comes after a party post-mortem of the 2019 election concluded that a complete digital overhaul was required. “If we are going to get back into power we need to win the ground war and the online war,” said a party source. “We need to be smart, innovative and effective. It will take time, but this week was about demonstrating what we are capable of.”
Adverts have been sent to Facebook users in target seats, stating that the exams fiasco is “robbing young people of their future” and calling on constituents to contact their local Tory MP, who is named and pictured. The party is also switching to greater “social listening”, deploying MPs and regional offices to monitor social media to see how political issues are playing out in practice in Facebook groups. “There was clearly a groundswell of anger among parents, teachers and young people – and they were all sharing their stories,” said the source. Labour’s attack videos have focused on using ministers’ own speeches against them and third-party voices, such as pupils who had had their grades downgraded, rather than predominantly featuring Labour frontbenchers. There are also plans to deploy more online petitions. However, there have been complaints from the party’s left over the quality of Labour’s social media campaigning, which was used so effectively by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters to help him win the party leadership in 2015. Some have complained that the new adverts are outdated and too reserved. Under Corbyn, a lot of the most popular Facebook and Twitter content backing the party came not from the party but Momentum, the grassroots group that developed from Corbyn’s leadership campaign. The new drive comes after a review of the 2019 campaign by the Labour Together group called for a “wholesale transformation of our digital and online campaigning”. Labour Together’s former director, Morgan McSweeney, is now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. The review concluded that the party’s social media channels “became simply an additional broadcast platform rather than a dynamic and responsive tool for targeting, engaging and persuading groups of voters”. It added: “Labour’s supporters online spent too much of the campaign talking to themselves rather than reaching out to convince swing voters to support Labour. In contrast, the Tory online presence was vastly improved from 2017, at national and local level, using proxies to attack Labour and build support for the Conservative campaign in key seats. The Conservatives’ central message of ‘Get Brexit done’ lent itself to their very effective approach to organic shares and ‘distributed spin’ online.”