“A lot of people” on TikTok have been asking Aunty Munya Andrews how she will vote on the Indigenous voice to parliament.
Introduced to the app by her 16-year-old daughter, Aunty Munya has been answering questions on culture and allyship in short TikTok videos over the past year, some with more than 100,000 views.
She wants to “increase people’s comfort to have the hard yarns”, like talking about the voice referendum.
“I could hardly believe it when views were reaching tens of thousands and the comments and questions started pouring in,” says Aunty Munya, a Bardi elder from the Kimberley region.
Twitter and Facebook get the lion’s share of attention, as platforms where political debate as well as political conspiracy theories commonly spread. But TikTok may be where the battle over the voice is most fierce.
More than 8.5 million Australians are active on TikTok, the company says. The platform is now the “default information landscape for a lot of young people”, according to Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University.
Young people aged 18 to 34 are still more likely than any other age group to vote yes. Yet the official TikTok account from the no campaign Fair Australia is far outstripping its opponents in terms of followers and content views.
Data collected by Guardian Australia shows Fair Australia’s content has almost 21m plays overall compared with about 1m plays on the two official pro-voice accounts, Yes23 and Uluru Statement.
The Fair Australia TikTok account has more than 47,200 followers, compared with Yes23’s 3,993 and Uluru Statement’s 4,497.
The official no campaign account dominates several of the most commonly used voice to parliament hashtags. For the most widely used hashtag, #voicetoparliament, seven of the top 10 videos by total plays were from Fair Australia.
Even on the yes-aligned hashtag #yes23, nine of the top 10 are from Fair Australia, with the first video from the Yes23 account coming in at nineteenth (see the notes below on how these stats were collected).
Fair Australia has been embracing meme formats and slickly edited video set to trending audio on the app. One of its videos, a clip of the former Liberal MP Browyn Bishop, has been played at least 1.9m times.
The Yes23 account, on the other hand, has been more likely to post interviews with supporters, with a median of 3,604 plays per video.
While there are plenty of TikTok influencers who also support a no vote, for those leaning yes it has fallen to individual creators to step into the information gap. Prof Braden Hill, a Nyungar man and researcher at Edith Cowan University, started making TikTok videos to answer questions on the voice from family and non-Indigenous friends.
“My content is trying to kind of speak back,” he says. “I realised there was an appetite … to cut through some confusion and focus on the idea that’s been proposed.”
Changing the conversation
We still don’t know a lot about how TikTok is impacting the political conversation, but the platform does have technical features that can “push the extremes quickly”, Leaver says.
What makes TikTok distinct is that many users never leave the platform’s “For You” page, which serves up content algorithmically based on factors such as location and how users engage with the content. This is unlike platforms such as Instagram, where the accounts a user follows have a strong influence on what they see in their feed.
TikTok is largely a black box when it comes to understanding who is seeing what.
Hill believes “the more outlandish” the content, “the more likely you are to see it”.
“It just takes off like wildfire, and it’s overwhelming to try to counter,” he says.
Despite TikTok cracking down on voice misinformation, Guardian Australia found numerous examples of content that made explicitly false claims. There are videos that wrongly claim the voice is a “Trojan horse” to reduce freedom of movement, for example, or that a successful voice referendum will lead to the UN taking over Australian land. TikTok removed the videos after they were identified by Guardian Australia.
“Our focus during the referendum is to keep our community of more than 8.5 million Australian users safe and protect the integrity of the process, and our platform, while maintaining a neutral position,” Ella Woods-Joyce, TikTok’s director of public policy for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.
“We do not allow hate speech or harmful misinformation about civic and electoral processes, regardless of intent.”
There are also unofficial anonymous accounts that appear to be set up exclusively to share content against the voice. One account, called Vote NO Campaign, has almost 18,000 followers and links to a site selling anti-voice T-shirts.
It often reposts content from Fair Australia as well as other videos, including one that shows the communist hammer and sickle and suggests a yes vote will “cancel Australian traditions” and “divide our nation forever”. The account holder did not respond to a request for comment.
Jamal Daoud, a former candidate for the United Australia party, is behind the TikTok account Multicultural voices: No Voice. He says he started on TikTok because it’s the best way to reach “ordinary Australians” who are not politically motivated.
“Usually on Facebook hundreds of people will be watching the videos,” he says. “On TikTok, [it’s] sometimes thousands or ten thousands of people.”
The Multicultural voices: No Voice account also reshares content from Fair Australia and other accounts with which Daoud says there is a “common understanding”. Asked about content he has made that questions how people identify as Indigenous, among other topics, he said they are open for any debate.
“We are here to expose the fact that among the Indigenous people there are people who [are] against the voice. The people who are against the voice will support what I’m saying,” he says.
At the other end of the battleground there is content from people like Aunty Munya, who is co-director of Indigenous cultural awareness organisation Evolve Communities with Carla Rogers. “My message to young Australians is to take their place in history, do their research and vote with their conscience,” she says.
A ‘double-edged sword’ for Indigenous creators
Daoud says he has faced very little abuse on TikTok but claims he has had some content censored by the platfrom. In Australia TikTok is working with news organisation Australian Associated Press as part of its referendum factchecking program.
Hill’s experience on the app, as an Indigenous man creating pro-voice content, has been very different. He thinks misinformation in the wider debate is “freeing people up to say things that are really quite racist, that they wouldn’t have otherwise said”.
The response to his first TikTok video – outlining the historical rationale for the voice proposal – was overwhelmingly positive. But as the referendum date nears he is seeing racist terms “we thought would be long gone”. “It’s exhausting, because it feels like an absolute inundation,” he says.
Aunty Munya’s comment section sees the same. Her business partner Rogers fields the posts. “It can be really hard screening out the comments where people are sharing their legitimate views, both for and against, which we encourage, and those that are just trolling,” Rogers says.
In the battle over the voice on TikTok, the app does provide a way for people to connect. “There are plenty of non-Indigenous folk who are now being able to see into and be part of the lives of Indigenous folk in ways they hadn’t been before,” Hill says. But he says there is a downside: “It is a real double-edged sword.”
The algorithm may amplify certain narratives, but in the end, Leaver says, hateful rhetoric is not reserved for TikTok. “It is a culture problem in which TikTok is but one large forum,” he said.
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Notes
Video statistics for each TikTok account (fairaustralia, yes23au, ulurustatement) were collated using this TikTok python library, which scrapes video statistics, including plays, comments, shares and other information.
Statistics for each hashtag were gathered using the same approach and based on the top 200 videos returned. The feed for hashtags on the TikTok app appears to be algorithmically sorted per user, however the feed for hashtags on the TikTok website appears to be consistent regardless of the user. The video statistics used are based on the website hashtag feed.
The number of plays for each video is rounded to two significant figures when the total plays are above 1m.
