2025 Australian Federal Election Party Communication on TikTok

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TikTok’s rise in popularity, especially among younger and first-time voters, has drawn Australian politicians into online battlegrounds in pursuit of new voter bases. Political actors, however, are grappling with this unfamiliar shift towards informal and often unprofessional political communication. This begs the question, how do Australian political parties adjust political messages to fit the TikTok medium, and how do they perform relative to each other? During the 2025 federal election campaign period (28 March to 2 May 2025), we examined 517 TikTok posts by four political parties – Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Greens, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Using a qualitative thematic multimodal analysis, supplemented with descriptive statistical tools, we manually analysed the content and performative elements of each post to determine how parties used TikTok in their campaigns. Our findings suggest that parties are using TikTok to engage in a performative contest over who can most effectively appeal to young audiences, without necessarily engaging in substantive political discourse. We position the heightened use of TikTok within the broader political debate surrounding social media regulation and youth political disillusionment, calling for the implementation of standards that constrain and monitor social media campaigning, particularly when targeted towards young voters.