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Welcome to another round of

0:29

boardroom or Miroboard. Today we

0:31

talk retrospectives with agile coach

0:33

Maria. Let's go. First question.

0:35

You've spent two hours in a

0:37

team retro, but the only input

0:39

you've heard is Dave's. Boardroom or

0:42

Miroboard? Boardroom. In Miro, Dave can't hog

0:44

the space because everyone can add thoughts anonymously,

0:46

online at the same time. Correct.

0:49

Next. You need

0:51

the team to act on feedback fast. So

0:53

you turn all those retro notes into Jira

0:55

tasks instantly. Miro all the

0:57

way. And I can assign those tasks to

0:59

teammates. You're nailing this.

1:02

Now you see hundreds of sticky notes

1:04

from the retro. A real mess. But

1:06

you organize them into five themes in

1:09

just seconds. Miro, I basically get

1:11

back an entire hour when I use

1:13

its AI tools for clustering. And

1:15

she's done it. Join over 60 million

1:18

people running actually enjoyable and

1:20

actionable retros in Miro. Get

1:22

your first three boards free

1:24

at miro.com. That's m-i-r-o.com. From

1:31

the Times and the Sunday Times, this is

1:33

The Story. I'm Jane

1:35

Mulcarrens. So

1:46

about three days after

1:49

they announced the election on May

1:52

22nd, the Labour Party posted a

1:54

meme on TikTok. at

2:00

Downing Street and kicked off the

2:02

general election, Matilda Davies, data journalist

2:04

at The Times and The Sunday

2:06

Times, was scrolling through the social

2:09

media video app TikTok. Quite

2:11

a popular meme with a video of Cilla Black

2:13

back in 1989, singing

2:16

the theme of her TV show, Surprise, Surprise.

2:19

Surprise,

2:22

surprise, surprise, surprise.

2:26

The Tories had just come out

2:28

with an eyebrow-raising policy pledge that

2:30

all 18-year-olds would have to take

2:32

part in national service. And

2:38

they'd captioned it, Rishi Sunak turning up

2:41

on your 18th birthday to send you to war?

2:44

I suppose my immediate reaction was, ironically,

2:48

surprise. To me, it

2:50

wasn't necessarily something I expected the

2:52

official political communications to be

2:55

putting online. That

3:03

video has now been viewed five

3:05

million times and

3:07

encapsulates a new frontier for

3:09

political campaigning. This

3:12

is the first TikTok election. That might

3:14

sound trivial, but TikTok has a vast

3:16

audience, a young audience that few other

3:19

platforms can't match. And

3:25

it's not just Labour getting in on the act.

3:28

I'm Rishi Sunak, and this is everything that's

3:30

happened in the campaign so far in 60

3:32

seconds. When I became leader

3:34

of Liberal Democrats, I said I wanted

3:36

to be the voice of carers. Do

3:39

we pick little Rishi or pure

3:43

Starbur? Oh, he's so

3:45

boring, I couldn't even listen to him. All

3:51

the major parties are on the bandwagon now, so

3:54

why are politicians so keen to win

3:56

over the TikTok user base? as

10:00

sort of casual and fun as Labour are going

10:02

for. But I think they

10:04

know that they're key voters are not the people

10:06

on TikTok. So I think they've put

10:08

a lot less into it, which I

10:11

think is not surprising to anyone. But

10:14

counterintuitively, there's a single politician

10:17

who's doing incredibly well on

10:19

TikTok. There is, yeah. Nigel

10:21

Farage, at the moment, he has about

10:24

650,000 followers, over 11 million likes

10:27

on his videos. And the

10:29

party's official account is also doing

10:31

quite well. It has about 2

10:33

million likes, but not nearly as

10:35

well as Nigel Farage's personal page.

10:37

Now, that definitely doesn't tally with

10:39

the traditional demographics of younger people

10:42

skewing left, does it? Why do you think

10:44

Farage is getting so much attention on his

10:46

social media? So I think

10:49

it's a couple of things. Firstly,

10:51

Farage and his

10:53

kind of brand of right wing populist

10:56

politics actually

10:58

is a lot more popular with young

11:00

people than I think people realise. A

11:03

recent study that I read showed

11:05

that men under 25 are

11:07

more likely to vote for reform than people

11:10

in their 40s and 50s. And

11:12

I think that

11:14

style of politics also really lends

11:18

itself to TikTok. It's much

11:20

more casual and much more direct. Got

11:23

to tell you, I don't like the look

11:25

of a Labour government one little bit, but this

11:27

lot, having betrayed Brexit, having betrayed everything I gave

11:29

them in 2019, or the help I

11:32

gave them back five years ago, deserve

11:34

everything that is coming to them. And

11:38

Farage, in particular,

11:40

speaks quite simply, quite

11:42

passionately. He's not afraid to tackle

11:45

taboo topics or be a bit

11:47

inflammatory. And I think that's the

11:50

type of content that does well on the platform anyway. But

11:53

obviously there's one thing, Matilda, that makes TikTok

11:57

content very different, and that's the

11:59

algorithm, right? The algorithms

12:01

that social media companies use now

12:03

and TikToks in particular are

12:07

so intelligent. There's a lot

12:09

of secrecy around them, but basically

12:12

what it does is it sees every

12:14

move you make on the app, whether

12:16

that's liking a video, commenting on a

12:18

video, searching for someone's profile, and

12:21

then it uses that to create a

12:23

very detailed picture of who you are and

12:25

serve you up content it

12:28

thinks you'll be interested in based off of that

12:31

and what other people similar to

12:33

you have been enjoying. TikTok also

12:35

sees your browsing on certain other websites

12:37

and uses that to inform the algorithm.

12:41

So it has a very

12:43

deep understanding of who people are. It's

12:45

incredibly targeted. Right, targeted

12:47

and focused and personal, right? Yeah,

12:49

exactly. So we've

12:51

talked about what works well on

12:54

TikTok, Matilda, and how it favours

12:56

irreverence and humour and sort of

12:58

more personality-led stuff. Is

13:00

there a danger that this kind

13:02

of tone and style,

13:05

I guess, of communicating could

13:07

potentially lead to a greater

13:09

polarisation because people are making

13:11

bold and controversial statements and

13:14

snappy ones too, you know, without much context? Yeah,

13:17

absolutely. That's definitely a concern

13:19

with TikTok. As I would say,

13:21

that it is a concern with most

13:23

social media sites. We've certainly seen

13:26

before that the more

13:28

inflammatory content you post

13:30

on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter,

13:33

the more likely people are to share it, either

13:36

because they agree with it and they think

13:38

you're speaking directly or they

13:40

disagree with it and they want to criticise it. But

13:43

all of that brings attention to those people

13:45

and that's definitely a concern with TikTok as

13:47

well. I

13:49

spoke to an ad exec and

13:51

he was saying that he thinks where

13:54

we've got to is kind

13:56

of an age where political

13:59

communication one

28:00

video hit over a million views when Labour have

28:02

had maybe almost 10 at this point. So

28:05

before we get carried away, deciding

28:07

that TikTok is gonna influence

28:09

the outcome of the election more than anything else,

28:12

we probably should say something about

28:14

social media campaigns not always translating

28:16

into votes, shouldn't we? What happened

28:18

in 2019? In

28:21

2019, I think a lot of people thought

28:23

Jeremy Corbyn was gonna do a lot better

28:26

in the election than he did because

28:28

he was incredibly popular on

28:30

social media. But actually, that

28:32

didn't really translate to votes at all.

28:35

And the young people that he

28:37

was primarily popular with online, a

28:39

lot of them didn't turn out to vote at

28:41

all. So it actually didn't make as much as

28:43

a difference as I think people

28:46

were concerned that it would. So

28:48

it's unclear at the moment whether

28:50

or not these kind of TikTok

28:52

wars are actually gonna make a difference at the ballot

28:54

box. But I

28:56

think it's quite smart for

28:58

the political parties to be using TikTok

29:01

and to be trying

29:03

to target younger voters there. Historically,

29:06

young voter turnout in this country

29:08

is appalling. It hasn't got

29:10

above 55% for the last 30 years. So

29:14

I think it was

29:17

only a matter of time before political parties

29:19

realised that they had to start speaking

29:21

young people's language, meeting them where

29:24

they're already spending time. I

29:26

mean, let's not forget that if Labour

29:28

do win this election, they

29:31

have said that they would like to

29:33

give the vote to 16-year-olds, which means

29:35

that 11-year-olds, current 11-year-olds would be able

29:38

to vote in the next election. Do

29:40

political parties absolutely need to think ahead

29:42

to the next election and capture that

29:44

youth vote now in order to mobilise

29:47

young people to be political and vote

29:49

very, very soon? Yeah, 100%. At

29:53

the moment, a fifth of people

29:56

on TikTok are under 18. So

29:59

even if it's... It's not going to make the

30:01

biggest difference this time around. It's

30:03

probably quite valuable for political parties

30:05

to start making themselves known to

30:08

young people now because they have

30:11

a lifetime of voting ahead of them. And

30:13

so I suppose the early you can get them is probably

30:15

quite valuable for them. That

30:22

was Matilda Davies, data journalist at the Times

30:25

and the Sunday Times and

30:27

Redbox editor Lara Spirit. You

30:29

can find all their work at thetimes.com with

30:31

a subscription. And make sure to

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sign up to the election briefing newsletter for

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your daily dose of politics straight to your

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email inbox. You can swat up

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on the election from the threat to the blue

30:42

wall to why voters are turning to the Greens

30:44

to Labour's plans for the economy in our previous

30:46

podcast. We'll put some links in the episode notes.

30:56

The producer was Sam Chantarasak, the executive

30:58

producer was Kate Ford and sound

31:01

design and theme composition was by

31:03

Mao Lissetto. If

31:05

you've got a question about the election

31:07

that you want answered, do send us

31:09

an email to thestoryatthetimes.com. There's not long

31:11

left. Thanks for

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