With the public mood febrile, Labour is focused on what really matters — votes at 16. The Government has unsurprisingly framed the shift in terms of inclusivity, with Sir Keir Starmer arguing it’s “really important” that teenagers old enough to work and pay taxes can also choose their leaders. That’s debatable: there are plenty of things, from fighting in a war to driving, that 16-year-olds still can’t do. Either way, if Starmer imagines his electoral tinkering will benefit centrists like him, he may yet be disappointed. For if his move enfranchises over a million Brits, it also opens up vast new online battlefields, ones where anti-establishment figures could yet make all the noise.
With the next election still years away, after all, parties have a remarkable opportunity to forge the political identity of today’s 12- and 13-year-olds: and tomorrow’s new voters. As genuine digital natives, it’s impossible to overstate the power of social media here, especially when ads can be hyper-personalised, and when there’s so much in modern Britain to feel angry about. That promises a tsunami of digital campaigning, as children are flooded with seemingly innocuous content that can nonetheless reinforce partisan political messages. A trending meme or viral video that children encounter now has the potential to mould their political outlook, influencing how they vote when they finally turn 16.
For Britain’s political parties, this really matters. In large part, that’s because young voters are also enthusiastic voters, especially for a novel event like in 2029. This has already been shown in Scotland, which lowered the voting age for the 2014 independence referendum, and which saw turnout among 16- and 17-year-olds reach a remarkable 75%. No less striking, research suggests that by instilling a high level of participation in voters at 16, individuals are more likely to vote into their 20s and beyond. This means effective campaigning in the short term can influence politics for years or even decades to come.
More to the point, tomorrow’s future voters are essentially up for grabs. The traditional view — that a younger electorate is a de facto electoral boon to centre-left parties — is a dangerous oversimplification, one that fails to appreciate the underlying political polarisation within the group itself. This generation is not a monolith, but in fact highly fractured, with notable drift towards both the far-Left and far-Right. A recent poll from the Onward think tank echoes this divide, revealing that among young Britons, close to a third hold a positive view of communism, even as 38% would back a “military strongman” taking charge. That, in turn, is driven by a profound rejection of the mainstream political establishment, from housing to climate change, presenting vast opportunities for radicals to attract youngsters to their cause.
For its part, social media is the perfect vehicle to engage with these concerns. For one thing, there’s its sheer proliferation, with perhaps 2.7 million Britons under the age of 13 using TikTok in 2020. Then there’s the broader rise of digital activism and social media campaigning, which has allowed young people to be part of political protest movements from the comfort of their iPhones. Taken together, this dynamic allows politicians to target young people with highly specialised messages.
What might this look like in practice? The Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election offer something of a blueprint, with both employing psychological profiling to target voters online. The Trump campaign used Facebook to deploy tens of thousands of daily ad variants, before determining which resonated best. There are even more relevant examples here too. Back in 2010, for instance, the parent company of the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica was hired by Trinidad and Tobago’s opposition United National Congress party. The techies determined that, to win the election, the UNC needed to discourage young voters from casting their ballots. To that end, they crafted a campaign centred around youth apathy, reframing abstention as an act of empowerment. This strategy led to a significant drop in youth voter turnout come election day, duly gifting the UNC their victory.
“The Trump campaign used Facebook to deploy tens of thousands of daily ad variants”
Over the last 15 years, of course, digital technology has improved dramatically. Combined with increasingly malleable social media platforms — feeds are driven exclusively by user preferences, making it easier to steer them down a particular path — this guarantees the electoral techniques used in the run-up to 2029 will be far more sophisticated. This is apparent, too, in the widespread adoption of generative AI tools, making it possible to produce thousands of highly differentiated pieces of campaign material, each personalised to specific subsets of young voters. If, for instance, an individual was deemed to be afraid for the future, they might be shown anti-government messaging dovetailed with inflammatory images of uncontrolled mass migration.
No less pertinent, this material can be refined and tweaked in real time. To return to our hypothetical example, our user’s anti-government messaging could instead be combined with patriotic images of historic Britain, firing a sense of national pride. Taken together, anyway, this surely marks the death knell for traditional polling. Rather than releasing their ads and hoping for the best, campaigns can now use synthetic voter models to run simulations, before deploying ever-evolving material that instantly responds to shifts in voter behaviour. Most importantly, this will also ensure that campaigns can keep up with social media trends, mimicking its bewildering variety of apolitical memes.
And if generative AI will surely play a role here, the vast amount of data now available on social media users will also allow parties to target voters far more subtly. Increasingly, material will be integrated into the algorithmically curated feeds of future voters, undetectable from other content but designed to convey a certain political message. Individuals, who on the surface may appear identical in age, sex or race, may nonetheless see vastly different messages appearing on their feeds. As a result, political material will be crafted to resonate with their “true” online selves, something that can only be determined after hundreds if not thousands of hours of scrolling. Insecurities and weaknesses, revealed through what content someone consumes, can hence be exploited. This is certainly clear in the co-opting of “pro-masculinity” content by nationalists, with the latter promoting the defence of one’s homeland as a key tenet of being a man.
For political strategists, this is a dream come true, allowing them to seamlessly disguise political messages as naturally viral content, shifting the ground on core issues from immigration to healthcare without anyone (least of all voters themselves) consciously noticing.
What could all this mean for Britain? Parties have already tried to burrow into Gen Z feeds, with Reform dominating youth social media: in large part thanks to Nigel Farage’s endless stream of “memeable” content, directed at his 1.3 million TikTok followers. In the run-up to the 2029 election, anyway, what we might call “TikTok politics” will intensify competition in key constituencies — as parties, especially those on the political fringes, target marginals where most new voters live. Think, here, of university towns like Canterbury, or else high-birthrate areas like Bradford. That’s reflected more generally too. Before the 2019 election, psychologists determined that the number of newly eligible 18-year-old voters was greater than the incumbent MP’s majority across 56 seats. Highly targeted regional campaigns, favourably altering voting behaviour in young people, could therefore have an outsized impact, especially when our FPTP electoral system acts as a vote multiplier.
While a single-party majority remains unlikely, then, capturing swathes of a highly polarised youth vote could be decisive. Not that any of this will happen via anything as shallow as policy or debate. Rather, it seems likely that algorithms will shape the actions of many first-time voters, whose choices in the polling booth were engineered months or even years before.
