Debunk: Audience asleep at the Liberal Party 2022 launch were actually Tories in the UK in 2019

Yes, they’re ‘sleeping Tories’, but the English kind, not local Liberal Party supporters at last weekend’s’ party launch in Brisbane.

A reverse-image search has found most of the images shared of attendees asleep at the Brisbane launch were taken by photographers Andy Stenning and Neil Terry and are from a 2019 Daily Mirror article featuring many sleeping delegates at that year’s UK Conservative Party conference.

Memes, jokes and modified images have been a frequently used tactic fused to reply to tweets by Coalition government MPs during this election campaign.

Many, like the one above, have made use of ‘official’ government photography to ridicule the government’s policy within hours of its announcement. 

The trending word ‘Superannuation’, for example, was triggered by the Coalition’s ‘Super for Homes’ policy and attracted a surge of Twitter memes.

RMIT Factlab has examined trending daily election hashtags aimed at the Coalition and Labor and tracked the use of images on Twitter as commentary.The use of memes and images produced by the major parties on Twitter has been low with none of appearing in the most-shared picture or video shared tweets since the election began.

Perhaps the best-known of all posts around the Prime Minister revolves around a photo-op in Alice Springs where the PM removed his protective helmet while welding. A gif of the moment, shared by ACTU Secretary Sally McManus - has been seen more than 154,000 times, with more than 1,000 retweets and more than 6,000 likes. 

While Twitter’s user base sits at a little over 5 million in Australia, significantly lower than Facebook’s 18 million-strong user base, it has been a key communication tool for politicians and journalists in the election campaign. 

A search of the top-shared election content with pictures and video on #ausvotes and #auspol hashtags since the election began ishows content that is predominantly critical or negative of the government. Of the nine videos or pictures shared more than 2000 times, three are by Labor MP Julian Hill, while others are of opposition figures ‘winning’ media interviews, or are allegations of electoral corflute vandalism with pictures. 

Interestingly, the most-shared video or picture from #ausvotes or #auspol is a video of the moment Greens leader Adam Bandt responded to a journalist’s ‘gotcha’ question with; “Google it mate!”. It has had 540,000 views and been shared more than 4000 times.

Professor Axel Bruns from Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre has analysed more than 755,000 tweets directed at Mr Morrsion. He found that “fewer than 1,300 (or 0.17%) were retweets, while other Liberal leaders similarly failed to reach the 1% mark.” QuT identifies retweets as an endorsement. The retweet figure for Labor is 23 per cent, and teal Independents have recorded 30 per cent.