One of Scott Morrison's election campaign team bragging about how they came to 'own' voters during 2019

Banning, blocking, sanitising, hiding negative comments, using deliberately misleading labels or memes were tools used by Morrison's digital campaign team to convince fool Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users into believing that Scott Morrison was the man to support at the 2019 Australian federal election.

ABC News, 8 November 2019:

Appearing before a Sunday afternoon session at the Australian Libertarian Society's annual Friedman Conference, Guerin spent 18 minutes humblebragging about the tradecraft TG used to ambush its opponents and influence the voting public....

It shows Guerin giving a blow-by-blow account of how TG won what he called "the battle of the thumbs".

He also boasted about weaponising "boomer memes", deploying a strategy called "water dripping on a stone", and unlocking "arousal emotions" to maximise the impact of the Liberals' social media posts.

And he talks about how social media feeds for another political client were sanitised to downplay criticism and negativity in order to give the impression of broad, enthusiastic support.

The video is more than just a recap of a successful political marketing campaign, it's a guided tour of the dark arts of contemporary information warfare.

Topham and Guerin came up through the ranks of the Young Nationals, the youth wing of New Zealand's conservative National Party, and worked on the fringes of political campaigns both in New Zealand and Britain before launching their own firm in 2016.....

Through their connections — including with Crosby Textor, the Liberal Party's go-to political advisory firm — TG ended up doing some work for state Liberals in elections in South Australia in 2018 and New South Wales earlier this year.

The big break came when the Liberals hired TG to take a leading role in the digital campaign ahead of the May poll, working in the election engine room alongside the party's federal director, Andrew Hirst, and his team.

A Liberal Party spokesperson declined to say if the party was still using TG's services but noted Topham Guerin "did an outstanding job for the party during the recent election campaign".

But six months on from the election, the Liberals are still paying for Facebook ads to sell Scott Morrison, posting attacks on Labor, and two of the page's administrators are identified as being New Zealand-based....

The Liberal team, he [Guerin] said, had out-gunned their opponents in both volume and engagement, concentrating their efforts in marginal seats.

"That's how you win an election that no-one thinks you're going to win," he told the mainly centre-right-leaning audience.

And achieving mastery of Facebook — which has become the key platform in digital campaign strategy — is at the core of the TG playbook.

When the average Facebook user spends just 1.7 seconds on each post, the challenge is to get them to "stop long enough on our content, to process it, to react with it, to interact with it and then share it with their friends".

"This is the single most important point: the best social media strategy is water dripping on a stone. You've got to be pushing the same consistent message day-in, day-out," he said.

In Australia, the main anti-Labor "dripping water" message was, according to Guerin, that "Bill Shorten is the bill Australia can't afford".

That was expressed in ads and posts designed to stir up concerns about property taxes (changes to negative gearing), retirement tax (scrapping franking credits), car taxes (electric vehicle subsidies) and resurrecting the death tax bogey.

On the flip side the "I'm standing with Scott" mantra was hammered home....