The three tech stories of GE24

Collage by Brent Gorsky

UPDATE: I added 2 more great pieces of reporting below, from The Journal & Dublin Inquirer, after sending this post as an email

We can look at the tech story of the Irish 2024 General Election in 3 ways; tech as a campaign tool, tech companies as campaign actors, and the tech sector's economic role in the election discourse. With polls opening tomorrow, lets briefly recap where we are with each story:

Tech as a campaign tool

Fine Gael's attempts to control the digital narrative spectacularly failed. In the Irish Times yesterday I wrote about something that is emblematic of this:

On Friday night, Harris posted a campaign montage TikTok video entitled Kanturk. It has a jaunty beat and smiling clips of him shaking hands and holding a pint. The text declares that his visit to the town had “festive spirit and a lot of energy”. That video garnered about 8,000 views. By Monday evening, RTÉ was reporting that the viral video of the Taoiseach’s now infamous Kanturk exchange with Charlotte Fallon had been viewed eight million times.

This goes right back to the viral Michael O'Leary video, which you can read about here.

The other headline to me is that Sinn Fein have underspent the others in the campaign period, as we've reported here. But they do not seem to have been hurt by it. My take on this is they played the long game, as they often do.

Two other notable campaigns I highlighted on RTE's Behind the Ballot podcast last night are that:

Aontú have run an impressively disciplined digital campaign; they haven't spent big, but they have a consistent message: waste, waste, waste
Labour have spent big, putting their money behind particular candidates rather than the bigger parties scattergun approach (how much they spent per candidate is here)

Tech companies role in the campaign

It has been a relatively quite election from tech companies POV, something they will no doubt be happy about. A few notable exceptions:

The Meta ad archive stopped working during a crucial part of the campaign, prompting us to launch a complaint under the DSA (the Irish Times)
Instagram allowed Simon Harris to publish 100 ads, without labelling them as political, or adding them to the political ad archive; The Irish Daily Mail (online as Extra.ie)
TikTok failed to detect electoral misinformation in some ads, when tested by Global Witness; covered on RTE & in The Business Post
A group claiming to be from Ógra Sinn Fein set up fake Bluesky accounts for lots of parties & party leaders, inc. An Taoiseach (see The Journal)
The Dublin Inquirer did a deep dive into a website & set of social media accounts of unknown provenience (but using words like “Fall” for Autumn) supporting anti-immigrant candidates

There has also been some pretty vile and racist abuse of members of the public who became part the electoral debate, that have spread online. More on that after the election.

The tech industry as the elephant in the room

I stand by my point that the major tech story of this election is its role in our fiscal stability, which I wrote about here:

Finally: Hello future archive hunters!

I got an email yesterday to say that The Briefing is going to be part of the National Library of Ireland's digital archive of the election. This made my nerdy little heart extremely happy. So hello future researchers; I hope we still have a planet to live on.