Could the WhatsApp election hurt Labour at the polls?

When Keir Starmer was interviewed for the Sun’s YouTube live stream last week, only about 10,000 people tuned in to watch him pledge to get tough on illegal immigration.

Under pressure to prove he would speed up deportations, the Labour leader singled out one example in particular: “At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they’re not being processed.”

Two days later, Labour was in a panic: a clip of Starmer’s comments, largely unremarked on by the dozens of journalists covering the Sun debate, was being forwarded thousands of times around Bangladeshi community WhatsApp groups.

Amid anger from his own MPs and facing the resignation of several councillors, Starmer ripped up his campaign schedule to give an apologetic interview to the London-based ATN Bangla UK television channel.

In some constituencies – often, but not always, with large Muslim populations – over the past six weeks a parallel WhatsApp election has taken place where the big issues have been Labour’s policy towards Gaza and the party’s tough talk on immigration.

One Labour candidate in a seat with a large Muslim population said the Bangladesh video was a real problem for the party. “Things are flying around WhatsApp in a way they didn’t in previous elections,” they said. “We’re rebutting it on the doorstep but the correction doesn’t fly on WhatsApp.

“When they hear the reply it’s quite powerful – Keir Starmer’s first trip was to Bangladesh. We’re just trying to get people in the know in the community to spread the word.”

Dr Patrícia Rossini of the University of Glasgow, who has studied the effect of WhatsApp on elections in her native Brazil, said the messaging app is a “completely hidden information environment”, which can lead to big surprises when votes are counted.

“It’s virtually impossible to factcheck or remove content once it’s gone viral,” she said. “It’s not even possible to know how viral something has become.”

She said people are more likely to trust text, memes and videos forwarded by people they know, adding: “What’s fascinating to me about WhatsApp is there’s no algorithmic amplification. It’s entirely driven by people and peers.”

As a result, if there is one big unknown before Thursday’s election, it is whether Labour’s success in winning over former Tory voters across the country will be undermined by the loss of some previously safe seats – where campaign activity is often driven by the rapid forwarding of content on the messaging app.

Activists in nominally safe seats across the West Midlands and Greater Manchester are being told to stay home and campaign in constituencies where Labour might have expected 20,000-vote majorities but now fear losses to pro-Gaza independent candidates or George Galloway’s Workers party.

This alternative peer-to-peer distribution model means that news that matters to communities can be widely broadcast, even if mainstream outlets are not overly focusing on it.

An early sign of this was a video clip of Starmer on the radio station LBC, where he pledged his support for Israel’s right to defend itself after Hamas’s deadly 7 October attacks. This, and other Gaza-related clips going viral on WhatsApp, were partly credited with Galloway’s victory in this year’s Rochdale byelection.

One young woman in the supposedly safe Labour seat of Birmingham Hodge Hill interviewed for the Guardian’s project looking at voters’ media habits said she had never heard of an Israel-Palestine conflict until last October.

Now, having been horrified by Gaza content she had seen online – on TikTok and Instagram as well as WhatsApp – she rated it as one of her top issues, causing her to change her vote from Labour to Green.

By comparison, national campaign coverage of Gaza as an election issue has been limited, with the war barely featuring in the various televised leaders’ debates.

Labour campaigners said there was no doubt the Bangladesh clip had now been seen by far more people than tuned in for the original Sun interview. One viral edit of the video omits the fact that Starmer was discussing illegal immigration from Bangladesh, causing Labour to call it “misinformation”.

Rossini said WhatsApp could change elections because it rewards politicians who “focus on micro issues that are really emotional” in an election, as opposed to a broader pitch.

“Rather than thinking about an election as a choice for a government on economy, health or other things, you’re thinking about their stance on a particular thing you deeply care about,” she said.

She said all of this reflected a different approach to consuming political news compared with the past, saying: “You don’t have to follow the news because things that matter to you or concern your community will reach you.

“It’s discovery that is unintentional. A small minority of users are thinking of WhatsApp as a major source of news – but more people on WhatsApp are being found by pieces of news.”