Memes Political memes are created and spread by digital marketing agencies, citizen groups and political parties. This can be particularly deceptive as memes fall outside of guidelines on political advertising. In fact, The New Daily reported that ‘weaponising memes’ was an “unexpected hallmark of the 2019 federal election” (Butler, 2020). Digital marketing agency Topham Guerin worked with the Liberal Party in that election, running a “24-hour meme machine” to disseminate “attention-grabbing, emotion-manipulating, behaviour-nudging messaging” (Workman & Hutcheon, 2019). Political meme pages were created in support of political parties, such as Innovative and Agile Memes (supporting The Coalition), The National Party of Memes (supporting Nationals), and ALP Spicy Meme Stash (supporting the Labor Party), leading to Buzzfeed to report on the use of “weaponised memes in Australia” (Esposito, 2018). The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a coalition of alt-right Facebook groups working with staff of the United Australia Party produced fake news, racist memes and messages against Labor and the Greens, which were liked and shared more than a million times during the campaign (Gladstone, 2019). SMS Messages A computational campaigning effort was undertaken by the United Australia Party during the Queensland election to the House of Representatives in January 2019. Financed with at least A$50 million (£27,232,500) from Clive Palmer, who also founded the party, SMS messages were sent to at least 5.4 million Australians (Figure 2). While many reactions were unfavourable — questioning where Palmer’s team got the numbers from—this activity was technically legal according to the Australian Communication and Media Authority who state on their website: “Australians can be contacted by phone, email, SMS in the lead up to election to seek views and influence your vote”. Palmer said that they would continue their campaigning effort including SMS messages and that there was no limit to the amount of money that would be spent (Mourad, 2019). Figure 2: United Australia Party’s SMS Campaign (Mourad, 2019) Political Advertisements The Guardian found that Facebook ads from the party pages of Labor and the Coalition tended to be negative, often attacking the opposition party, whereas individual politicians’ pages had positive messaging (Evershed, 2019). Major parties used Facebook’s features of targeting ads at specific demographics, interests, and locations. Throughout the federal election campaign, the AEC received five hundred complaints about political advertising, of which ninety related to social media (Knaus & Karp, 2019). Although unauthorised paid electoral ads are in breach of the Commonwealth Electoral Act, anonymous, fringe groups paid to push political messaging on platforms such as Facebook. For example, The Guardian found an anonymous 16