Hello my name is David Ronseman and this is Talking Politics. On our last episode we talked about what we could do, about the big technology companies, today we're going to talk about what they are doing to this election.

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I'm delighted we have two real experts to guide us through this minefield today and it is a minefield.

Charles Arthur who was for a long time the technology editor of the Guardian and has written widely about the interface between new technology and old politics.

Jennifer Cobb who is a lead researcher at the Trust and Technology Initiative in Cambridge.

So my fear in this election as someone who is not on Facebook so it was a bit of a either refused necologist, somehow never got around to it.

In 2017 I'm very aware I missed a large part of what was happening in the 2017 election and only in hindsight did the surprising results start to make more sense because there had clearly been another campaign going on that had passed me by.

Particularly on the Labour side a very effective Facebook campaign and issues were being raised that if like me you got your coverage from mainstream media you just missed so I didn't know that not just Fox hunting but the ivory trade was a big election issue in 2017.

So I have two fears in 2019 the first of which is that 2017 is repeating itself and I'm missing it and the poll gap is starting to close Labour are cleaning better than people thought and there probably is a Labour campaign I'm not seeing.

And then the second fear is that I'm one of those people who thinks that it's 2017 again and actually 2019 is a different campaign because two years is a long time in technology.

So we'll try and deal with both of my anxieties. Charles is this like 2017 again is for instance Labour running a really effective Facebook messaging campaign that's people like me are missing.

Facebook has got a lot more transparent about the ads that are running so there's now a place you can go on Facebook and see what ads are being run by which parties or by organisations that are paying for it and what they're doing who they're targeting it at and what the message says.

And from what I've been seeing of that and the WhatsApp group I'm on which is discussing these sorts of things there doesn't seem to be a big Labour project going on the Lib Dems have got a gigantic one going on which has loads of different ads the conservative similarly Labour is sort of third in that group in the Brexit party a bit smaller but there doesn't seem to be this big groundswell of really different ads breaking through certainly not on Facebook.

So when you say third is that in volume and spend in spend because one of the ads that has broken through to me so I saw it because it gets picked up by mainstream media if that's what Huffington posters is the Rob Delaney ad that Labour ran very very effective piece of political messaging so if people haven't seen it will tweet the link to it he talks about the death of his young child the incredible care he got from the NHS as an American I mean what makes it so effective as he says as an American.

I love I'm not going to do the accent but he loves the NHS and then we get a message goes further than in Corbyn and said which is if Johnson gets in Donald Trump's children will carve the NHS up between them and when I saw it a couple of days ago 10 million people had seen it which sounds like a lot to me I mean that is big that's a pretty that's a pretty good reach as I call it so even if Labour are spending as much on what you might call the micro ads.

They seem to have at least in one case the most effective political message that is just being shared.

Absolutely and I mean the Rob Delaney thing is really interesting I mean I've seen him do a routine a comedy routine under the NHS is actually part of that you know he's so fixated on it but his real power is that he's not a politician so somebody's not a politician doing these sorts of things has much more effect I think and that's part of why he gets shared so widely and it's been interesting that

very early on in the campaign Labour tried to get a thing going which was what Toria Stereoity has done to me or some of the things to get people sharing hashtags and stuff on Twitter about you know what I don't want to see anymore and what they want to be rid of.

There's been an effort to make these things go viral but hasn't quite happened as far as I can see and that's been a difference I think from 2017 there hasn't been that same ignition of any of these things apart from the Rob Delaney one.

Do you have a sense of how to judge these things so Rob Delaney through people sharing it and there's been quite a lot of interesting analytics about who's been sharing it from what I saw.

It's being shared by people who don't normally share political messaging certainly Labour messaging much more shared by women than by men and so on.

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