How the Media and Musk Are Boosting Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Well Beyond Its Size

Anybody who follows UK politics closely or, even gives it a cursory glance, will notice that the social media landscape is dominated by one political party. 

At the General Election in the summer of 2024, Reform UK took five seats in the House of Commons and along with it, Nigel Farage’s first win from eight attempts at becoming an MP.

For some, this heralded a new era in political discourse. Were we truly moving away from a two party dominance in the UK?

The answer to that is yet to play out and only time will tell, but, if you spend any time at all following politics on TV or social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Reform UK were actually the Government of the day, such is their media coverage across all platforms.

I spend far too much time on X and it occurred to me that I was being bombarded by Reform UK posts — from the party, its MPs, its management, its board members and by our media outlets.

I wanted to understand if they were just masters of social media marketing and had conquered the algorithm or, were they being given a virtual leg-up?

To answer that question, I broke out the advanced features of the platform, using X Pro and my trusty spreadsheets.

There are a great many keywords and combinations that I could have picked, but to keep it quite generalised, I went for each of the major political parties and searched for the party name, the leader and the deputy.

Labour and Reform are straightforward but to keep things fair I combined searches for ‘Conservative’ and ‘Conservatives’ and I gave the Lib Dems their shortened moniker and their full name as well.

The data by exact key word/phrase is in the table.

OK, now on to the good stuff; the data and some takeaways from my search.

In no particular order:

Reform dominate social media in relation to their MP quota in the House. Over one month, they amassed over 950 posts across the selected media outlets. They have five MPs. The Conservatives have 121 and the Lib Dems have 72.

As you would expect, Labour and Keir Starmer have the lion’s share of the media posts. They are the Government of the day, so that tracks.

Caveating the point above; the GB News coverage of Labour was 95% negative of both the party and its leaders. Similarly The Telegraph is predominantly negative, opinion pieces.

Almost half of the total posts about Labour and Starmer emanate from GB News; see my point above. They spend a great deal of time and effort pushing a negative view of the Government whilst, simultaneously, doubling their efforts on using the Reform UK line.

The Conservatives are covered far more by BBC News/Politics and GB News than other outlets, with the BBC mentioning them as many times as they as they did Labour, despite having 121 MPs.

The LibDems are the real losers in the social media battle. With their strong showing of 72 MPs, they were only mentioned 46 times in one month across these outlets. Compare that to Reform’s 952 and you can start to see the trend.

The Times, Talk TV and The Telegraph didn’t even mention the Lib Dems, or their leaders, once over that period. I find that quite shocking. LBC posted about them three times in comparison to Reform — 82 times.

The Green Party have had a torrid time and only managed 6 mentions over the month. Considering they have only one fewer MPs than Reform, this feels pretty unreasonable; 946 fewer mentions. They need better social media comms. 

So, lastly, on to Reform; the behemoths of social media relative to their tiny party size. 

As you would expect, GB News pumps out their party lines without any restrictions. They posted about Reform or their leaders 572 times — that’s about 19 times every day. Every other outlet, put together, posted about Reform 438 times.

Talk TV follow GB News with 130 Reform posts and in third it’s LBC with 82 mentions. Don’t forget that Talk TV employs Isabel Oakeshott, the partner of Reform’s current deputy.

For comparison: the Conservatives were mentioned by those three: GB News — 267; Talk TV — 57; LBC — 84. Remember, Reform have five MPs.

An even starker comparison is the Lib Dems, the third-largest party (Reform are eighth): GB News — 11; Talk TV — 0; LBC — 3.

It’s no wonder that Reform keep coming close to, or at the top of recent polling data. Their media coverage is vastly outsized compared to their representative party size.