Borkowski Media Trends: Can TikTok 'stop the boats'? | London Overground's Name Game & More

PLUS: Dakota's Tangled Web | OpenAI's Video: nasty? | Labour's Long March

Mark Borkowski on Home Office’s TikTok Tactics

This week Mark Borkowski was once again featured in Spear’s Magazine’s Reputation Index. Here he is on the Government’s use of TikTok influencers to try to persuade people not to cross the channel.

“The latest move by the Home Office – paying Albanian social media influencers to ‘de-influence’ migrants from crossing the channel – is undeniably audacious.

Given the small budget relative to the extensive publicity the move has received, some have written it off as just another virtue-signalling (or vice-signalling if you disagree) stunt in the government’s ongoing struggle to address this complex issue. But its origins and implications raise some critical questions.

The whole campaign comes hot on the heels of New Zealand’s right-wing National Party victory in the country’s 2023 elections, where a savvy digital campaign proved essential to their success. Influencers, viral videos and gamified messaging helped the party resonate with younger demographics on their turf, propelling the party to victory. As we contemplate our general election, I wonder how much more we can expect our government to pull from the Antipodean playbook.

However, there is an inherent risk in this approach. Remember Rishi Sunak's vaping ban announcement on LadBible? The optics of the governments trying to be accessible, pop-culturally relevant and ‘cool’ rarely land well and often veers worryingly close to dystopian fiction. And that’s before we even acknowledge the security concerns of the platform. In June 2023, TikTok was banned from all government phones, hence why the Home Office is getting influencers to post instead, in some bizarre workaround.

Navigating this digital divide, where the language and tools of one generation are foreign to another, is fraught with challenges. And as Borkowski’s recent white paper set out, the generational divide is only set to widen. As we hurtle towards elections this year and beyond, it will be fascinating to see how politicians adapt their communication strategies to bridge this ever-widening gap.”

London Overground’s Name Game

Yesterday, the Mayor of London announced a complete rebranding of the London Overground. Once ‘a mass of orange spaghetti’, the network has been subdivided into six distinct lines, with six new colours.

But it’s not just the aesthetics that have been diversified, the new line names are also an explicit nod to London’s multi-cultural history. For example, the Lioness line from Euston  to Watford Junction honours the England women's football team, who won the Euros in Wembley back in 2022. Mildmay, from Stratford to Richmond pays tribute to a hospital treating HIV patients that was often visited by Princess Di, Windrush (Highbury & Islington - south London) remembers the Caribbean Windrush generation, Suffragette (Gospel Oak - Barking Riverside) honours women's suffrage pioneers, Weaver (east London - Essex) the textile industry, and the Liberty (Romford - Upminster) is an apparent nod Havering’s status as a ‘royal Liberty’.

The move follows the trend of TfL’s increasingly amorphous naming. Where once we only had just the Metropolitan line (1863, running, yes, into the city), then the District line (1867, running out to the sticks) and the Northern line (1890, running, shockingly, North to South), TfL has slowly moved away from such naming practices with the likes of the Jubilee and much beloved ‘Lizzy’ line.

While many rushed to applaud  the improved navigability and inclusive representation of the move, some critics have written it off as a “pointless gimmick” that is “politicising”the transport system. Others have argued it’s just another hollow play by the London Mayor, seeking to shore up appeal amongst certain voter segments in an election year. Indeed, the announcement comes soon after the huge fanfare around plans to slash Friday tube prices, which critics soon discovered would only save a Zone 2 commuter 60 pence each way.

One also has to question the optics of the announcement in light of the ongoing TfL pay disputes. At a time when the next tube strike is only ever round the corner, people have questioned whether spending £6.3m on an aesthetic updo is really going to ameliorate relationships with the network’s disgruntled workers.

But this all being said, the whole fiasco does appear to be a storm in a teacup. As residents outside of the M25 have rushed to point out, the UK probably has bigger problems to worry about than the Liberty line to Upminster.

Dakota Johnson weaves a tangled Web

Madame Web, the latest installment in Sony’s ‘Spider-Man Universe’, arrived this week to the worst reviews for a superhero film in recent memory, an impressive feat given that the last one, The Marvels, received a critical and commercial drubbing back in November. The film follows Cassandra Webb as she explores the ‘spider world’ and stars Dakota Johnson, whose unconventional press tour has attracted attention online, particularly when she failed to name any previous Spider-Man films.

Johnson has always been a slightly ironic presence, but what seems distinct is her active embarrassment at having been involved at all; while the ‘anti-press tour’ itself is nothing new, it is for the superhero genre, where the camaraderie and ‘genuine’ belief of the cast in the project has always been a hallmark. Johnson’s willingness to shatter that illusion speaks to the way she’s historically straddled mainstream cinema and independent fare, but it also highlights that the superhero film as a concept simply doesn’t hold the power it once did – someone has made the call that it is safer for her career to seem above the film, than it is to enthusiastically support it.

In an excruciating interview with the Huffington Post, Johnson was asked about the line “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”, which became a meme in the trailer last year for its garbled cadence and her laconic delivery. That line has now been cut from the final product, likely a response to the online ridicule, but Johnson’s flat defence of it encapsulates how everything around the film has, in essence, become a joke. It’s impossible to expect anyone to pay for something that even its stars can’t support.

Trends readers may cast their minds back to the release of The Marvels and our prediction that the once impregnable franchise may not be long for this world. Madam Web isn’t quite the end, but it’s certainly another nail in the coffin, an arguably unavoidable disaster for a genre in the final throes of its natural lifespan. If the mid-20th century Western, perhaps the closest comparison to the modern superhero movie, died with the collapse of the original studio system, it seems likely that we may now face the opposite: with studios like Warner Brothers essentially staking their future, financial and creative, on the health of comic book movies, it might be that this time the heroes bring down the curtain. 

Is Open AI’s latest tool a dytopian video nasty?

OpenAI has added another powerful feature to its AI toolbox that's causing excitement and an overwhelming sense of dystopian dread in equal measure. This latest mainstream AI advancement is text-to-video, which is what it says on the tin - the ability to generate high-quality, realistic footage with a single prompt.

As part of OpenAI's mantra of "safe and beneficial" AI development, they haven't dropped a bomb on the internet, giving anyone with an account access to start generating silly memes. This tech OpenAI is calling 'Sora' is available to a few handpicked researchers and video creators who will "red team" the product, a cybersecurity term for harnessing Sora as an attack to see how an entity would respond to a real cyber threat (basically refining the product ensuring it's safe and secure). It's likely we're some way off from having free rein to use this tool.

A powerful tool like Sora requires strict safeguarding, especially with a certain election coming up - the results of which could change the course of several global conflicts. Imagine this tool in the hands of an attack ad specialist, who can produce harmful content in seconds. Of course, OpenAI has basic restrictions on the type of content it allows users to create and will also be looking at ways to mitigate using Sora for nefarious means.

But it's important to note that all of OpenAI's tools haven't quite been able to beat the eye test - most experts of a given field can spot the difference between AI-generated content and human content, no matter the number of prompts, especially when equipped with tools that help humans detection. But seeing as we're so early on in generative AI's life cycle, there is a critical need to develop tools that mitigate the risk of AI or create barriers to minimise the chances of people developing AI for evil. As far as we can see, OpenAI is taking this seriously, and Sora's primary function will likely be comedic; meme generation ramped up to an entirely different level.

Double Trouble: Tory Slump Fuels Rise of Reform as Labour Gains Ground 

The Conservative Party has suffered two abysmal defeats in both the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections, but Labour is not the only beneficiary of the Tory woes. 

Labour have managed to overturn an 18,000-person majority in the Northamptonshire seat of Wellingborough and an 11,200-person majority in the South Gloucestershire seat of Kingswood. This marked an extraordinary 28.5% and 16.4% swing respectively against the Conservative Party, in what is now their ninth by-election defeat.  

The results will be bruising to the Conservative Party, who are currently pointing to low turnout (38% in Wellingborough and 37% in Kingswood) and saying that it is normal to expect poor results halfway through a parliamentary turn.  

Professor Sir John Curtice, however, has gently reminded the Conservatives that they we are now in the “fag end” stages of their term. He said the results were “truly spectacular” as he pointed out that the last time a government managed to lose this many by-elections was in the Parliament of 1992-1997, which led to the ascendancy of Tony Blair.  

Both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader have faced the press today, with Rishi Sunak saying that the Conservatives have “got work to do” and Keir Starmer saying that the country is clearly “crying out for a change.” 

But it also appears as though Labour aren’t the only ones to have benefitted from these by-elections, as the Reform Party candidates have been doing a victory lap today. In Wellingborough, the party formed by Nigel Farage, achieved 13% of the vote and in Kingswood, it achieved just over 10%. The leader, Richard Tice, has been celebrating this as the “best ever” by-election result. 

It marks a fascinating conundrum for the Conservative Party however, as they faced being squeezed on both sides of the political spectrum. As Reform becomes a credible threat across more rural seats, there will likely be a growing push for the Conservative’s to move further to the right, especially on issues of immigration and lower taxes. For someone whose leadership is constantly in question, it will be a further test for how the Prime Minister can command and maintain discipline within his party as we head to another General Election later this year.