At the time of writing, Nigel Farage and Reform UK have, combined, over one-point-five million TikTok followers. Alone, Reform UK has over 386 thousand TikTok followers
Obviously, TikTok is not entirely reputable for gauging voter opinion, but with just under 25 million British users, according to DataReportal, Farage and Reform UK could certainly be set to disrupt the status quo of British politics.
A YouGov poll from January 2025 found that 25% of voters would vote for Reform UK in a snap election, perhaps indicating that a shift is already underway.
Matthew Smith, the head of data journalism at YouGov, reported that as of February 2025, 66% of Britons held unfavourable views of Keir Starmer. Nigel Farage, despite being one of the most divisive politicians amongst those included in the poll, still received 30% of voter approval, the most of any UK politician.
But questions over the legitimacy and honesty of Reform UK’s rhetoric have arisen, with opposers believing that Farage capitalises on fearmongering and misinformation with issues like immigration and justice. His relationship with Donald Trump has also brought his personal ethicality into question.
Right-wing channels playing to the media shift
Dr Jarad Ahmed lectures in journalism, politics and communications at the University of Sheffield and directs the International Public and Political Communications Masters course. His research centres on how mainstream media reported controversial topics, specifically how the BBC portrayed Al-Qaeda’s terror threat from 2001 to 2011.
Ahmed’s knowledge of the workings of mainstream media allowed him to see how less conventional broadcasters compromise the traditional media’s ability to report and be heard.
About GB news, Ahmed says: “They’re riding the wave of the lack of trust in mainstream media and by continuously pumping out this misinformation and labelling it as entertainment, they’re undermining the role that journalists play in a democracy.”
Ahmed did disclose, though, that the move to more scandalous stories, as opposed to ones that people should be reading about, has happened across the board, even at the BBC. He cites the declines in newspaper readership and trust in the media as key reasons for this change, as it would be unsustainable to stick to traditional journalistic practises.
In the year 2022/2023, the House of Commons library reported that 65% of the BBC’s over £5.7 bn total income came from licence fee revenues. According to Ahmed, if people are going to spend £159 annually for the BBC, they will demand to see the news they want.
However, during the pandemic, a phenomenon occurred which seemed to reverse a lot of the trends we had seen.
“People naturally moved to legacy brands like the BBC, The Times, and The Guardian because people wanted accurate, regulated information but because there was so much news out there that was depressing, people turned away from it… instead, they turned to channels like GB news.”
Dr Jarad Ahmed
As well as being entertaining, channels like GB News and Nigel Farage’s social media pages also go some way in offering comfort, Ahmed thinks. By taking complicated situations and offering comparatively simple solutions, viewers get a sense of stability and that their problems can be rectified.
Farage may use this method to punish the incumbent party when they appear lost in a situation, and given Reform UK’s staggering insurgence in support, this method is proving effective.
Reform UK MP for Ashfield and the party’s Chief Whip, Lee Anderson, has also adopted these tactics of over-simplifying complex issues to garner support, like when he ripped up a letter ordering him to pay his BBC licence fee at the Reform UK party conference in Birmingham.
Politicians assembling media teams
Ahmed spoke of a metaphorical revolving door, in which those high up in the media are recruited by politicians to make their ideas more palatable to the masses.
“Editors and producers will go into politics because politicians have realised that people don’t trust them, so they need people in PR, marketing, and television to make their policies more media friendly… So many people are now making podcasts about these issues,” says Ahmed.
An example of this is the ‘The Rest Is Politics’ podcast which is hosted by ex-Labour strategist, Alastair Campbell, and former Conservative front bench minister, Rory Stewart. Campbell previously worked in journalism as the political editor of the Daily Mirror and then Today before he became Tony Blair’s press secretary.
While they perform a different role in the political media to Farage, the action of using the media as a way of creating discourse and an agenda is certainly apparent.
Dr Donatella Bonansinga is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, where she investigates populist activity and narratives and how they exist within the radical left and right. Specifically, she deals with populism and how it reacts to feelings of anger, fear, pride and hope, and how populism is visually communicated on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
Though Farage’s time on social media may, at first, appear to be a success story in terms of followers in comparison to his counterparts, Bonansinga believes this could be a slightly reductionist perspective.
“I would say that establishing ‘success’ is particularly complicated on platforms such as TikTok because it means different things to different people. By looking at audience engagement or how many times established media picks up what a political actor says or does on TikTok, we can track how their message is amplified to a wider audience.”
Donatella Bonansinga
Farage has bridged the gap between established and social media himself, making appearances on GB News, LBC, and This Morning. While each of these shows ranges in their depth of political commentary, it is Farage’s personality which makes him so watchable.
He continues this public image on his social media and is doing very well with younger voters as a result. Many right-wing politicians have secured healthy social media presences, which have translated to good performances in elections.
Topham Guerin is a digital strategy firm which has worked on many political campaigns, such as Boris Johnson’s 2019 landslide victory and Christopher Luxon’s win in the New Zealand election of 2023. The latter is important because of how much campaigning took place online.
With the help of Topham Guerin, Luxon and the New Zealand National Party were able to connect with 18 to 34-year-old’s, driving themselves up the polls. They did this by using TikTok filters, following trends, and even developing a game called ‘Tax Relief Rush’ which, in the company’s words, converted political messaging into interactive entertainment.
When asked about the importance of social media in modern politics, Ben Guerin, a co-founder of Topham Guerin, said it would be negligent for a party to ignore it, and in a conversation with Politico, Guerin said: “This was an election where we had an old, white man, who is on the right side of politics, achieve 75% of all those views among 18- to 35-year old’s.”
“We were able to prove that the right can actually win younger voters when you talk to people where they are and in the language that they’re using.”
Ben Guerin via Politico
Bonansinga commented on the effects of Farage’s rhetoric on young and impressionable viewers and explained how she feared that young people may not always be able to decipher between reasonable and problematic political messages.
With snappy videos, memorable taglines and an apparent connection to the working class, Bonansinga feels Farage is making serious inroads with a demographic which is proving to be easier to persuade.
“I say easier to persuade because teenagers on the platform have not lived through the times when Farage and his ideas were considered ‘radical’ if not ‘extreme’,” Bonansinga says.
Bonansinga’s research also looks into the idea of who the ’emerging’ and who the ‘established’ groups are in politics, and what makes them such. A predicate of someone in the ’emerging’ category tends to be that their ideas go against the conventional grain of the ‘established’, but Farage’s ideas are becoming more mainstream all the time, particularly concerning immigration.
The rise in popularity of these once-rogue ideas puts pressure on the bigger parties to adopt variations of these ideas to get support for their side. We have seen this recently with both the Conservatives and Labour, the former using the simple slogan: ‘Stop The Boats’ in 2023, and the latter opting for ‘Smash the Gangs’ in their recent election win.
In the age of the idea of diversity in politics being more prevalent than ever, the fact that both parties went with strong anti-immigration messages perhaps proves Farage’s grip over what the dominant parties feel they have to promote to keep Reform UK at bay.
Anger, fear, pride and hope
Bonansinga’s research has evaluated how Reform UK’s social media interacts with anger, fear, pride and hope; the first two are aimed at the groups that they oppose, such as immigrants and minorities, and the last two are what they try to inject into rallies and campaigns to muster feelings of latent patriotism.
Her research into anger found that: “Reform’s communication helps people make sense of insecurity by clearly identifying those who are allegedly responsible, for example, your job insecurity is due to immigrants stealing your opportunities.”
Similarly, with pride, Reform UK uses it to glorify the virtues of the people. They often talk about the greatness of Britain, especially in the past, and compare it to today where they believe Britons are being left behind.
This emphasis on having pride in Britain’s history clashes with the more liberal point of view that things like the British Empire are not something to be proud of, saying it was a source of oppression.
In a video on his YouTube channel titled: ‘Farage SLAMS woke education system.’, he spoke about the deterioration of national pride amongst young people, saying: “when you think of this little island, the amazing things we’ve done for the world, be it innovation, development, the spread of Christianity, why are our kids our being told that everything about our past is poisonous?”
Lastly, Reform uses hope as a means of identifying themselves as the only hope for a better future. With them, we can hope for better security and a reversal back to what we once were.
“Reform appeals to this emotion when presenting itself as the ‘ only solution’ to Britain’s problems and the only party capable of ‘saving’ the country. In the party’s narrative, hope is very much intertwined with the idea of salvation,”
Dr Donatella Bonansinga.
Another important word that can be related to Reform UK that they are not likely to boast about is insecurity. For some analysts, they are guilty of playing up to fears of certain regions of the UK.
All four constituencies that Reform UK currently hold voted for Brexit and are in regions that have struggled with deindustrialisation. Ashfield was once a productive mining area but as of December 2023, less than 65% of people were in employment, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Skegness and Boston, South Basildon and East Thurrock, and Clacton, would all have seen a decline due to the reduction of the fishing industry. Nigel Farage and other brexiteers were keen to blame the EU for this drop-off.
Bonansinga believes Farage is selecting each of his political enemies and finding reasons why they threaten British national security.
She says: “According to the party, migrants are threatening what it means to be British; woke and climate activists are creating a cultural war; political elites are unresponsive to the demands of the people and as such are threatening the very essence of democracy.”
Joseph Jacklin 