Momentum's Viral Video Machine Winning The Social Media War For Labour - BuzzFeed

One of Jeremy Corbyn's most powerful weapons in the 2019 general election campaign is located in a cramped, frugal office in a scruffy part of north London. Here at the headquarters of the left-wing activist group Momentum, a team of committed socialist filmmakers has produced a succession of viral videos that have transmitted Labour's campaign messages to a staggeringly big audience — around 16 million individual voters.

In the five weeks since the election was announced, Momentum's video operation — consisting of 15 full-time producers and editors, supported by around 700 volunteers around the country who scour the internet and broadcast media looking for material that can be turned into memes — has achieved more than 50 million views on Facebook, more than most of the professional media organisations covering the election.

On this afternoon, with just days to go before the December 12 vote, Momentum's headquarters is humming with activity. Around 50 staff are crammed elbow-to-elbow in the open-plan space. Scrawled on whiteboards and signs around the office is a reminder of the group's political objective, in case anyone was in doubt: "SOCIALISM."

Emil Charlaff, the head of the video team, stands over a colleague's monitor reviewing one of their upcoming productions, a scripted comedy sketch attacking the Conservatives' austerity measures. A wiry 33-year-old with a shaved head and trimmed beard, Charlaff wears a grey T-shirt, black jeans, and trainers. Watching the footage, he's concerned that it's too slow, so he tells the editor to cut it.

"It'll take another couple of days to get this perfect," the editor says.

"We're cutting it fine," Charlaff says.

"We've got Tory Robin Hood to get out first."

On a whiteboard above Charlaff, someone has scribbled Momentum's key social media statistics during the campaign so far: video views on Facebook and Twitter and the time users spent watching their clips. In the first week of the campaign, they got 4.2 million video views on Facebook. By the fifth week, that had risen to 16.7 million. "It was a good week," Charlaff says dryly. He says he's got more viral content still in the pipeline for the final days.

In this election, commentators have praised Boris Johnson's Conservatives — not unfairly — for improving their social media presence with a much more imaginative and engaging approach than they've had in the past. But much less attention has been paid to the way that pro-Corbyn groups on the left, with Momentum at the forefront, have been breaking new ground in the battle for attention online.

"They've got a smart operation that has delivered brutally effective content on the NHS and inequality that has reached far more people than the TV debates have," said Mike Harris, chief executive of 89up, a digital agency that has been closely tracking social media activity during the campaign.

One example of Momentum's reach came on a morning in late November. It was the day after the Tories launched their campaign manifesto and one of their main initiatives was backfiring: The party had promised there would be "50,000 more" nurses working in the NHS in a decade, but under scrutiny, it turned out that only 31,000 of those would be new recruits. Nicky Morgan, the Tory culture secretary, was sent out on ITV's breakfast show, Good Morning Britain, to do damage control.

The interview, aired at just after 7am, was an excruciating mess, the presenters growing increasingly exasperated as Morgan stuck stubbornly to the party line. But for Momentum, it was a golden opportunity. Watching the show that morning was one of the volunteer army that the group has been using to track the political shows looking for just this sort of thing: footage that can be cut into catchy, emotive videos that promote Corbyn and embarrass their rivals.

The volunteer dropped the clip into a Slack channel the spotters used to surface their potentially viral discoveries, and back at Momentum headquarters one of Charlaff's editors picked it up. They cut the GMB interview into a six-minute clip emphasising the anchors' irritation and Morgan's obstinacy, adding subtitles and a provocative headline: "Biggest Car Crash Interview Ever!"

Momentum posted the video on its Facebook page, and soon it was going viral.

At 8 o'clock that night, it had been seen more than a million times.

By midnight, it had hit 2 million. And it kept climbing.

Eventually, Momentum's spin on the Morgan interview was watched 8.3 million times on Facebook, making it one of the three most-viewed videos of the 2019 election, according to BuzzFeed News' analysis.