In Australia this election season, social media have constituted a major battleground as candidates try to reach younger voters. As Gen Z and Millennials now make up the dominant voter bloc, securing their support is more electorally important than ever.
This effort has also played out on Chinese social media platforms, namely WeChat and RedNote. Thousands of Australians use these apps, often as a main source of news.
The RECapture research team has been tracking political activity on these platforms for years. Between October 2024 and April 2025, we observed 319 Liberal Party advertisements, 68 Labor Party advertisements and 258 ads from independent candidates on WeChat. More than 20 Australian politicians used RedNote for self-promotion. Both platforms are becoming increasingly popular among politicians.
But there’s a catch: political communication on these apps is either banned or hidden. So how do candidates work around the rules?
We’ve found they use influencers and third parties, blurring the lines between authorized political advertising and undisclosed campaigning.
Skirting the rules
Platforms such as Facebook and Google maintain public ad repositories to document political advertising.
On WeChat and RedNote, however, such content is not formally registered or subject to public scrutiny.
Since 2019, WeChat has been a key platform for Australian politicians trying to reach Chinese-Australian voters.
From 2022 onwards, our research has observed the rising political popularity of RedNote, driven by its low entry barriers and emphasis on visual content.
In January, a shift of US-based users from TikTok to RedNote further elevated the platform’s prominence. Now, candidates of all stripes are using it.
But WeChat bans political advertisements and campaigning. RedNote uses shadowbanning (the covert hiding of specific content) to limit the visibility of political accounts.
As a result, political figures in democracies globally often bypass these restrictions by working with Chinese-language media or influencers to reach Chinese-speaking voters.
This tactic enables political messaging outside platform and regulatory oversight. It undermines transparency and accountability in political communication.
How do political ads work on WeChat?
Political advertising on WeChat isn’t transparent. WeChat requires official account registration through Chinese businesses recognised by Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent.
In Australia, Chinese-language media outlets serve as intermediaries. They distribute political campaign materials on behalf of candidates.
Political advertising on WeChat is presented in three main formats:
- embedded within articles,
- as sponsored content and
- as short videos distributed via WeChat’s Channel function.
Advertising costs are typically negotiated between media outlets and campaign teams, ranging from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the outlet’s influence and the ad’s target demographic.
Spending on political ads on WeChat isn’t disclosed anywhere, so it’s very hard to track how much money is being spent this way.
What do these ads look like?
For example, we identified Scott Yung, a Liberal candidate for Bennelong, and Andy Yin, a former Liberal Party member now running as an independent for Bradfield. They both published between two and eight political advertisements on WeChat daily in April.
These ads were in addition to their self-promotional content and other campaigning activities via short videos.
This content sometimes includes celebrity endorsements. In 2019 and 2025, respectively, Yung and Yin used third-party media and marketing companies based in China to recruit celebrities to endorse their campaigns.
However, such strategies are criticized domestically due to concerns about potential “Chinese influence” and perceived links to the Communist Party of China.
But behind the public political ads lies a semi-private form of campaigning.
By attaching a QR code to their political ads, candidates direct their campaigns to private group chats, enabling a more targeted form of engagement (observed in the case of sponsored content for Liberal candidate Reid Grange, running to represent Reid).
What about RedNote?
Non-Chinese Australian politicians often get around shadowbans on RedNote by signaling their connection to Chinese communities through symbolic gestures. This includes posts showcasing their visits to Chinese restaurants or photos taken at Lunar New Year community events.
Candidates of Chinese background often highlight their connections with prominent white Australian politicians, such as former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, to show their standing and political credibility within the party.
Discussions of party policies, especially controversial ones such as Australia-US-China relations, are rare. When they do occur, they are often selectively focused on matters of concern to Chinese migrants, matters deemed safe for discussion on RedNote.
Chinese-Australian candidates often organize their offline campaign events to target Chinese-Australian influencers. The influencers then disseminate relevant content on RedNote.
As a result, candidates rely on content creators, influencers, supporters, migrant businesses and Chinese-language media outlets to promote their campaigns.
Regulations falling by the wayside
Candidates usually follow authorization disclosure rules on their English social media pages.
These rules, however, are often disregarded on RedNote or WeChat.
Candidates often outsource their campaigning work to Chinese media and marketing agencies. This means the candidates have minimal oversight of the activities taking place on these platforms, raising concerns about whether electoral regulations may be inadvertently violated in the process.
We’ve found instances of unauthorized pages of politicians and candidates that have gone unnoticed by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
These are hard to find because the content is largely shadowbanned. If users or the AEC searched a particular candidate’s name, they wouldn’t be able to find much.
In April, the AEC advised rules around authorizing this sort of content. It said electoral communications distributed by people or organizations that are not political entities still require authorization if monetary or gifts-in-kind transactions are involved.
The AEC’s guidance further says political parties should include an authorization if they repost collaborative content. The general principle is: “when in doubt, authorize it”.
The key challenges here are identifying who collaborates with whom, on which platform, how content is remixed and whether the collaboration is voluntary or involves monetary or in-kind transactions.
The AEC doesn’t actively monitor Chinese social media platforms. This makes enforcing any regulations almost impossible.
Given how much political candidates are using these apps, there needs to be better regulatory oversight of what happens on them.
Authors: Fan Yang is a research fellow at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne, and at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, the University of Melbourne. Dan Dai is a PhD candidate at the Digital Media Research Center, Queensland University of Technology. Luke Heemsbergen is a senior lecturer in communication at Deakin University. Stevie Zhang is a research assistant at the RECapture Project, The University of Melbourne. Also contributing research were Robbie Fordyce and Mengjie Cai
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
