James Fisk: If Conservatives get back into power they need to overhaul the way Government communicates online

James Fisk works in digital communications and is Director of Communications for the Next Gen Tories.

Why does the Government have Instagram?

The answer that has likely popped into your head is “to communicate with younger people”, or “to bring the state into the 21st century.” or even, “to reach a bigger audience”.  These are very fair answers, and the attempt by the Civil Service  to evolve its communications, and endeavour to more effectively communicate policy and information is noble.

The problem, however, is that the methodology and success metrics deployed by the Civil Service for departmental social media accounts, risks fundamentally undermining the relationship between the individual and the state. In short, we need to ask if it is right for the Government to ‘go viral’.

Cast your mind back to 1st October 2025. For those not as chronically online as me, this is the day that the Department for Education posted a video promoting Labour’s new free school breakfasts policy, where Civil Servants interviewed a variety of parents asking questions about how the policy will benefit them.

The video, from a technical standpoint, is good. The edit is smooth, the hook is engaging, and it certainly got a lot of views, but it went down like a cup of cold sick.

The most common criticism, on our side of the aisle, was expressed in comments such as “why am I being taxed so these lazy parents can go to coffee mornings with their mates” – a valid point, based on a genuine answer in the video. Meanwhile, on the left, the video was widely criticised for being too “middle class”, having been shot entirely in London, and not “telling the working class story”. It’s fair to say, if a policy about giving schoolchildren free food is criticised from the left and the right, the comms has probably failed.

This is not a criticism of the DfE Digi team, far from it. In fact, the reason I picked this video is because I was put in a very similar position myself last year. I have spent my career working in digital communications, and when working in the Caribbean for a political party, they introduced a free school breakfast policy. To tell the truth, I had a lot of similar ideas to the DfE digital team, and I found it quite amusing to see similar video ideas deployed by the British state and a foreign governing party.

The difference, however, is that the creative risks I took were taken from the account of a political party. My objective was not just to communicate a policy, but to win votes. The state is not in that position, and shouldn’t be, ever. That is why I believe this video is emblematic of everything wrong with the way the Civil Service runs departmental social media accounts. In their noble attempts to look good online, they naturally risk looking bad and adding to the ever growing sense of the government being out of touch.

The problem at the heart of the Civil Service’s approach, is that they are using tired, old school metrics to measure success. The success of a Digital team in Government departments is measured mostly in reach. Their job, in essence, is to ensure that as many people as possible are informed about Government policy, their methodology is to create online content that gets more views. If a video gets a lot of views, the more people see it, and the digital team is successful.

Here is why that doesn’t work: The free school breakfasts video got a lot of views, millions more than the average DfE video. Yet a social listening analysis of online sentiment on the day that this video was released, shows that the volume of negative posts about the free school breakfast policy increased by nearly 900 per cent after the video was posted.

Furthermore, in the previous month, across all of social media, ‘free school breakfasts’ had a sentiment reading of 56% positive, this means that a majority of online discourse about one of Labour’s key manifesto pledges was favourable. After the video was released, the same term had a reading of 90.4 per cent negative.

What’s more, on the day that the video was released, the percentage of negative posts about the Government, not a Minister or political party, but the institution of Government itself, increased by 4 per cent. So we are in a situation, where a team in Whitehall has decreased the popularity of a government’s manifesto policy, made people more annoyed at our institutions, and yet have likely moved closer to hitting a KPI.

So why is this so damaging, and why do we need to fix it? We know that the British public is losing trust in the state’s institutions, there are multiple reasons for this, and most are far more important than civil servants making memes (yes, they’ve done this too). But, in a digital world, Conservatives have to understand that the relationship between the individual and the state, the very essence of the social contract, exists not just in visible policing or the tax on your payslip but, develops every single time you interact with the Government on your phone.

As a Conservative, I am naturally against the state encroaching too much into my life, and I believe this logic should exist online. The individual’s perception of the social contract is, for better or worse, is now forged every time one has to reload Gov.uk, or has to scroll past a Home Office ad on TikTok, or sees a taxpayer funded videographer forgetting to clean their lens.

If the Conservatives are serious about changing the state, and governing effectively, we have to make sure that the British state is not annoying people on Facebook, because it can critically undermine the perception of government, and democratic policy, if it is done badly.

So how do we do this? Firstly, we need to redefine the metrics for successful online communications from Government Departments. Politicians and parties need to have complete creative license to try and win votes online, make people support policies, and take the risk of being disliked by certain demographics for doing so. The institution of Government cannot afford to take that risk, so it shouldn’t.

We need to take a small state approach to the Government’s presence online. It should be for future Conservative Ministers to win public support for policy online, and the Civil Service run, Departmental accounts need to be sources of information, not viral videos. We need to focus on providing clear, useful and informative information online, not going viral. It should be for Ministers to communicate policy announcements online; nobody wants to watch a video from the Home Office during their evening scroll.

Any incoming Conservative Government needs to ask serious questions about the way the state interacts with individuals online. Does DESNZ need an Instagram, do citizens really want to see DEFRA using social media trends? How many people, realistically, who are in need of information from the state are opening TikTok?

A good online state looks like a Government whose website is the envy of the world, that protects us from online misinformation, and gives us accurate information from accounts we have no reason to distrust. As someone of the generation who has grown up in a world of online fake news, I am always sceptical of what I see online – it is the state’s job to counter that, not exist as an actor within it.

We cannot fall into the trap that Labour have. So let Ministers communicate free school breakfasts, and let the DfE tell us when GCSE results day is. Otherwise, we risk letting the civil service blunder its way to creating distrust in future Conservative policies.