Sen. David Shoebridge

Chart notes:

Political Intelligence Dashboard section: Pulled from the leaderboard's 23 September 2026 weekly refresh. He isn't in the national top 10 on Overall, Meta or TikTok reach, so those charts are shown for competitive context only, with his own figure added below the Overall and Meta top 10 at his real rank (TikTok's chart omits him entirely, since his tracked tt figure is zero, see Methodology above). He does appear in the X Followers top 10 field, added below it at his real rank, and it's the one board of the four where he's closest to the cut. The final chart swaps in the leaderboard's YouTube-only board in place of the podcast chart, since that's the one board where he ranks inside the top 10, and it's his strongest platform by competitive position.

Overall reach chart: He isn't in the tracked top 10, so he's added below it at his own real rank, labelled #18, not a false #11: 259,370 combined reach (including the newly-verified TikTok figure), #18 of 23 researched overall, well below the #10 cutoff but shown directly against the field for scale. Unchanged from last pass.

Meta-only reach chart: Same treatment: added below the top 10 at his own real rank, #18, not a false #11. His IG + FB reach is 152,000, #18 of 23 researched. Unchanged from last pass.

TikTok followers chart: His verified 47,000-follower TikTok account had been recorded as zero in the leaderboard's tracked figures (see Methodology above), excluding him from this board entirely. That gap is now fixed, and he ranks #6 of 10, ahead of Katter, Babet, Faruqi and Lambie.

X (Twitter) followers chart: He's added below the top 10 at his real rank, #15 of 23, with 50,500 X followers.

YouTube subscribers chart: Swapped in for this briefing in place of the podcast/Podscan chart, since he runs a YouTube-native show rather than a podcast. He's #8 of 10 tracked channels with 9,870 subscribers. Unchanged from last pass.

Platform mix chart: Shows the share of his 259,370 combined reach, by platform.

Table-by-table notes:

Real Engagement leaderboard: Pulled straight from the Leaderboard's Real Engagement tab, now a 43-post sample across Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, cut here to the top 20 by engagement rate. Two of his sampled rows land inside this top 20 this week: Facebook at #6 (2.13%, up from #19 and 0.45% last pass) and X at #9 (1.69%, up from #13 and 0.67%). Instagram, unchanged at 0.68%, has slipped just outside the cut to #22 of 43 as the sample widened with fresh TikTok rows from other tracked accounts. On a per-follower basis his Facebook and X rows are out-performing several much bigger accounts, including Wong's and Plibersek's Facebook rows further up the same table.

Content Performance leaderboard: Same sampled posts, ranked by raw average likes and cut to the top 20 of 43. Facebook now makes this cut for the first time, at #18 (1,000 avg. likes, up from #29 and 259 last pass); Instagram (#34, 531) and X (#30, 601) still sit outside it. The gap between a strong engagement-rate rank and a still-mostly-weak raw-likes rank remains the clearest single pattern in this briefing: his content isn't underperforming, his reach is simply smaller than the nationally prominent accounts that dominate a raw-likes table, though Facebook's result shows that gap can close.

#auspol chatter on X: Row #2 is real, unpaid evidence his own content already travels on X: a third-party account's clip of his own speech outperformed almost everything else in this week's #auspol conversation, ahead of most professional political accounts. The rest is backdrop: government MPs pushing the algorithm opt-out bill, and unaffiliated accounts arguing about immigration and the Attorney-General.

Reddit hot posts: Row #10, a foreign AI-driven disinformation network targeting Australian politicians, sits directly inside his newly-confirmed Digital Rights & AI portfolio (see Idea 5).

X trending in Australia: The Israel row is the one worth watching given his Foreign Affairs and Defence portfolios: several of his own recent estimates clips (military exports questioning, the antisemitism envoy exchange) sit directly on this topic.

Real Facebook engagement: Facebook has no public "trending" feed of its own (Meta killed that feature in 2018), so this is the closest honest equivalent: real engagement on this week's biggest political stories, useful context now that Facebook is his own best-performing platform by engagement rate.

Media repurposing table: Channel names verified directly on each video's page, no login required; view counts weren't independently verified. Three are straightforward recuts (The Financial Express x2, News24), one is a Joint Committee exchange picked up by a major regional publisher (Australian Community Media), and the standout is a genuine booking, not a recut: Deepcut News chose him as the first-ever guest on its new Deepthink podcast.

Insider Mentions table: Separate from the media-repurposing table: this follows insider political-press coverage and committee/floor-level detail, tip sheets like POLITICO's Canberra Playbook plus primary-source verification against Senate Hansard, rather than general news pickup, and checks secondhand accounts against the primary record rather than repeating them uncritically.

Top Political Headlines: Story #2, the algorithm opt-out bill, has the most direct line to his own work: he was confirmed as the Greens' Digital Rights and AI spokesperson on 7 September.

NSW & portfolio headlines: Rows #1 and #2 are the strongest story of the week for him specifically: a state government extending strict youth bail laws in exactly the week his own federal inquiry found the evidence doesn't support that kind of crackdown.

YouTube channel: Recent uploads found this pass include his questioning of the government's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, a hate speech bill committee exchange, defence military-exports questioning, and a National Indigenous Australians Agency estimates exchange on the Youpla scheme. All are unedited committee footage.

TikTok account: Follower and likes counts verified live on the profile 21 September 2026, no login required. Representative post lines: "Imagine you're in charge of the Government, how much would you spend to get exactly zero new submarines?" and a Defence-estimates exchange on military exports to Israel.