A disinformation reporting portal initiated by the Australian Labour Party (ALP) to “fight lies and fake news” has reportedly been “swamped” with submissions of misleading Labour Party advertising.
“Election campaigns around the world and here in Australia have seen a rise in misinformation and disinformation campaigns, often from unknown or falsified sources, that scare and mislead people,” states the disinformation reporting webpage.
“It’s important that the Party is across sources of disinformation so we can respond swiftly,” it states, so that “Labour members and supporters can report disinformation they come across, especially online.”
The portal includes a form where people can report what disinformation they’ve seen, which social media platform they saw it on, and upload evidence.
Labour’s plan to combat disinformation with a new reporting register has spectacularly backfired after people started submitting the party’s own advertisements to be fact-checked. …
Young nuclear campaigner Will Shackel revealed to his social media followers on Thursday he had reported one of Labour’s own ads to the register.
“Labour has just created a website to report disinformation. Here’s something that I just reported. The irony here is quite extreme,” Shackel wrote on X, with a screenshot of a Labour Party anti-nuclear ad.
Earlier this year, opposition leader Peter Dutton (Liberal, Australia’s main centre-Right party) made nuclear energy a core part of the Liberal Party’s clean energy plan ahead of the federal election next year, announcing a plan to build seven nuclear power stations in June.
Labour responded with negative social media ads, including those below showing towering nuclear power plants in landmark, built-up Sydney locations.
“The Sydney Opera House can be seen in the foreground being towered over by two cooling towers with what appears to be mushroom clouds exploding from them.
“Peter Dutton wants to build nuclear power plants all over Australia. Join our fight to stop nuclear coming to you,” the slogan read.
“Cooling towers are used at some nuclear power stations as a way of ejecting heat from the plant and keep the equipment cool.
“However, the white vapour seen wafting off the towers is water vapour, not smoke or mushroom clouds commonly associated with a nuclear explosion.
“Another disputed element of the ad is the claim about where the Opposition is proposing nuclear plants be built, with Mr. Dutton suggesting just seven sites for development as part of his plan announced in July.
“None of these include the Sydney Opera House or general Sydney area.”
Sky News clarified that Labour’s anti-nuclear ads ran in April, before Dutton announced the Liberal Party’s proposed locations in June. Nevertheless, it is ludicrously misleading to picture a nuclear power plant adjacent to the Sydney Opera House and Sydney’s prestigious beach-front eastern suburbs.
Judging by the comments under Shackel’s post on X, others have been inspired to make their own reports of Labour advertising to the ALP’s disinformation portal.
Labour politicians have previously been criticised for “juvenile” three-eyed fish and Blinky Bill memes critical of the opposition’s nuclear power policy, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Labour) said critics needed to “lighten up”.
Indeed, it would be ridiculous to report satire to a disinformation portal, although that’s essentially what Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg alleges the Biden Administration did, stating in a letter to U.S. Congress that the administration “pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire”.
The Australian Government also policed Covid memes on the internet, the Twitter Files show.
These scenarios highlight the political nature of these kinds of disinformation initiatives.
After all, what does Labour mean when it says the party intends to “respond swiftly” to disinformation reported on the portal?
I have contacted the ALP to request comment on what the party intends to do with the information collected on the disinformation reporting portal, and will update this post if a response is received.
Meanwhile, we can speculate. A politically savvy party focused on winning an upcoming election might use the information uploaded for some or all of the following purposes:
- Crowd sourcing a list of social media posts to report to platforms as being in contravention with their Community Guidelines, with a view to getting them taken down. Similar to what the Department of Home Affairs and Department of Health did during Covid.
- Informing sentiment research to shape messaging.
- Generating statistics to feed to friendly media and to use in campaign materials.
- Identifying influential actors who undermine party messaging, so as to target those actors specifically.
Even if a portal like this was created with the genuine motive of combating disinformation, perceptions of mis- and disinformation are inherently subjective, and therefore prone to partisan biases.
(I am talking exclusively here about attempts to police political expression, which obviously excludes illegal speech and content like defamation, incitement to violence or child pornography.)
Recent research from the News and Media Research Centre (NMRC) in Australia found that political orientation is associated with which topics people report seeing misinformation on.
Left-wing news consumers were more likely to report having seen misinformation about national politics, immigration and the Palestine and Israel conflict, while Right-wing news consumers were more likely to report having seen misinformation on climate change and the cost-of-living crisis.
In other words, what you think is mis- or disinformation depends on your politics.
In another 2022 study from the NMRC on Covid misinformation, the researchers reported that focus group participants did “not have a shared perspective or viewpoint about what misinformation is”.
What this suggests is that politically-driven attempts to fight mis- and disinformation through mass reporting operations are not capable of steering public discourse closer to the truth. Rather, they are political tools to achieve political ends. They should be treated as such, and trolled relentlessly.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.