It’s said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.
Social media has supercharged the speed and scale of lies. Much of the discussion about misinformation and disinformation on social media focuses on the obvious fake news pedallers and grifters. But what about the habits of our own political leaders?
Crikey’s A Dossier of Lies and Falsehoods: How Scott Morrison Manipulates the Truth lays out the case that Australia’s prime minister is happy to play fast and loose with the truth when it suits him. Naturally, this proclivity extends to his social media habits.
Scott Morrison is a keen user of social media. He and his team use it to directly reach voters with information about new policies, his government and himself.
Over the past year, Morrison’s accounts have posted an average of almost two times per day. Using carefully chosen snaps taken by his personal photographer, the prime minister’s social media accounts show a carefully crafted image of a man who is part-daggy dad, part-respected leader.
A closer look at what Morrison has posted about Australia’s vaccine rollout — the subject of a lie and a falsehood captured in the dossier — shows how people respond to his promises and how far they go, even when they turn out to be false.
Promises more popular than the truth
Morrison has posted to social media about vaccines more than 50 times in the past year. How much people have engaged with those posts varies on a number of factors — including whether it was true or not, it seems.
The number of Facebook engagements (likes, shares and comments) on a post tells us just how many people have responded to a piece of content. It can also be used as a rough proxy for how many people saw the post. Facebook’s algorithmic feed prioritises content that’s engaging, meaning something that’s interesting is likely to be shown to more people.
Knowing this, it’s possible to surmise that Morrison’s optimistic posts prior to vaccine rollout — particularly those promising that Australians will be first in line to get their COVID-19 vaccinations — were generally more engaging and seen by more people than his posts about the rollout’s execution.
Morrison’s most popular Facebook post was a livestream of a press conference where the prime minister announced that the government had secured a deal with AstraZeneca to obtain their vaccine candidate.
More than 220,000 people watched his announcement, in which Morrison promised that Australians would be “among the first in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine”. That turned out to be false.
Of Morrison’s top 10 Facebook posts by engagement numbers, only two were posted since the vaccine rollout started: one about the first person in Australia to receive a vaccine and another about the first frontline workers to get their jabs.
Since then, Morrison’s posts about Australia’s maligned vaccination rollout have proven to be significantly less popular.
His least engaging vaccine post was made earlier this month when he said that just 3 million doses had been administered to Australians, significantly behind where rollout was initially projected to be. Other unpopular posts included further updates and announcements about where people could get their jabs.
While other factors affect this engagement (posts of graphs are generally less engaging than live video, for example), the general trend suggests that Australians are more enticed by lofty promises than they are with the disappointing execution of Australia’s vaccination scheme.
Lies and falsehoods travel beyond their original post
Social media analytics also allows some insight into how far these messages can go, regardless of whether they’re true or not.
Beyond the hundreds of thousands of views of Morrison’s initial post about the AstraZeneca deal, reposting of similar rhetoric allowed the message to carry further.
Social media analytics tool CrowdTangle is limited to searching posts from Facebook pages (i.e. official accounts and not personal accounts used by most people) and so can only give us a limited picture of what’s happening on the platform.
It shows a search for “Australians will be among the first in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine”, a message used repeatedly by Morrison on social media and elsewhere, was posted by other pages nearly 100 times in the week since the initial AstraZeneca announcement.
These posts, shared by accounts ranging from the Liberal Party of Australia’s official account and news outlets’ pages to community pages such as Explore Melbourne, had 49,000 engagements during this time.
What this shows is not just that social media platforms like Facebook allow Morrison to spread lies and falsehoods faster and further, but they also reward him for doing so.
Another painfully obvious part of Morrison’s social media strategy, are the number of pre-fab cheer squad responders who usually account for the first half dozen reactions, minutes after the post is made…as if they are just your average, quiet aussies who spend their day perched on the computer, just in case their beloved leader issues a missive.
These characters can also been seen working the feed as it legitimately grows, looking for anyone less than enthusiastically supporting Scotty, so they can do a group pile on.
Then there are the cheap-as-chips responders, often with the poor spelling, grammar, and sentences that barely make sense, who usually just profess their undying love for Scotty.
This same goon squad can be found on ALP and Green feeds, doing the reverse….first in to attack, post lazy memes and trot out the standard “Labor can’t manage the economy” etc lines.
Sounds like a typical thread here with the usual suspects.
Maybe, scottie from marketing is getting ready to use Facebook in the coming election, as it was used in the last federal election that is, by Clive Palmer and his “whatever” party to push completely unmitigated lies.
Facebook refused to act until the election was all over.
Yet, morrispin has very recently claimed that social media is the home of evil, and he should know he spends plenty of time tbere.
Has anyone else noticed how few people have bothered responded to today’s edition in toto?
Is it that the lies of Scummo are not news? Or not worth bothering to read?
Nothing works & nobody cares?
Is this why we can’t have nice things?
As Meatloaf sang, “Everything’s a Lie and that’s a Fact!”
Perhaps Scummo is a Cretan, like Epimenides and could be thrown out under S44?.
I felt a bit underwhelmed by the list of lies, especially on the back of yesterday’s teaser of “hang on to your hats, folks”. I was hoping for some new revelation that would lead to his immediate arrest. Okay, maybe not that big, but something new.
It’s good to keep getting reminded of his porkies, but it wasn’t exactly revelatory, so i guess it didn’t inspire many to comment on stuff that has pretty much been talked about at length previously.
Aside from having it actually published and called him a liar (which is big in media circles because it can be hard to prove and it can be defamatory, so it’s risky) – it should give other media license to discuss this reporting without being at risk themselves to be sued for defamation. It remains to be seen if that will happen though.
We know he lies a lot more, but can’t prove it, so that would be too risky to call those speculations straight up lies.
Nothing new which makes this entire ballyhooed edition a circle jerk of lazy, clueless and/or complicit enablers masquerading as newshounds.
We are all aware of $cotty’s lies and deceptions but Crikey actually published them. This is new. It’s huge news and will hopefully drive other msm to act accordingly. Light exposes darkness, thus making $cotty’s standards visible to all.
The format may also have thrown off some readers. I usually base my reading of Crikey from the email version, but couldn’t today.
You’re probably right that the lies are not actually news, but publishing that he is a liar, with documentation, may indeed be a step further than the Australian media has gone so far, given our harsher defamation laws than most of the western world.
The tragic legacy of the Trump circus was to demonstrate to goons like Morrison that there is no real political consequence to lying to the electorate. People just don’t seem to get outraged at the bullshit, lies and lack of accountability from politicians. Maybe I am cynical but people seem more interested in what politicians will deliver for them personally rather than taking a broader view on issues like accountability for politicians and equality across the social spectrum.
I think a large part of the problem is that too many people are having to work two jobs or extra long hours just to get by and don’t have the time, or the energy left to become involved, even when it is they who are suffering the most because of tnis government cruelty. Those who are living on a good salary don’t care because it doesn’t affect them, unfortunately they are often the ones who will vote for the coalition.
I found this story frustrating. The headline and the premise of the story is that Morrison lied to the Australian people when he announced that “we would be first in line to receive the vaccine” While the article provides detailed analysis on the public response to the Prime Minister’s social media posts on vaccine rollout, there is scant evidence presented in the article to support the headline that Morrison was lying. Am I missing something here?
Well, as the US, UK, EU,most of Scandinavia, China and Russia were at least half the way through their first round of vaccinations before Australia received its first shipment of AstraZeneca and Pfizer and so, maybe you did miss something.
The reason he knew it was a lie, was because he was the main reason why Australia didn’t sign a contract with a number of drug companies. scottie from marketing ended up placing us at number 60 in the order of priority.
Thanks Ratty you are more on top of this issue than I am however, my point still stands that given that the story was running with the headline that Scotty was lying to the Australian people, then the writer should have included some detail to support the assertion. Otherwise it is just lazy journalism to assume the reader already knows that the PM was lying and raises the point of why I would read the article if I already knew the details around why he was lying?
Was this the same point of time where even one of the vaccine suppliers came out and said that Australia had only lodged an expression of interest, and not actually placed an order for the vaccine?
I would love the press to actually pin Morrison down on stuff like this. “When you say we have 160 million vaccines, do you mean we physically have that number here, in the country, ready to go?” When he starts flooding the room with gobbledygook stats, the questions should continue relentlessly. “How many are actually in the country? How many are just on order?”.
I remember this was the same thing that happened with Trump, journos would be browbeaten or just let him off the hook, but then towards the end of his reign, they started to show more backbone….i reckon Jon Swan’s interview was a turning point…and as they stood up to Trump, more conferences ended with him storming off in a dummy spit. And so it should be with Morrison.
It wouldn’t take too many dummy spit conferences, to start to dent his manufactured image as a fit and highly regarded leader, and recast him as a weakling and a coward.
“How many are actually in the country? How many are just on order?”.
Or, even worse, how many are not even commercially on order yet.
I think that you are being optimistic that it wouldn’t take too many dummy spit conferences, to start to dent his manufactured image…. Watch the second clip here (the one minute and 37 second one – but it is worth watching the pushback in both clips)
https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1366310101783437312
I am guessing this is the sort of dummy spit you mean. However I am not sure it actually gets any cut through with the average voter.
i remember cheering when that one happened, thinking the journos might start doing this on a regular basis, but it hasn’t eventuated so far unfortunately.
if this was a regular occurrence, i think there’d be two effects, 1) punters would get fed up with a pm who was forever fleeing and 2) it would start to get inside Morrison’s head, the way the Lincoln Project people were able to get into Trump’s, and start getting him to behave more like a spiteful brat, more instinctively, and less to script.
Scotty has shown that his first instincts are unerringly the wrong ones, and he has a glass jaw that is overdue some contact.