Tales from the misinformation mines

Content Corner

I’ve now been covering the dystopia beat for a couple of years now. I’ve spent countless hours in secret group chats, monitoring subreddits and using obscure tools to try to show how people are using the internet to amass and exert power. Misinformation — from viral rumours to politicians’ bullshit to influence campaigns — is a big part of this story. Here are some of the things that I’ve learned.

As someone who covers the Australian internet exclusively, I’ve seen how the spread of misinformation is influenced by our context. It’s easy to think of it as coming from somewhere else, especially when you see hoaxes like the viral “school kids believe they’re cats” ripped straight from American headlines and repeated here. But what I’ve seen is that the misinformation that takes off or takes hold is almost always Australian-made. We’re also surprisingly immune to misinformation that comes from elsewhere, like when certain people, including Clive Palmer, tried but failed to import election fraud claims during the 2022 election.

Misinformation comes from the places you don’t expect. There are the usual suspects, such as conspiracy communities and fringe political actors, who pop up time and time again as sources. But don’t fool yourself by thinking they’re the only ones. I remember during the 2019-22 bushfire season, amid the flood of unproven claims and viral misinformation, there was one kinda funny rumour: Selena Gomez fans — “Selenators” is their preferred term, I’m reliably told — made up that the pop star donated $5 million to promote her upcoming single, “Rare”.

Another motivation behind misinformation is money. There’s a tendency to think of misinformation as a weapon in the information war, but sometimes it’s a sneaky way of cashing in on the attention economy. One of the most prominent misinformation websites in Australia is a dinky fake-news publication called Australian National Review. How does it keep going? Well, it runs heaps of advertisements on its website. In effect, companies are paying misinformation creators and curators because of the attention they garner. If you’re not fussed about whether something is true or not, then misinformation becomes a very attractive way of getting eyeballs, which can be turned into dollars.

One misinformation source that sometimes is over-egged is bots. I get it. There are people with views out there that are so hard to understand that sometimes it’s tempting to wonder what if they’ve been tricked somehow? Sometimes you might wonder whether people have been fooled by a covert bot campaign, or whether they may even be bots themselves. While bot campaigns certainly exist — I’ve discovered some myself — they’re not very convincing. The same goes for other new tools: a report that came out of the US just this week found that while artificial intelligence may be increasingly part of influence campaigns, it’s not very effective.

So what should you worry about when it comes to misinformation? I think the role of mainstream media in spreading and validating misinformation has become under-appreciated. Public debate about misinformation tends to focus on the internet, often citing the enormous scale of viral posts as its risk. But far more people watch the news bulletins on TV every single night than all but a handful of social media posts. It’s more than just scale too. I’ve noticed that there’s a qualitative effect when a mainstream media source spreads misinformation that’s bubbled up from the fringes, or validates it through de-contextualised or sensationalist coverage.

And, like everything else, misinformation has become totally politicised. You’d like to think that getting stuff right would be politically neutral — naive, right? — but alas, it’s not. In fact, for some, being fact-checked has become a badge of honour (see Senator Malcolm Roberts’ Facebook page for proof). Coalition figures have come out against the government’s misinformation bill even though they passed a very similar law themselves! I don’t have the solutions to solving our misinformation crisis, but I can tell you that polarisation is making it harder to solve.

Hyperlinks

Department of Defence staff used ChatGPT thousands of times without authorisation (Crikey)

NT Supreme Court judge says Meta must ‘take some responsibility’ for sharing of child abuse material (ABC)

Streaming platforms should pay us for infrastructure, telcos say (AFR)

Australia’s .au domain administrator denies data breach after ransomware posting (The Record)

‘Heavy TAB gamblers’ among groups targeted by online advertising database (Guardian Australia)

An anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist will appear on an Australian reality TV show (Crikey)

That’s it for WebCam this week! I’ll be off for a bit but I will be back.

Don’t be a stranger. Please contact me if you have anything to talk about (tips, leaks, even just for a chin-wag). Here are a few ways. In the meantime, you can find more of my writing here.

Bye!