A mystery astroturfing online campaign targeting Scott Morrison’s refusal to give more funding to hospitals to deal with COVID-19 case peaks has spent more than $10,000 to advertise to more than half a million Australians.
This campaign shows how online tools can be used to instantaneously show political advertising at targeted audiences without disclosure of who’s behind it.
On September 28, a “We Love Our Hospitals – WLOH” Facebook page was created and weloveourhospitals.org was registered. While the About section claims it’s for showing appreciation “for our hospitals and the wonderful people who work in them”, the page’s handful of posts focus on attacking the federal government for a lack of hospital funding.
Since the page was created, $10,162 has been spent promoting three critical posts to Facebook users, according to Facebook’s public library of advertisements. The ads are targeted at Queensland and Tasmania and have been viewed collectively at least 565,000 times.
The website claims that “a community group made up of passionate members around Australia, who all share a love of our healthcare system and hospitals, and are prepared to show it with meaningful action” are behind the page. But information about the identities of those involved is nowhere to be found on the Facebook page or website. The domain’s registration details obscure the identity of the person who registered it.
The website mostly features generic stock photos, but the one image that features what appears to be surgeons in scrubs holding up a sign of the logo has been photoshopped to include the logo. Journalist and open source information analyst Elise Thomas points out that the photograph’s metadata shows the image was also created on September 28 by user “Ed” using graphic design tool Canva.
Curiously, shortly after this Crikey reporter tweeted about the Facebook page and its spend, the website’s content was almost all taken down after remaining unchanged since publication two weeks ago.
Despite Facebook’s transparency efforts which allowed Crikey to find out about these advertisements and their targeting, the identity of the person or people behind this campaign is unknown. That’s despite a five-figure spend in just two weeks, among the top Facebook political and social advertisers during that period.
As Australia is not yet in an election period and these ads are not explicitly about an election, it does not appear to break election advertisement disclosure rules.
But with an election not far off and a clearly partisan tone to it — all the posts specifically target the prime minister and his government, with little concern for how state governments have run their hospitals, and are shown only to people in two states who are crucial to winning the election — the difference between what is and isn’t considered an election advertisement is slim.
We Love Our Hospitals won’t shift an election or even a seat by itself. But it lays out a playbook for how someone can easily run a shadowy digital political campaign without accountability.
Okay, some one or some group of people are spending money on adverising against Morrison.
How does that differ from. anonymous ppl pouring.money into Liberal/ NP coffers, or shady back door deals that shady characters/ organisations donate under table.
We never did find out who paid Porter!Transparency is a two way affair.
And, wow, 10 grand up against the multi-millions of the Rupert propaganda machine. How dare those peasants!
At least what this campaign reports is true – the LNP have never accepted the principle of equitable universal health. Not sure why it should bother them.
I read this as the left finally cottoning on that the tactics used by the right to spread misinformation and astroturf is winning elections and the whole “we go high” rhetoric is losing elections. I’ve been thinking for a while that the 2022 Federal election will be particularly dirty (after the filth that was 2019), but I’m hopeful it’ll mean reform in the aftermath.
The difference of course being that what is posted is not untrue
Perhaps, but telling the community that our side’s terrorists are actually freedom fighters isn’t going to lead us to a nirvana of truth and light any time soon.
Small point – Nirvana is not a synonym for Paradise, it means ‘extinguishment’, of everything that makes us human.
Ah Selkie proving my Crikey pedant point 🙂 Jokes dear!
Downvoted for gentle jokes! Sacre bleu
Still worth knowing as a basic a
point of accurate meaning. As used by Peter (no offence meant) its a clear misnomer.
Small point – ‘extinguishment’ is word nobody needed.Try ‘extinction’.
But they’re different words. Wikipedia says it literally blown-out, like an oil lamp.
Yay for MediScare mkII?
The current state of our universal health care system…Medicare…is as was predicted by so-called ‘MediScare’ at the last two elections, by the ALP. In fact, the message was entirely true!!
My point.
MediScare was a dismissive term aimed to discredit a political campaign based upon the very real and true intentions of the LNP government to privatize the payments section of Medicare.
I am constantly amazed of the ability to give a name made up of descriptors which are the antithesis of the reality.
“Services Australia” the new outsourced Medicare assessments and payments section of Medicare.
Is neither providing anything regarding a “service” and was sent offshore until the Covid19 outbreak took hold in India.
It is as good as the “Democratic Republic of Congo” which is not democratic, a dictatorship rather than a republic and was formerly Zaire.
So we’ve now got a race to the bottom, to see which side of politics can abuse social media the most effectively using shadowy faux-apolitical content. Is that what we’ve arrived at?
Battling proxies over proxy policies?
Let the dead bury the dying – it’s a fight between zombies & vampires.
The race to the bottom has already been won by Clive Palmer, with his Kelly fronted UAP Ads, that we are being inundated with Months out from the next Federal Election.
Arrived at? That’s a bit like ‘solutions’. We are all on evolutionary paths. There’s no arriving and no solutions. Try ‘ this is the path we are on?’ And instead of solutions, we have ‘pathways forward.’
As ozzyman reviews points out, there is only one destination. Don’t go there. The rest of us are on a never ending bridge, err, journey. Some to Xenu, most to worm food.
Prize has already been won by Clive Palmer in the last election with the $68,000,000 Face Book campaign which told all those miner workers and their families that labor was bringing a “Death Tax”.
Assuming of course the person who did it is a politician.
Was this supposed to be a news story or a tutorial for disgruntled voters on how to launch a campaign against the government?
I’m assuming that those who wish to abuse social media for nefarious political purposes already have been fully trained, and Cam publishing a recipe book isn’t going to change anything. On the other hand, there are many people who are overly trusting of democratic institutions that need to be better informed.
he he he
This is the best news I’ve read all day.
It’s not illegal and I sincerely thank the anonymous individual for their contribution.
Scomo’s shortcoming are so vast and yet so well obscured by traditional media outlets (all right-centre including the abc) that the left will not win by playing fair.