If you cast your minds back to 2016, there was real concern that there was interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election, with the propagation of fake news; and not just fake news in the sense that President Trump levelled at media outlets who dared question the things that he has said but a weaponised disinformation campaign by Russian actors in particular that may or may not have been directed by the Russian state itself.
We might be tempted to think that this is a uniquely American phenomenon but when you consider the almost open warfare which is being conducted upon institutions by private media companies, it makes me wonder if private media companies and organisations themselves aren't employing farms of people in poorer countries as trolls to conduct warfare upon the battlefield of ideas. Places like Facebook and Twitter are fertile grounds upon which to sow the seeds of discord and where thorns of stupidity and lies might be allowed to infest the ground. If you are engaging in a war, then the idea of preparing the ground to your advantage, harkens at least as far back as Sun Tzu's 'The Art Of War'.
I am not naive enough to believe that only foreign powers are engaging in interference in elections and the political process. Foreign powers could very well have their motives and might want to cause mischief but the most obvious powers which benefit from the propagation of propaganda are domestic political parties and the people who either control or own them.
It used to be that the skills of advertising and marketing were enough to persuade people of the benefits of an argument but now that practically everyone is on their mobile devices and drinking from the fire hose of information, the level of scrutiny that people are demonstrating over the quality of information that they are consuming, is very very low indeed. Maybe there was once a push for things like critical thinking skills in school, however the kinds of kids who would self select for such classes grow into the kinds of people who would have otherwise already scruitnised the information that they are consuming. It is the people who don't really care about facts who are the problem.
If you have people who don't care about the quality of facts that their news reportage gives them, then it is really easy to feed them complete lies and falsehoods.
One of those lies happened to be about the season of bushfires that we have had. The common lie being spread was there were 183 people who had been arrested for bushfire related offenses. If you actually bothered to read the statement from the NSW Police Force, then the number of people who were arrested on suspicion of arson was 24... over the calendar year. If you were actually follow the matter numbers in the NSW Local Court system, then 23 of those 24 were actually minors in suburbia who had been committing minor arson, like setting bins and For Sale signs on fire. The other 1 of 24 was for a guy who had set his building on fire in an insurance fraud attempt. News outlets if they bothered to read the report from the NSW Police Force would have found that the 24 people arrested on suspicion of arson, had nothing to do with the bushfires; unless you equate setting bins on fire eight months ago with the cause of a bushfire today.
The problem was that the headline number of 183 had already spread literally around the world and was being reported by news outlets who were too dog lazy to bother doing any fact checking at all.
One of the annoying things that keeps on appearing on social media, is that someone like Sky News will report something which is obviously wrong and designed to provoke controversy and then people will share the thing. Various trolls (mainly on the authoritarian right) will then argue a series of talking points; which you'll find are actually all similar and between 5 and 26 hours later.
People who I follow will invariably share a thing as though it were fact and on multiple occasions I have been included in conversations which I was never part of.
I also find it sufficiently annoying enough when something is so hideously wrong, to want to question the reason why an opinion exists and if possible for a person to provide evidence. I find it especially annoying when media outlets and government ministers post content which is not only either cruel but is itself designed to break down the civic institutions of society.
A nation like Australia is generally too small on the world stage to have much of an impact on very much. Nevertheless, the media companies which Australia has unleashed had a more than outsized impact on the world. One of them in particular is probably partly responsible for both the election of Donald Trump, the continued election of Tories in the UK for the past decade, and Brexit.
I don't think it beyond the realm of possibility that domestic media outlets, think tanks and other organisations aren't themselves funding a war of disinformation. Organisations which enjoy not only tax exempt status but which are deductible gift recipients and whose figures aren't publicly available, could very well be funding troll farms overseas. I also wouldn't be surprised if actual terrorism was being funded.
I know that this sounds a bit conspiracy theoryish but the fact that online arguments in Australia seem to follow almost playbook like precision, makes me think that there possibly is a playbook. As someone who works in the land of forensic accounting where the general rule is to follow the money and then we're deliberately not allowed to follow the money, it makes me very suspicious.
The thing about a conspiracy theories is that sometimes, they turn out not to be a theory but an actual provable conspiracy.
I suspect that there is a disinformation war going on, I have my suspicions about who is funding said war, and I suspect that if nothing is done about it, then civic institutions in this country will be dismantled.
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