Australian elections at risk from foreign misinformation campaigns

The issue of foreign powers using fake news spread by fake profiles on social media to influence elections rose to prominence following the 2016 US elections, but a new parliamentary report (pdf) says Australia is just as at risk.

While misinformation interference in the election of former US President Donald Trump may have been widely reported, it also played a key role in the Philippines election and the Brexit vote in the same year, according to a policy document from Reset Australia (pdf), the local arm of a global initiative that targets digital threats to society.

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“The Department of Home Affairs noted that it regularly observes 'campaigns unfolding on social media that involve disinformation'. Some have been linked to foreign state actors,” reads the report.

It goes on to say that while Australia has not been the subject of any major targeted misinformation campaigns by foreign powers so far, “It is possible, if not likely, that Australia will face such an attempt in the future”.

Reset Australia executive director Chris Cooper says, “We know malign foreign actors are able to reach into millions of Australian smartphones to sow division, disunity, and disharmony. Right now, our governing bodies are ill-equipped to reign in these harms, largely because we can’t see them until it’s too late."  

The report revealed confusion and a lack of accountability, with little clarity on who was responsible for preventing and identifying foreign misinformation campaigns — Neil Hawkins, an Home Affairs official, equivocated on whether his department had any responsibility.

The report makes seven recommendations, which are (paraphrased):

1. Delegate accountability to one department
2. Be proactive in protecting non-government groups that are common targets
3. Establish ways of communicating foreign interference to the public 
4. Publicly release the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation
5. Publicly release the Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce's terms of reference
6. Require platforms to disclose interference and empower agency response
7. Conduct an audit to assess the Government’s capability to detect disinformation campaigns.

Reset Australia’s Cooper adds, “We need evidence-based policy solutions that focus on systems and processes, not reactive responses which focus on specific content and individual actors or industry-written codes. As this report outlines, Australian policymakers should demand greater transparency about what users are seeing and sharing, this includes audits of how social media's algorithms are curating people's online experience."

The report concludes with a quote from Twitter’s ANZ public policy director Kara Hinesley from a Select Committee earlier this year saying, “Removal of content alone will not address this challenge. The threat we face requires extensive partnership and collaboration with government entities, civil society, experts and industry peers. We each possess information that others do not have, and our combined efforts are more powerful together in combating these threats.”