'Industrial' clickbait disinformation targets Australian politics

Several accounts -- run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers -- later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated articles and advertisements.

AFP has tracked over a dozen sports and human-interest pages promoting content that mixes actual news with fabrications, with some posts getting thousands of shares.

The websites display "almost industrial level forms of misinformation", said open-source intelligence analyst Giano Libot.

"It's designed for the algorithm in search engines to pick up," Libot said.

"It also is reflective that, especially in Southeast Asia, we don't have a lot of policy around it yet."

Meta removed 13 pages in March after AFP contacted the Facebook parent company for comment, citing site violations.

The network is the latest to emerge from Vietnam, where low labour and electricity costs have long bred a cottage industry of click farming via social media.

An AFP investigation last year uncovered more than 30 baseball-themed pages mostly operated from the country publishing false political claims ahead of the World Series, prompting removals by Meta.

AFP fact-checkers have debunked similar disinformation targeting Dutch politicians.

AFP works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, including in Asia and the European Union.

Experts say the surge of AI-generated political clickbait is a relatively new phenomenon for Australia, attributing it to the country's increasing polarisation.

"Often the purpose of disinformation is not to benefit a particular party, but to destabilise communities and create an era of distrust," said Jeannie Paterson, co-director of the University of Melbourne's Centre of AI and Digital Ethics.

"Australia is an ideal place at the moment for this sort of destabilisation exercise."
'Foreign interference'
Recent in-fighting between Australia's opposition coalition and the rise of Pauline Hanson's far-right One Nation party provided ample fodder for the pages AFP identified.

Among the most widespread claims was that Hanson had launched a $12 million lawsuit against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's Labor Party.

Identical posts appeared on swimming and tennis-focused Facebook accounts linking to websites littered with ads and content in several different languages -- including Vietnamese titles.

Facebook transparency data showed the pages were managed by several administrators in Vietnam, despite listing contact details associated with American hotels and casinos.

On another post falsely claiming Hanson read Foreign Minister Penny Wong's record "on live TV" on CNN, commenters cheered the senator, saying it was time for the top diplomat to "go home".

But the claims were baseless and an analysis using several AI detection tools -- including one co-developed by AFP -- found the articles were "likely machine-generated".

A One Nation spokesperson told AFP the pages are "a clear case of foreign interference in domestic Australian politics".

Albanese's office did not respond to a request for comment.

AFP could not independently verify the provenance of the Facebook pages and websites.

While Australia's next federal election isn't until 2028, politicking is still happening at the state level, with polls due in Victoria state in November and New South Wales next year.

The onslaught of polarising themes online "can sway electoral behaviour" on the local level, said Ika Trijsburg of the Australian National University, "because it's much less entrenched".
'Cat-and-mouse game'
In a bid to reduce the potential risks of deceptive AI use, Vietnam in March enacted a law regulating the technology -- the first country in Southeast Asia to do so.

The legislation requires companies to clearly label AI-generated content. It applies to developers as well as providers and deployers of the technology, whether they are Vietnamese organisations or foreign entities operating in the country.

Still, the tide of AI slop is likely to persist.

In mid-February, a new Facebook page called "AU News Today" started publishing Australian political news that mirrored the pages AFP identified.

An investigation by the Australian Associated Press uncovered a similar Vietnam-based network of accounts, disguised as news outlets, that continued publishing well into March.

Shaanan Cohney, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Melbourne, said there is "a levelling-up of the skills in the disinformation world, which makes it a cat-and-mouse game".

"Even if things were easy to detect before, it gets harder to bring down these networks."

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