More here ... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... tank-findsCountry’s democracy at risk by actions that can ‘affect electoral outcomes’, says submission to Senate inquiry.
Financially motivated actors from Kosovo, Albania and the Republic of North Macedonia used nationalistic and Islamophobic content to target and manipulate Australian Facebook users during the 2019 election, according to analysts from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
Ahead of public hearings on Monday scheduled by the Senate’s select committee on foreign interference through social media, a submission from ASPI says it has found influence operations relating to Indonesia’s West Papua independence movement, Kashmir, and People’s Republic of China operations targeted at various political dissidents and the anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong.
“In the case of the Hong Kong protests, social media actions have ranged from vitriolic attacks on Twitter, to targeted harassment of key protest organisers including posting their personal details online to intimidate and deter,” the submission says.
It also points to a Guardian Australia investigation that uncovered a social media operation run from Israel that used divisive Islamophobic content “to steer Facebook audiences to revenue-generating content farms”.
“These activities have the potential to skew Australia’s political discourse, influence voting behaviour and affect electoral outcomes,” the thinktank warns.
The Senate inquiry was established last year to investigate the risks posed to Australia’s democracy by foreign interference through social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and WeChat.
ASPI will give evidence to the inquiry on Monday and the committee will also hear from witnesses from the Stanford Internet Observatory which has studied interference operations from China and Russia. Both ASPI and the Stanford Internet Observatory have had access to a database created by Twitter to enable research around disinformation, and have published analysis.
>snip<
The home affairs department has warned in a separate submission that foreign interference activity against Australian interests is occurring at an “unprecedented scale” and says measures to help people identify fake news could be one of the potential responses to defending sovereignty.
The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, used a major foreign policy speech last week to warn about the dangers of disinformation – a challenge she said was highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic, when false information had the potential to cost lives.
Payne pointed to last week’s report issued by the European Commission that concluded Russia and China had carried out targeted disinformation campaigns “seeking to undermine democratic debate and exacerbate social polarisation”.
She said Twitter had disclosed the following day that more than 32,000 accounts had been identified as state-linked information operations which the company attributed to China, Russia and Turkey.
The Chinese people have no access to platforms like Twitter due to direct censorship which leaves the CCP wide open to manipulate information maliciously fed to the west to suit their own agenda.
Now we also have TikTok where the minions of the CCP were sent out to acquire tickets for Trump's Tulsa rally and then leave them unused.