"ALBANESE LOSES IT AS BARNABY JOYCE TEARS INTO HIM OVER NEW HATE SPEECH LAWS — LABOR’S CENSORSHIP AGENDA EXPOSED!”
“Pauline Hanson and Lee Hanson unveil never-seen duet — a song connecting them across time.”
“SHOCKING NEWS FROM AUSTRALIA: BILLIONAIRE GINA RINEHART FULLY SPONSORS THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD PRODIGY WHO SAVED HIS FAMILY.”
What do all of these stories have in common? None are real.
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ABC NEWS Verify examined 20 overseas Facebook pages, mostly administered from Vietnam, using these tactics to enrage and engage Australian Facebook users.
Anne Kruger, a University of Queensland expert in countering false information on social media, told ABC NEWS Verify the algorithms serving content to users on social media were currently geared towards anger.
She’d like to see the social media giants do better.
“I think we have design engineers that can do more when it comes to flagging what is the quality information and leading people to that,” she said.
“Why is it so easy to be led to the bottom feeders when it comes to content and those that are making money out of it? Can we please make it easier for people to actually find quality information?”
Queensland University of Technology disinformation researcher Timothy Graham said there were likely many more similar accounts beyond what ABC NEWS Verify examined out there.
“I would wager that this is the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
[…]
On the surface, a Facebook account with the name Trần Tân paints a picture of a life of muted affluence in Vietnam.
Photos posted to the account show a man shopping and sitting in an opulent hotel foyer.
The account is involved with running a page ABC NEWS Verify examined, called Unique Mystery.
It appears to be generating fake news for money.
Each post includes a link to a story on a fake news website, where users are served ads.
It’s the same model for the vast majority of accounts that ABC NEWS Verify examined.
Most of the accounts have at least one admin based in Vietnam listed in their transparency information. Some have admins in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and the United States.
Two accounts, Down Under Daily and Strength in Principle, were only established in January and immediately began pumping out Australian fake news.
Others have been around for longer — some years — and had previously been creating fake news that targeted other countries.
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After ABC NEWS Verify contacted Meta, it took down most — but not all — of the pages we highlighted for violating its inauthentic behaviour policies.
Meta said it was constantly enforcing against inauthentic behaviour using a combination of manual enforcement and automated systems, telling ABC NEWS Verify in a statement that it was still “investigating the content” for any violations of Meta policy.
As those investigations by Meta continue, ABC NEWS Verify has identified even more fake political news accounts since the company was made aware of this story.
Senator Payman said Meta should do more.
“If platforms like Meta can detect copyrighted music in seconds, they can certainly detect coordinated AI-generated smear pages. The question is whether they want to when there is no imperative to?”
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