‘No coincidence’: Eruption of 11th hour scare campaign a sign of ‘political desperation’

The platform X has been flooded with posts attacking Labor and the prime minister for a whole host of contentious tax policies targeting property, superannuation and inheritance.

Some of the most widely spread posts identified by news.com.au are either misleading, shared by accounts with no identifying information, or by apparently fake personas.

Convenient torrent of claims

Take for example the false claim by so-called legal academic Jenny Taylor that Labor will introduce a 40 per cent inheritance tax, viewed more than 90,000 times on X in less than two days. Taylor also wrongly declared Labor will “scrap the capital gains tax rebate”.

But an artificial intelligence detection tool concluded there’s a 99 per cent chance Taylor’s profile photo is AI-generated.

The inheritance or “death tax” line has suddenly appeared countless times across X over the past few days, and then today, Opposition leader Peter Dutton described Labor’s plan to lift the tax rate on superannuation balances higher than $3 million as “a quasi-inheritance tax”.

Another post from conservative journalist and commentator Fred Pawle appears to show Treasurer Jim Chalmers refusing to rule out a tax hit on those selling their family home in a heated exchange on Sunrise.

The only issue is that Dr Chalmers was speaking with former co-host David Koch, who left the Channel 7 breakfast program two years ago. The clip has been viewed 125,000 times.

What’s the likelihood this sudden flood of misleading information is totally organic and its abrupt timing in the dying days of the campaign is purely coincidental?

“Very, very low,” associate professor Stephen Harrington from Queensland University of Technology said.

Desperate dying days

Digital communications expert Professor Daniel Angus, director of the Digital Media Research Centre, agreed that the past few days are “no coincidence” and labelled it “desperation politics”.

“The major political parties need to accept that sometimes it goes their way, sometimes it doesn’t,” Professor Angus said.

“There’s an ebb and flow and everyone gets to run the country for three years at some point. This tendency to throw everything at a campaign when you’re done, especially really dangerous rhetoric, doesn’t help anyone.”

Dr Harrington is part of a research project looking at the proliferation of ‘dark political communication’, which is distributed outside of traditional channels and appears to be the handiwork of ordinary non-political users.

“In reality, it’s created by parties directly or organisations that support them,” he said. “It doesn’t carry authorisation that identifies it as being political messaging, so it circulates beneath the line.”

The storm of misleading claims on X is not overly surprising, Dr Harrington added.

“Something big and splashy like this in the final days of a campaign isn’t new and there are some well-known instances, like Labor’s ‘Medi-scare’ campaign in 2016,” he said.

“What we’re starting to see though is the normalisation of that strategy on social media.

“I would suggest that some rules and values are more likely to be bent in the final week of a campaign when a party looks to be losing. What have they got to lose?

“At this point in the campaign, it seems desperate. I don’t know if this kind of thing will have much of an impact.”

Third parties need more scrutiny

Tracing who’s responsible for content is tricky, meaning there’s little-to-no accountability or scrutiny, which adds to concerns about the rising prevalence of such tactics.

News.com.au asked the Opposition if it had knowledge of any co-ordinated campaign and for its views more misinformation and disinformation on social media broadly, but didn’t receive a response.

This election more than any before has an American vibe about it thanks to powerful players outside the main political machines spending significantly on content creation and distribution, akin to PACs or political action committees, in the US.

There’s the group Climate 200 supporting a host of independent Teal candidates and Advance Australia backing the Coalition, performing many of the functions that were once exclusively those of the parties.

“There are snippets of Americanisms in this election campaign, I agree,” Dr Harrington said.

Professor Angus agreed and said: “Some of those third-party groups have been sharing straight up unhinged lies. That should worry everyone with an interest in protecting Australian democracy.”

Other misleading claims

The flood of dodgy tax content on X is not the sole example of fake or misleading message being widely spread during this campaign.

A team of researchers has uncovered a host of false or dodgy political statements attacking Labor and favouring the Coalition circulating on Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and RedNote.

Monash University’s Robbie Fordyce, Deakin’s Luke Heemsbergen, and The University of Melbourne’s Fan Yang, said the misinformation and disinformation “capitalised on pre-existing concerns within migrant communities”.

“Concerns include potential changes to investor visas, undocumented migration, humanitarian programs and Australia’s diplomatic relations with India, the US and China,” the trio wrote in analysis for The Conversation.

Other tactics evident on social media include “re-hyping past news stories to create the impression the events are happening in the present” and “exaggerating the likelihood of events” such as immigration reform.

One link shared on WeChat to a Chinese news outlet reporting on apparent “chaos” as a result of a re-elected Labor Government carried an advertisement for Liberal candidate Scott Yung, running in Bennelong.

That former Liberal stronghold is one electorate that’s received a barrage of content produced by apparently non-political third parties but that favours the Coalition.

Last week, a barrage of content targeting voters in Bennelong, as well as the marginal seat of Bradfield, was noted by The Australian Financial Review, which found much of the advertising contained misinformation or disinformation, including about a non-existent inheritance tax.

The newspaper estimated $1 million had been spent in a single week to amplify messages that were supportive of the Coalition or highly critical of the government.

Digital communications expert Luke Heemsbergen, a senior lecturer at Deakin University, said political ads and election messaging are less about informing voters and more about “gaining traction to set-up winners and losers in voters’ minds”.

“Political parties indulge in the post-truth world not to inform, but to engage voters via outrage, identity or community,” Dr Heemsbergen said.

“A lack of will for rules around false or misleading speech, in the name of free speech, for political parties makes negative election rhetoric valuable to politicians, but not helpful to the problem and solutions available to run the country.”

No rules around false content

The Australian Electoral Commission does not address misinformation and disinformation about parties, candidates or policies and makes clear it is “not the arbiter of truth” on political communication.

And bizarrely, there is no legal obligation for political advertisers to share truthful messages.

“We need truth in advertising laws, absolutely,” Professor Angus said.

“And the truth in advertising law is not necessarily for the major parties alone. It’s for the third parties as well, so that if you’re advertising and paying for content to be in front of people, you need to be held to a standard of truth.

“That kind of bare minimum standard will prevent some of the absolute BS that we’ve seen floating around in this campaign.”

The AEC does keep a register of false claims spread about the electoral process itself as part of its “active” efforts to “defend Australia’s democracy”.

Some of the dodgy claims to surface during the campaign include a TikTok explaining voters can submit a show of “no confidence” and force the election to be re-run if enough people follow suit.

A video shared to X purporting to show a polling official erasing a vote marked in pencil has also been deemed as fake.

Also on X, a conspiracy theory that the government had sent election officials to citizenship ceremonies to enrol newly minted Aussies, in a bid to shore up Labor’s standing, was found to be misleading.