Maybe, once upon a time, if one politician accused another ofnot being able to lie straight in bed, as Peter Dutton goaded Anthony Albanese on Tuesday night, it might have cut through. It might have caused voters to think such a person told lies and was untrustworthy.
Politicians, like other human beings, have always fibbed – exaggerating, omitting, or misspeaking.
But lying has a whole new dimension these days.
During his first term in office, the leader of the free world wasfound to have made false or misleading statements 30,573 times: little fibs, mistruths and eventually big lies that at first seemed preposterous but eventually took root and convinced a majority.
Now for the first time since Adolf Hitler propounded the virtue of big lies to “awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings”, those seeking to persuade with no commitment to the truth have technological tools that the propagandists of old could have only dreamt of.
It is another marker of the banality of the Australian election campaign that the devaluing of truth has not been seriously addressed. The campaign fortruth in political advertisingcontinues to hiss like a leaking balloon with – short of a hung parliament – little chance of reform.
Electoral materials must be authorised, but there is no requirement for those producing ads and “created content” to ensure truthfulness, and communication that awakens the imagination is always slippery.
Who knows now what is being pushed online? We do know that the parties, and associated lobby groups, have made hundreds of videos,designed to arouse, infuriate and, most importantly, to be shared.
But what are they actually saying?
The Australian Electoral Commission says that about 200,000 people a dayare visiting its website, many going to theStop and Consider guidanceon how to recognise, report and ignore misinformation. But there is no requirement for authorised ads to be lodged with the AEC.
Once upon a time, when the video ads were national and television the means of distribution, you could be pretty sure that over a campaign you would see most of them. Now as television viewership plummets, those persuasive video ads are more likely to be onYouTube, Facebook and other platforms.
The Australian Financial Review published amid-campaign databaseof the expenditure by parties in each electorate on YouTube, compiled by advertising tech firm Adgile. The key to campaign success is thought to lie in such videos, so this data reveals the seats where each party is most focused. The scale of the expenditure is extraordinary. At that point, Goldstein topped the chart, at $128,445, but even halfway through, the parties combined had spent five-figure sums in most electorates.
Unless you were the target you wouldn’t have a clue about the claims and counter claims being made. At least in the physical world you can see the battle of the corflutes as neighbours reveal their competing political preferences to each other.
We need a real-time digital archive of the political messages being crafted and disseminated to take the pulse and understand the vibe, and also to identify lies and misinformation. Truth is a fundamental value that needs protecting, but it needs to be accompanied by access and transparency.
For some reason, for which I am perversely grateful, the algorithms of my social media feeds have deemed that I am only interested in French country houses, tours of expensive apartments in London and New York, and recipes, not the Australian election.
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I’m not complaining – during the voice referendum I was inundated with outrageous misinformation. That helped me understand the slippery dishonesty of the no campaign.
Divining the vibe of this election is harder.
Polls suggest the national mood does not currently favour change. But more than ever politics is local, and the parties know that it only takes a few votes in many electorates to achieve their desired outcome. Advance’s Matthew Sheahan, flush with the success of his anti-voice campaign,observed, “Our target market is so small … If we are going to spend money and get a message to a mum who is 35 in Adelaide and thinking of voting Greens in the next election, if we can get a message to her 16 times … That’s the sort of number that will change her mind.”
The sophistication of the attention economy is without precedent. Even Mark Zuckerberg was surprised to learn how Facebook had swung the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
As Sarah Wynn-Williams documents in Careless People, it took a 10-hour flight to Lima for Zuckerberg’s closest advisers to convince him that “Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump”. A skilled Republican operative and embedded Facebook staff “basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts and fundraising messages … microtargeted users and tweaked ads for maximum engagement, using data tools we designed for commercial advertisers.”
American research now shows that the online media ecosystem there isoverwhelmingly right wing– the shows might be about lifestyle, sport, or food, but the prevailing political ethos seeps through.
The Guardian’ssurvey of youth mediasuggests that there is a different, more progressive, vibe here – but at some level that’s a punt, there is much we don’t know.
The old regulatory tools need new teeth that demand greater transparencyif our protective democratic institutions are to do their job.
Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia