Australia’s spy chief has warned anti-immigration rallies are being exploited by neo-Nazi groups and “Russian operatives” to sow discord, as the country faces a trend seen across Western democracies of declining trust and rising disinformation.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s director-general of security, Mike Burgess, said on Tuesday community cohesion is under attack in an unprecedented way.
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ASIO is investigating pro-Russian social media influencers who are working with an offshore media organisation to condemn Australia’s support for Kyiv, while also using “social media to spread vitriolic, polarising commentary on anti-immigration protests and pro-Palestinian marches”, he said.
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Australia in August expelled Iran’s ambassador and said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had directed two anti-Semitic attacks in Australia by using intermediaries.
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Such efforts were achieving “limited traction”, he added, pointing to the stabilising impact of Australia’s social-welfare safety net, compulsory voting and growing economy.
While social media algorithms are accelerating extremism and raising the risk of violence, it is people who create the content and decide to act on it, Burgess said.
“I worry we risk creating real world ‘aggro-rhythms’ where grievance, intolerance, polarisation and rhetoric feed on themselves,” he said.
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Absolutely.
This OP account (randomname) along with a couple of others are foreign accounts which only post here to agitate against Russia, China and others. So when they come along to our instance every week to stir up a fuss about foreign interference, it’s clearly insincere. They’re not here to help us.
Neo-Nazis are the base problem here, foreign state actors (including both non-West states and Western mass media like Sky and Fox) are inflaming them. Propaganda accounts like OP are just opportunistically pushing a campist perspective, trivialising our local problems, the root problems.
Would it be possible to create a tag for these certain users who have demonstrated an insincere and clear propagandist-line in their approach to posting?
So, i don’t think blocking them would help, just a game really of whack’a’mole, but if a prominent warning label like,
Account has been identified as a likely State actor
If it could be placed at the top of any posts these users make to AZ communities, it at least gives other users a heads up that this isn’t a normal post, alerting them to the insincere campaign of influence. I don’t even think these account holders would mind something like that, they don’t seem to care about disguising their campaigns.
You’ll have to ask the admins, I don’t know how/if tagging works.
To be honest, I’m not ready to conclude they’re specifically a state actor. They certainly could be, although there are other reasons people post think tank political propaganda.
We’ve already seen one go through a bunch of names (Lucky8 was one of them), clearly the same user. A local warning seems to be a good approach as they might not even notice and therefore are less likely to try and evade.
Yes, I have noticed. I don’t mind the anti-Russia stuff. Fuck Putin. Our relationship with China is complicated and nuanced. While we need to prepare for hypothetical threats we also need to make the most out of our current relationship. I think promoting anti-Chinese sentiment plays into the hands of the supposedly Russian influenced racist neo-Nazi types the account is supposedly critical of and does nothing for the 1.3 million Australians with Chinese ancestry or other Australians of east asian descent.
Social media makes it too easy to do a huge influence operation and get unintended consequences. Polarized, angry societies that can’t engage with each other for the common good are a bad outcome.