Social media’s taken a giant leap to the right. Will it sway Australian voters?

Perhaps the most significant event in Australian politics last week happened elsewhere. In America, Mark Zuckerberg shifted Facebook and Instagram to the right. Fact-checking has been abandoned. Perhaps more significantly, users of those sites – which, realistically, is all of us – can now say things they previously couldn’t.

On Friday, The Intercept reported examples of now-permitted language, based on internal training materials. These include: “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”, “I’m a proud racist”, and “Trannies are a problem”. Comparative claims such as “Black people are more violent than Whites” will also now be allowed.

Opinions are strong – and divided – on Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton.Credit: Monique Westermann

There is some debate about whether this is simply Zuckerberg adapting himself to the Trump times, or if, as a piece in The New York Times suggested, it might be a sincere embrace of MAGA by a man who has, for some time, been on a journey rightwards. Does it matter? The changes have not yet been implemented in Australia, but it is clear the atmosphere of the internet is shifting. Twitter began changing almost as soon as Elon Musk renamed it. Its transformation is impossible to miss: in the sense it seems impossible, using X, to avoid the propaganda of right-wing American provocateurs.

Perhaps you think you are unaffected by such things – maybe you post rarely, or only scan these sites, or have left them. But their impacts are more insidious. To my mind, social media sites permeate the world the same way language does. Each time a new social media site appears, we effectively, even literally, learn to speak a new language, or at least those around us do. And the languages we speak are more important than we realise.

Last week, I read a piece about bilingualism by Gavin Francis, a physician. Apparently, if you speak two languages, you will tell a story quite differently in each. To others, you will come across as a different type of person depending on which language you use. In one, you may seem, or even be, more agreeable; in another, more cunning. Actual languages change the way we perceive the world – and the way the world perceives us.

I am certain this is true of social media. I recall the time, a few years ago, when I found that I had begun looking at the world as though it was there simply to provide good shots for Instagram. Would this make a good post? Would this? Before that, a brief period when I would find myself reformulating my thoughts into tweets: short, judgmental, ironic. Those phases passed, but I am certain their effects linger, their tones and styles seeping into the way I encounter the world.

And so I am certain, too, that the new shifts in what we see (and learn to repeat) on the world’s largest social media networks will affect us all, as they change the way that public debate feels. To make this argument in a more direct way: does anyone believe the arrival of Fox News, the way it dragged television to the right, had no effect on politics or voters?

How soon will the impact of these changes reach Australia? We can’t know. But if it does begin to alter the campaign environment here, it seems likely it will benefit the right more than the left. In more specific terms, it will benefit Peter Dutton.

This is not because Dutton and his colleagues will say – or even think – any of the things that Facebook now permits its American users to say. It is because of the ambient environment those changes create for the dominant image Dutton projects: a strongman, against “woke”, concerned about migration and the problems that result, as he has often argued. This theme was apparent last week, when Dutton posted a video to Instagram implying migration is to blame for the housing crisis.

Interestingly, this seems at odds with other videos he has been posting, which emphasise a more rounded, amiable Dutton, as Professor Ariadne Vromen has told this masthead. If Dutton wants to temper his reputation, to appear softer, is there really enough time to execute that shift between now and an election no later than May?

Anthony Albanese wants to make sure the answer is no. Holidaying voters may not have noticed, but the prime minister just had a good week. In 2023, a narrative took hold, after Dutton used summer to frame the Indigenous Voice, that he drove debate while Labor followed. In getting out early last week, Albanese perhaps headed off an election-year repeat. At the same time, he seemed newly comfortable, untroubled by much; and he was relentlessly on-message.

And the subject he was most on-message about was his characterisation of Dutton and the Coalition, who he said wanted to take the country “backwards” with “negativity”. Labor, meanwhile, was building. To underline the point, Albanese came with money for exactly that: $7.2 billion for the Bruce Highway. In the media, the announcement garnered plenty of praise – and cynicism. Repeatedly, it was put to Albanese this was all about votes.

This may not worry Albanese much. Some suggest that Dutton has begun his softening early, before voter cynicism takes hold. But the questions to Albanese suggest the opposite may be the case – that journalists, and probably voters, are already treating everything they see as a campaign tactic. This may mean the period where voters will accept a new version of their leaders and may change their mind about who they are, has ended.

That may be a problem for Dutton. Albanese, meanwhile, is essentially selling the same thing he’s been selling for two years: a slow, unspectacular gathering of achievements. Several times last week he referred to the “foundations” his government has apparently established in its first term, which it will “build on” during a second. It’s not a large claim, nor an exciting one, but it might be plausible. As the campaign environment continues to shift, Labor will hope that’s enough.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.