Is Australia immune to America’s misinformation crisis? I’m not confident

Turns out the US government didn’t engineer Hurricane Milton to smash Florida last week. We know this because, as things stand, humans don’t have the ability to generate or control hurricanes. But we live in a world where such things must be clarified because social media has been awash with such conspiracy theories – this specific one amplified by a Republican congresswoman.

It is, I’m afraid, far from the only one. Here’s perhaps the most pernicious coming from Donald Trump, declaring at a rally in Michigan that the Biden administration slashed hurricane recovery budgets: “They stole the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”.

Illustration: Simon Letch

Here distilled is the essential Trump case in a single sentence. They’re crooks. Every issue is ultimately about “their” illegal immigrants. The election is being stolen (again). To this, Trump adds that devastated areas were left for days without help, and without helicopters being sent. All of which is demonstrably untrue.

Also demonstrable are the consequences. Meteorologists are facing death threats. FEMA says the misinformation is stopping people from seeking the help they need, thereby hampering recovery efforts. So thoroughgoing, so ruthless, so wild has politically driven misinformation become, that not even matters of life and death can deter it.

Recall, for instance, the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the immediate conspiracy theories that followed. For Trump loyalists, it was a deep state conspiracy to have the former president assassinated. For some who hate him, it was a false flag operation in which Trump staged this attempt as a campaign strategy. We might expect such things from online trolls, but in each of these cases they are coming from elected officials, Republican and Democrat. The poison has worked its way into the body politic’s organs. From there, it infects the bloodstream. More than a third of then-Biden voters, for instance, believed the July assassination attempt against Trump may have been staged.

Witness the contagion; how once unleashed, misinformation becomes self-perpetuating. Until recently in American politics, it was almost exclusively a Trumpist phenomenon, produced systematically. Several studies between 2019 and 2021 found that right-wing online communities were disproportionately vulnerable to misinformation. But now we see it jumping political borders, even in the context of the hurricanes.

Take the social media falsehoods that accuse Trump of having a policy to end FEMA and provide zero federal help to disaster victims, despite the fact no such policy exists. I’ve interviewed a Democrat who told me, with no sense of exaggeration, that Trump’s policy is to take the vote away from black people and ban contraception.

And then there’s the fake story (which began life as a joke) about Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once having had sex with a couch being referenced with a wink and a nod by Kamala Harris’s team, her running mate Tim Walz and a slew of Democrats, repeatedly. Sure, it’s not quite stolen elections and Haitians eating cats and dogs, but all this represents a misinformational step change. No doubt the Democrats have a considerably milder case, but they now have symptoms of the same disease.

Are we immune? I write this a year to the week since the Voice referendum, in which disinformation became a prominent (if not decisive) feature. I write it also amid a Queensland election campaign in which the state’s electoral commission is being forced to fight all manner of untruths: that unvaccinated people will be barred from voting, or that the election is rigged due to the use of the same Dominion voting machines used in the US federal election in 2020. Of course, those voting machines didn’t rig anything – as a court case has since established. And we don’t even use voting machines in Australia, let alone Dominion ones.

But we import so instinctively from America that we even adopt American arguments and ideas that are wholly inapplicable to us. Certainly, our system of compulsory, preferential voting protects us to some degree, but even a well-buffered system like ours could not survive a misinformational onslaught.

All democracies rely on some sense of shared information that makes deliberation possible. It would be unwise to look at America and feel guaranteed we are not seeing a version of our own future.

That’s because once misinformation takes root, it is extremely difficult to remedy. You can try to address it with legislation, as the Albanese government and the Democrats in the US are attempting, but it will always be controversial because it puts government in the business of deeming acceptable and unacceptable political speech, which liberal democracies do not easily tolerate. Add the fact that misinformation is notoriously difficult to define, and it becomes easy to attack such legislation as an authoritarian smokescreen for the silencing of the government’s political opponents.

A similar logic explains why the endless stream of fact-checking initiatives has largely failed. In a polarised world, fact-checking becomes immediately politicised; written off as just another partisan weapon. Hence, the conservative critiques, some of which even find academic support, of fact-checkers serving a progressive bias. And now, tellingly, those same fact-checkers face left-wing criticism for turning their sights to misleading progressive claims.

All of which reveals a key fact about misinformation: that its power and seduction lie overwhelmingly in the fact that it tells a story we have already decided we want to hear. All the examples above succeed because they attach to a narrative that is well set. Misinformation does not convert enemies so much as rally and then radicalise believers. Which points us towards the slimmest mirage of solution.

Our job as citizens at a time like this, is for us to become sceptics – not of the plainest facts so we can search for conspiratorial explanations – but of ourselves. That means we hesitate before embracing stories that too easily, too frictionlessly confirm the narratives we already have. It means when we encounter something that confirms our opponents as gobsmackingly evil, we set a high standard of proof for the claim. And we don’t refuse to do this simply because others are.

To be honest, I’m not confident we’re capable of doing all that. But I am reasonably confident democracy has a bleak future if we don’t.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.