Facebook overrun by AI rage-baiters vying for your sanity, and pocketing from it.
Pauline Hanson seems to be battling cancer, handing out cheques to sick kids, enraging Anthony Albanese and screwing over the Greens all in one week of hard work.
This is what foreign Facebook accounts would have you believe, responsible for pumping out egregious AI content of Australian politicians caught in scandals and fighting journalists.
Sometimes real images are stitched together with eye-catching “breaking news” graphics, some are completely AI generated.
Each story within the post’s caption is an invention of a chatbot and designed to shock its vulnerable reader.
ABC NEWS Verify released an investigation into the accounts, revealing that in one week of February, 370 images were shared.
Of these, One Nation’s leader Pauline Hanson appears in just over half of the posts.
In the stories, Senator Hanson is often portrayed as a dissenter, who is sticking it to the man and refuses to be silenced.
In a faux ABC broadcast, Albanese and Hanson engage in furious debate, causing producers to dramatically cut Hanson’s mic. She storms out of the studio.
Commenters praise her for “standing up to bullies.”
In 45 of the 370 posts, Albanese and Hanson go head to head. Hanson is always victorious.
For some, a quick google would dispel any belief in the posts. But the fake ABC broadcast has garnered 22,000 likes, 3,700 comments and over 1,300 shares.
A quick scroll past one of the headlines on Facebook is all it takes for the lie to plant itself in a viewer’s mind. For those who actually click on the articles, they will be met with pages of ads.
As the ABC discovered, these accounts re-direct users to a fake news website in order to profit off ad views.
The accounts drift between different countries, Australia its latest target for controversies, and the red-haired senator Hanson a perfect rage-baiter.
They operate out of Vietnam, with admins in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and the United States.
For them, this is another job, a way to generate ad revenue. For Australians, this is real political warfare.
Hanson’s polling continues to rise, as The Guardian recently revealed more than half of Australians are open to tossing a vote One Nation’s way.
Though her right-wing populism has always appealed to a certain part of Australian society, could her recent spike in popularity be partially attributed to her AI counterpart? A version of her that can win every debate, smugly defeat The Greens, and never need anything explained?
Publicly, Hanson tears down the Muslim community, inciting hatred towards Australia’s minority groups. In many of these AI posts, she is seen coming to blows with non-white public figures such as Waleed Aly, Fatima Payman and Penny Wong.
Waleed Aly has been depicted multiple times in conflict with other high-profile figures. And so, the narrative becomes the innocent white woman is under attack from the aggressive brown man.
For foreign Facebook accounts removed from Australia’s political turmoil, they can afford the luxury of not feeling the tangible effects of discrimination and a looming 2028 election.
Just last week, Meta signed a deal with Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which allows Meta to scrape News Corp for content, training its AI on Murdoch press.
With a reservoir of content at its robotic fingertips, how will the Facebook posts change, and how will this affect an election predicted to be overpowered by AI “bot swarms.”
Australia currently has no laws in place that enforces AI content be strictly labelled and bots to publicly label themselves as such. AI developers have only been nudged by the Government to clearly identify generated content.
