The culmination of several years’ worth of monitoring by the First Draft APAC team based at CMT, this report offers an overview of the current information disorder landscape in Australia. This is a period in which we’ve seen online misinformation proliferate around local and global crises of climate disaster and the pandemic, as well as around political events such as federal and state elections.
Throughout this period, the First Draft team of Anne Kruger, Esther Chan, Stevie Zhang (with Julia Bergin for a time) have kept watch over the media landscape, picking up on misinformation narratives as they develop, and working with newsrooms both here and abroad to debunk and counterbalance misinformation with the facts.
As described in the report, the 2019–2020 bushfires and the pandemic were a watershed moment where the impact of misinformation – consciousness of which had until then largely been confined to political events in the US and EU – suddenly became all too apparent here in Australia. The potential for damage to Australia’s public sphere had recently been noted by the ACCC in their Digital Platforms Inquiry reports, which kicked off regulatory efforts to counteract misinformation just as these events began to unfold. First Draft’s detailed monitoring shows that we certainly do not have this problem under control, and the complex interplay between politics, media and technology that drives it is something that researchers are only now coming to grips with.
With First Draft dissolving and the APAC team moving to RMIT FactLab, CMT is now focusing its work in this area on understanding the drivers of information disorder and developing effective policy and industry interventions. We’ve got a number of exciting interdisciplinary projects underway, working with other researchers across UTS. We’ll keep you posted!
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow