Like so many stories about misinformation, this one starts with a social media post.
US President Donald Trump posting late last night, Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake.
Prime Minister give asylum.
He was calling on Australia to make sure that the team was not forced to go back to Iran, saying that they would most likely be killed, a calling on Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi to grant them asylum.
Not long after that, Donald Trump backtracked and set the record straight.
In a truth social post.
The President says Albanese is on it. Five players have already been taken care of and the rest are on their way home.
But in those few short hours before it was clarified, misinformation had already taken hold. Social media posts that accused Australia of not helping their running women's soccer team and falsely claimed Albanesi lied to Trump about giving them asylum were viewed millions of times on x and some mainstream media got the story wrong, portraying Trump as the trigger for Albow's decision. A key person involved in this the
President of the United States. He of course, posted on truth social Australia is making This is just one example of the wave of misinformation we're drowning in as we struggle to figure out what's true and what's just been made up. I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven AM today, ABC journalist and host of a new doco, The Matter of Facts, Hamish McDonald on how do we work out what to believe in a post truth world? It's Monday, March twenty three. Hamish, we just heard this
example about Trump and the Iranian women's soccer team. But when it comes to misinformation and disinformation, that is probably just a drop in the ocean. So what are some of the examples that you came across that really shocked you? And what is the difference between misinformation and disinformation anyway, So.
Misinformation broadly, and there are slightly different interpretations of this, but broadly misinformation can be false information, but the person who's spreading it or share it might think that it's true. So this example you just had then of Trump and the Iranian women's soccer team, I think that's probably a
strong example of misinformation. Disinformation is where it's deliberate false information, maybe even created knowing that it's false, and then disseminated, perhaps for a specific or a vague purpose, sometimes by another country that's trying to sow a particular narrative thread into another country's information system. Or it might be individuals or organizations or lobby groups, or just trolls and bots.
A lot of the time the disinformation is literally being made by computers at the moment and then finding its way into your social media feed, and there's a lot of it. It's everywhere, like stories that we've covered and reported on recently, things like the Bondai terror attack. I remember in the days after that a colleague coming to me and saying, oh, have you seen this photograph of
the two female police officers standing by and not doing anything? Actually, the original wider view of that image shows some very compassionate police officers trying to ward off members of the public from going near the active shooter situation.
The later stats from the country's media regulator shows more than seventy percent of Australians think that they've come across misinformation online. So how savvy do you think we are really about trying to work out what's real and what's not.
The headline news Nikki is that we're not very good. What emerged for us as we made this series and conducted a series of social experiments with Australians just engaging with media and information is that the better that you think you are at spotting a fake, the less likely you are to actually identify it accurately. And this is essentially because our brains are trained to trick us, and so if we think that we're onto it, it kind of reduces our chances of spotting the fake image.
What about your mum?
My wonderful mum was doved in to this TV series to see whether or not she could spot a fake version of me. And the case here is that I've been learning to do Scottish dancing or Highland dancing.
So you know, I've been.
Very busy, Yes, always busy. I've been working on this as well as other things, but I've also been learning some new skills, all right. What was really interesting was kind of observing not just the mind game unfold for Mum, that kind of quizzical look and that sort of nervousness and caution and discomfort that I think we all experience when we're not sure whether what we're looking at is real or fake?
Oh my gorgeous.
But then as it unfolded, as she realized that it was a fake and that she was kind of half tricked, the emotion that came with that. Do you look out very eyed?
Do you think?
Yeah, well, I do look at things that are and I do spot them usually.
Oh my god, it has rattled me.
It's very clever.
Love you, Love you too.
And I think for me that that was quite profound, because it is unsettling for us if we have a realization that we can't believe the very thing that is right in front of our eyes. It's kind of profound for that reason, because I think it speaks to the the inner the kind of primal instinct that we all have, which wants to believe what what we can see and feel in touch. And maybe that's no longer the case.
I've seen you in a photo of a kilt, so I can understand why your mum thought you might be up for the dancing. But we know, Haimo, that there is this sort of growing suspicion around the world about facts, definitely about the mainstream media. How dangerous do you think that is for our democracy? If people can't even agree on what's real anymore.
Yeah, I think for me that's the kind of core question underpinning this whole series is what happens to democratic society, what happens to community, what happens to our ability to solve problems if we can't agree on a set of facts to begin with. And I actually think it is a really profound challenge for us. Do you remember when Trump first got elected and Kellyanne Conway gave that interview and she talked about, well, there are alternative facts. That was shocking at the time.
You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spacer, our Press secretary geb alternative facts to that.
But the point.
Alternative facts, alternative facts. Four of the five facts he uttered. The one thing he got Zeke Miller, four of the five facts he uttered, We're just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods.
But that was only what do we say, like six to ten years ago, And think about the world we exist in now. Almost everyone seems to have their own set of facts, and I think we have to consider, we have to ask ourselves what happens to functioning democratic, enfranchised society where everyone has a stake if everyone's just allowed to have their own set of facts, and we can't agree on a set of facts to.
Begin with, coming up what to do when so much of what we see is untrue heymish. Let's talk about disinformation and how it's being used in war, especially in countries like Russia.
So we traveled to the Poland Belarus border as part of this series to look at a concept called hybrid warfare grey zone tactics you might have heard of before. The accusation that Poland and the European Union level at Russia is that they're heavily engaged in grey zone tactics.
In this instance, the assertion is that Russia and Belarus, which is essentially a client state or vassal state of Russia, have been deliberately bringing migrants from Africa the Middle East to the Polish border, where there's a huge six meters high fence and forcing them over.
It is an abuse of some of the world's most vulnerable people, migrants turned into weapons in a political battle.
We absolutely share the assessment that this is a hybrid attack of an authoritarian regime to try to destabilize democratic neighbors, and this will not succeed.
And so this happens at particular times in the electoral cycle. And this is coupled with floods of disinformation being sent through the domestic social media channels. So in local Polish language social media images footage sometimes manipulated posts about all of these people coming from the Middle East, Arabs or Africans coming. They're gonna build a mosque in your village. Look, your government's lost control of the borders.
On Saturday, thousands of people took part in anti immigration marches organized by the Farret Confederation party. The marches took place in more than eighty cities across Poland. Demonstrators demanded the closure of the border.
What we found is that not only is this happening in the sort of digital sphere, but there's actually real humans that are getting caught up in this. So went to the Belarus border, walked for hours into this deep dense forest.
They've just received a request for help from two people from Afghanistan and they're waiting right now for their individual.
Needs to find at a pin in a map. Two Afghans that had been brought on these cheap visas, with these cheap travel packages promised to cheap an easy way into Europe, only to then find themselves stuck and stranded in this primeval forest in eastern Europe. One of them his wound was so thick and deep it looked like it was turning septic. It's a very big word, and it's probabetical attention. So there's a there's a genuine human cost to this. But in terms of the objective, often
it's deliberately ambiguous. It's not clear necessarily that Russia is trying to get one political party or another elected. It's to sow confusion, it's to so doubt, it's to undermine trust in democratic process and government and institutions. It's designed to make people confused and hamish.
We know that some countries are also using these types of disinformation campaigns instead of going to war, for example, China, they've really been going to town with all of their online messaging regarding Taiwan. So what did you find out there? What are they doing, what are they saying and is it even working?
As with all missing disinformation, it's often a bit opaque. But I think what you can observe is that there are very clearly disinformation campaigns that are run against pro independence politicians. So that's very clear. That's overt that's well documented. But then there is the more subtle stuff, the sort of narratives, the music, the Chinese mainland nationalist ideology that is pushed through some of these more subtle media mechanisms. It could be a musician, it could be a cartoon.
I think Taiwan is a fascinating example because the population is so aware and are so alive to the threat of China that they're quite motivated. They're quite activated on these issues in a way that I don't think we necessarily are in Australia. So they think about arming themselves both physically, you know, with self defense classes against a possible mainland Chinese invasion at some point, but they are also training themselves in navigating this and disinformation media literacy awareness,
how do we combat this. They were the first jurisdiction in the world to have a disinformation minister.
Always look at this foreign adversary or attacks were as our natural disasters, as ways for conflict to not turn into explosion, but rather see them like fire on the ground, not to be put out.
And I think they're really interesting because they're also looking at ways that you might be able to use some of this technology that's emerging to fight back against this.
If we have done effecta king, we need to promote our affectaking results to people we try to dissemine, add those spectacle poles through all the social media where we collect those disinformation and rumorous.
Hamish. It all sounds very overwhelming. We have so much information constantly coming at us in all directions. So is there anything we can really do about this? Can we combat it? Regulate it? Is there any way to hold back this tide of information that we're drowning in, especially when so much of it is simply not true.
Certainly regulation is an option, but I think we've seen with the under sixteen social media ban that's incredibly difficult to do. Not impossible, but very difficult to do. It's also complicated territory if you have governments getting into determining what is real and fake, what's miss and disinformation. Because obviously some of this you know at least that the
fringes can be somewhat open to interpretation. That said, something that really for me is a positive and gives me heart in all of this, is that to some extent the best responses are individual ones. You can arm yourself. You know, in Finland they're teaching miss and disinformation and media literacy skills two children from primary school up. So
everything from like triangulating information. If you read something on social media or see something on social media, if that makes you feel alarmed or provokes an emotional reaction, and learn that that's a red flag for you. That means you need to go and find at least two other sources of information on that same story, from reliable, trusted sources of information and news, and make sure you go to their websites, not their social media pages, go to
the actual source of the information. So these are the sorts of things I think we clearly could be teaching to children in Australia. And the other thing is we meet this fantastic academic Marion Wolf, who's studying the impacts of all of this digital consumption on our brain. She says, the single greatest act of defiance that you as an individual can do in this age of AI and missing disinformation is to pick up a physical book. A physical book,
sit down and read. It can be fiction, can be nonfiction, but it is good for your brain. It is good for your soul. It is good for your heart to pick up a physical book and read it, and that is a powerful tool.
Couldn't agree more, Hamish, thanks so much for joining us.
It's been great to talk to you.
Go read your book, Niki.
Also in the news, one Nation looks to have achieved its best electoral result in nearly thirty years, its vote surging the South Australian state election. It will take days to determine how many seats the party will hold, but Pauline Hansen has warned every winning candidate will be a
political landmine for Premier Peter Malinowskis. Malinowskas claimed Labour's largest victory in South Australia's history, while the Liberal Party vote collapsed, and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the federal government is not contemplating fuel rationing. Bowen says the Fuel Emergency Act is only to be invoked in extreme shortages and has
never been used. So far, only six of eighty one ships carrying fuel to Australia have been canceled, but a one hundred percent increase in demand has seen shortages, particularly in regional areas. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven am. Thanks for listening,