Australia’s spy chief has warned anti-immigration rallies are being exploited by neo-Nazi groups and “Russian operatives” to sow discord, as the country faces a trend seen across Western democracies of declining trust and rising disinformation.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s director-general of security, Mike Burgess, said on Tuesday community cohesion is under attack in an unprecedented way.
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ASIO is investigating pro-Russian social media influencers who are working with an offshore media organisation to condemn Australia’s support for Kyiv, while also using “social media to spread vitriolic, polarising commentary on anti-immigration protests and pro-Palestinian marches”, he said.
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Australia in August expelled Iran’s ambassador and said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had directed two anti-Semitic attacks in Australia by using intermediaries.
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Such efforts were achieving “limited traction”, he added, pointing to the stabilising impact of Australia’s social-welfare safety net, compulsory voting and growing economy.
While social media algorithms are accelerating extremism and raising the risk of violence, it is people who create the content and decide to act on it, Burgess said.
“I worry we risk creating real world ‘aggro-rhythms’ where grievance, intolerance, polarisation and rhetoric feed on themselves,” he said.
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Much earlier. The protocols of the elders of zion, a core conspiracy doc, dates back to 1903, Russian Empire, long before the Bolshevik revolution, the KGB or Putin. Russia has a lot of competence in the information space. It is a tool like any other and it is well documented that they use it to their strategic and economic advantage as any nation would. The western alliance have played similar games with propaganda and destabilization.
There are a huge number of people and groups in the anglosphere and Europe who are sympathetic to this propaganda and create plenty of it themselves. They would still be around and very dangerous to our liberal democracies with or without Russia’s involvement. Russia’s playbook in this is to fan fires that already exist. I suspect most of the real money and direction is from within.
Russia to some extent is a scapegoat for our own failings and highlighting their involvement an attempt to de-legitimize these movements by association. I think these groups are de-legitimized by their existence. I don’t need Russian involvement to hate a bunch of Nazis.
I believe there is evidence of Russian operators attempting to infiltrate marginalized groups and stir up discontent. If it turned out their operators were inflaming discontent in indigenous groups, amongst the poor, homeless, alt-health, environmentalists or whoever might have reason to distrust or dislike the current establishment I am not going to judge them like I am a Nazi.
I don’t like to touch on this one on social media but it is probably fair to say Israel and Iran are in a huge information war and Isreal is losing badly in Australia, UK etc because of the very bad optics of their actions. Does knowing that Iran is to some extent funding anti-Isreal debate delegitmize concerns about a Palestinian genocide? I don’t think so. So its complicated.
Absolutely.
This OP account (randomname) along with a couple of others are foreign accounts which only post here to agitate against Russia, China and others. So when they come along to our instance every week to stir up a fuss about foreign interference, it’s clearly insincere. They’re not here to help us.
Neo-Nazis are the base problem here, foreign state actors (including both non-West states and Western mass media like Sky and Fox) are inflaming them. Propaganda accounts like OP are just opportunistically pushing a campist perspective, trivialising our local problems, the root problems.
Yes, I have noticed. I don’t mind the anti-Russia stuff. Fuck Putin. Our relationship with China is complicated and nuanced. While we need to prepare for hypothetical threats we also need to make the most out of our current relationship. I think promoting anti-Chinese sentiment plays into the hands of the supposedly Russian influenced racist neo-Nazi types the account is supposedly critical of and does nothing for the 1.3 million Australians with Chinese ancestry or other Australians of east asian descent.
Social media makes it too easy to do a huge influence operation and get unintended consequences. Polarized, angry societies that can’t engage with each other for the common good are a bad outcome.
Yep. And I was in a hurry so in case it needs to be made clear: fuck the Russian Federation, fuck it’s governments, especially Putin. My issue isn’t with who they’re critisising.
Would it be possible to create a tag for these certain users who have demonstrated an insincere and clear propagandist-line in their approach to posting?
So, i don’t think blocking them would help, just a game really of whack’a’mole, but if a prominent warning label like,
Account has been identified as a likely State actor
If it could be placed at the top of any posts these users make to AZ communities, it at least gives other users a heads up that this isn’t a normal post, alerting them to the insincere campaign of influence. I don’t even think these account holders would mind something like that, they don’t seem to care about disguising their campaigns.
You’ll have to ask the admins, I don’t know how/if tagging works.
To be honest, I’m not ready to conclude they’re specifically a state actor. They certainly could be, although there are other reasons people post think tank political propaganda.
We’ve already seen one go through a bunch of names (Lucky8 was one of them), clearly the same user. A local warning seems to be a good approach as they might not even notice and therefore are less likely to try and evade.