Conservative lobby group Advance Australia’s “Election News” Facebook page has used targeted advertising to publish hundreds of links to older news articles that cast the Greens party in a deeply negative light. The use of old news articles is a very common tactic in spreading malinformation.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2024.2394156

From the linked article:

For the past two months, conservative lobby group Advance Australia’s “Election News” Facebook page has used targeted advertising to publish hundreds of links to older news articles that cast the Greens party in a deeply negative light.

ARC Centre of Excellence of Automated Decision-Making and Society digital communications expert Professor Daniel Angus said the practice is a textbook example of a “malinformation campaign”, where true information is removed from its appropriate context and then spread with the intent to cause reputational harm or sow confusion.

Professor Angus said that the use of old news articles is a very common tactic in spreading malinformation.

“Common tactics can be to share news about older crimes, past scandals, or other negative news, presenting them as current to inflame emotions, stoke fear, or manipulate public perception.

“The strategy capitalises on how audiences may only read headlines and lead paragraphs but fail to check publication dates and appreciate that these issues may have long been resolved.”

“The decontextualisation of the original information makes it highly insidious, as it uses facts in ways that seek to erode trust and foster harm in the target, and there are no straightforward antidotes,” he said.