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Some of the largest One Nation supporter groups on Facebook appear to be run from overseas by foreign digital creators who monetise content.
Guardian Australia examined 14 of the largest pro-One Nation public groups with at least 8,000 members, and found most were created this year.
While some groups appear to be longstanding and set up by genuine supporters, the majority are full of content overwhelmingly fed by what digital media researcher Timothy Graham said appeared to be “a foreign-run, predominantly Indonesian, for-hire engagement farm operation”.
Many of the administrators and top posters in these public groups are tagged as “digital creators” and offer subscriptions, meaning they may be making money through Facebook programs that allow forms of content to be monetised.
“The people who comment, by contrast, are overwhelmingly genuine, established Australian accounts,” Graham, an associate professor in digital media at Queensland University of Technology, said. “The operation therefore harvests a real Australian audience for engagement and money.”
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email One of the largest groups with more than 117,000 members is run by at least two administrators whose personal profiles indicate they speak Indonesian and are based in south-east Asia. They are tagged as digital creators.
On their personal profiles, some of these administrators post images from Meta’s back-end, including charts in Indonesian that show their content is popular in Australia. Others post clips that show their Facebook earnings based on views of their content, and lament slow months.
One creator, who has posted content about whether the burqa should be banned in Australia, shared a screenshot in Indonesian showing that Meta would pay US$20 for two posts that reached 50,000 people.
Much of the content across these groups is designed to be what Graham called outrage or “poll bait” – asking yes or no questions, such as “Was Pauline Hanson right to scold this journo?” or “Should Sharia law be banned in the Australia?”.
Other posts are reactive, with some of the accounts Guardian Australia tracked posting multiple times about the party’s “Fire the Liar” campaign. In at least one case, the text and image promoting the party’s fundraising drive was copied from a verified One Nation page.
Many posts are also being replicated across groups, sometimes by the same accounts and, as ABC Verify found, much of it is AI-generated. There is a significant theme of Islamophobia. An AI-generated image of a woman in a burqa holding a sign asking “Do you really want to deport us?”, for example, appears across multiple groups.
Two accounts that run another of the pro-Hanson Facebook groups with almost 40,000 followers appear to be based in India. Before posting Australia-centric content in recent months, they shared content in Hindi on Indian political topics as well as the occasional selfie. They offer contact details for “brand promotion”.
The analysis revealed that other common themes in the content include Anthony Albanese, Barnaby Joyce, Fatima Payman, Gina Rinehart and Ben Roberts-Smith.
Crystal Abidin, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University who has researched digital creator economies in south-east Asia, told Guardian Australia: “For a lot of the south-east Asian meme factories, the politics are entirely divorced from the profit making. They are for hire.”
She said these accounts may use political posts to demonstrate their reach to attract brand contracts and to grow followers and subscribers, or to personally profit via monetisation schemes offered by Meta, TikTok and other platforms. Creator group chats are often used to share images and ideas about how to reach different audiences.
“Meme factories might be one enthusiastic person with dozens of devices, or it could be dozens of people working coordinatedly,” she said. “It could be someone working out of their bedroom, just getting informal cash under the table, but it could also be a bona fide digital media company.”
For digital creator economies, Abidin said, antagonism can be lucrative: “Getting clicks for hate views, for outrage, for trolling … For people who are there, not because they like your content, but because they can’t look away.”
An administrator for one group, “One Nation Supporters Australia🇦🇺”, which has more than 135,000 members, purports to be federal MP David Farley, who won the Farrer byelection in early May.
The account, which was only created on 30 May, uses photos taken from a Facebook page used for Farley’s campaign, but spruiks a financial scheme that advises people to withdraw their assets from “crashing banks” and instead invest in cryptocurrency, as well as sharing AI-generated content in support of Hanson.
The “Farley” account moderates at least eight public Facebook groups related to One Nation, including two of the largest analysed by Guardian Australia as well as several with as few as 16 members – including one targeted at One Nation supporters in South Australia.
Reached by phone, One Nation media adviser Richard Henderson said party members had been impersonated on Facebook for “years and years”, before saying he would not respond to media queries from Guardian Australia.
The “Farley” account was removed after Guardian Australia approached Meta for comment.
“We are reviewing the content that was shared [by Guardian Australia] and will remove anything that violates our policies,” a Meta spokesperson said.
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