Read an extract from Facts and Other Lies by Ed Coper!

Would your younger self believe the news of today? Angry rioters in furs and horns overrun the Capitol in a bloody carnage of insurrection. The Prime Minister of Australia employing the wife of his friend who fronts a group the FBI has declared terrorists. A global pandemic which, even as they lie dying from it, people refuse to believe exists.

Many who sat in shocked disbelief as these events beamed around the world asked the same question: ‘How did we get here?’ Ed Coper is a leading communications expert whose new book sets out to answer that very question. Titled Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age, this book aims to put fake news in its historical context and explain how disinformation has fractured society, even threatening democracy itself. Scroll down to read an extract!

Ed Coper

Sky’s the Limit

Lest we think this dominance of conservative content is a uniquely American problem, here in Australia conservatives rule online too, through the same ecosystem. The same kind of highly partisan conservative disinformation content is sneaking around under the radar, much of it unnoticed and unreported. These networks are global (a lot of Infowars’ traffic comes from outside the US, from places like Australia), but more importantly the blueprint is the same. We should be aware of how it is being replicated in our own backyard.

While in Australia we obsess about traditional TV ratings and mock Sky News Australia and its contributors for having such a small tele- vision viewing audience (it averages about 3 per cent of the total audience share), those same Sky News pundits are dominating somewhere else: social media.

On the internet, Sky News Australia is number one, with daylight second and every other Australian news brand even further behind.

They are easily number one on YouTube, and easily the number one most engaged-with Australian media brand on Facebook.

Sky News’ videos on their Australian YouTube channel have been viewed more than a billion times—double the amount of ABC News’ total views. Their videos are being watched on average more than 3.7 million times a day. Only about 70,000 people tune in to Sky’s most popular programs when they air on the actual television.

Trump and the pandemic have been very good for Sky News in Australia, just as it was for the American conservative networks. Their digital presence is growing exponentially thanks to their replication of the right-wing outrage machine that has worked so well in the US. By mid-2020, the number of times Sky News Australia’s videos on YouTube were being viewed each day was exceeding the number of views each month in 2019. Their YouTube views grew by more than 600 per cent and their Facebook engagements by 300 per cent over the same period. Three out of every four people watching Sky News Australia are now doing so on social media and other digital platforms.

In the month before journalist Cam Wilson wrote in 2020 about Sky News’ exploding numbers, there had been a total of 1.6 million Facebook shares across all of Australia’s major broadcast television news’ Facebook pages. Sky News accounted for almost 900,000 of them:

Facebook posts from their Page had more total interactions last month than the ABC News, SBS News, 7News Australia, 9 News and 10 News First Pages—and they’ve had more shares than all of them combined.

Sky News is firmly planted in the digital ecosystem of the right-wing culture wars, largely unnoticed as most media observers have yet to catch up with a non-traditional media landscape.

Alan Jones even said as much out loud, when kicked off his Daily Telegraph column in the face of sponsor backlash: ‘Have a look at Sky News YouTube, Sky News Facebook and Alan Jones Facebook and you can see. The same column that I write for the Tele goes up on my Facebook page. The public can check it for themselves.’

Each month, 3.3 million Australians watch the Sky News Australia YouTube channel. When sane people hailed their week-long ban from uploading new YouTube videos due to spreading ‘content that denies the existence of Covid-19’ in August 2021, the premature celebrations forgot one thing: ‘banning’ is a red badge of courage within these ecosystems (side note: it should be a disturbing wake-up call about media regulations when the social media platforms have a hairier trigger for removing lies than the actual media regulators themselves). We will talk about this in later chapters, but being put in the internet naughty corner achieves little more than riling up the base and reinforcing their worldview that the elites are censoring the ‘truth’. In the seven days after their seven day ban, Sky News Australia’s covid-related videos had over 4.2 million views on YouTube. In an average week, only 1.4 million people watch their TV channel.

What is the secret to their staggering success? The same formula that worked so well for the right-wing echo chamber in America that they were emulating: hyperpartisan disinformation, plus incitement.

The same kind of online networks exist in Australia, led by the standard bearers who you will accordingly also find on Sky News regularly: Craig Kelly, Pauline Hanson, Mark Latham, George Christensen and Clive Palmer. They understand instinctively that their breed of anti-woke outrage hits a note that resonates far and wide with their base, who are hyperconnected through social media. As Christensen, admitted: ‘I can be derided, Pauline and Trump can be derided. Yet all we’re doing is listening to people, then repeating what they tell us they want.’

While Trump was dominating the online share of voice in the States, could you hazard a guess what the post with the most interactions on Facebook in Australia in all of 2020 was? Out of every single post in the entire country for a year we mostly spent on social media?

‘Clive Palmer Diggs Deep to support Australians during the COVID-19 crisis.’ His post begins, ‘I will do what it takes to get 1 million doses of Hydroxychloroquine for Australians to fight the COVID-19 pandemic . . .’

On some days, 40 per cent of all the interactions across every single Australian politician’s Facebook pages would be on posts by Craig Kelly. Pauline Hanson’s posts would dominate on other days. As the main- stream Australian media would scratch their heads as to why Craig Kelly busied himself so much with the conspiracy theories of another country 10,000 miles away, his online audience would grow larger and larger. Craig Kelly may not quite be the moron we assumed, but actually just the earliest Australian politician to embrace the new realities of effective political engagement, just as Sky News has done.

—Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age by Ed Coper (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

Facts and Other Lies

Welcome to the Disinformation Age

by Ed Coper

From fringe conspiracy theories to 'alternative facts', a timely look at how we arrived in the 'fake news' era.

Would your younger self believe the news of today? An entire city block blown up by a suicide bomber on Christmas Day because he believed phone towers spread disease. A Representative elected to the US Congress on a platform that Democrats are secretly harvesting an anti-aging chemical from the blood of abused children. Angry rioters in furs and horns overrun the Capitol in a bloody carnage...

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