Disinformation in the city: The challenges facing Australian and Indonesian local governments
‘Fake news’ is a global issue. Disinformation, the dissemination of deliberately misleading or false information, is damaging. Our public and democratic institutions scramble to respond with fact checkers, registers and legislation. Politicians decry it, schools have launched programs to educate against it, and even religious leaders from the Pope to the Indonesian Ulema Council are lending their weight to stop its spread.
Yet disinformation persists, and it’s gathering momentum.
This prompted the establishment of a new research collaboration between Monash University, The University of Melbourne, Victoria University, Deakin University and The Australian National University to understand the impact of disinformation on cities locally and globally.
A team from the five universities is hosting a free panel discussion, Disinformation in the City, during Social Sciences Week, at Monash.
Throughout the geopolitical sphere, disinformation is being used in unprecedented ways, from the international theatres of war to a new scale of focus – the hyper local, with protests played out in the council chambers of Australian towns.
Indeed, local governments have become an increasingly frequent target of disinformation, ranging from policy issues around sustainability to urban planning to social inclusion.
Disinformation manifests in many ways, driven by mistrust in key institutions, often exacerbated by conspiratorial accusations.
This is by no means a new phenomenon, but it appears to have become more prevalent, visible and possibly also more politicised in post-pandemic times as general trust in governments and mainstream media has declined. At the same time, social media has enabled mass transmission of disinformation, able to leverage this distrust and resentment.
As regional neighbours, Australian and Indonesian cities are battling disinformation in their respective contexts of demographic diversity and expansive geography. Both have significant social cleavages ripe for manipulation by those peddling disinformation, and both have local elections looming in 2024 – a likely flashpoint for fake news.
In both contexts, understanding local disinformation, and what it means for local communities and those governing them, is critical.
In the Australian context, at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, different levels of governments in Australia enjoyed an increase in trust, but this trend has reversed since 2021 with a continuous drop in the proportion of Australians who believe the ‘government can be trusted to do the right thing’. In 2023, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer saw, for the first time, that less than half of all Australians (45%) trust the government.
There are, of course, many reasons for this trust deficit. One of them is related to the fact that a significant proportion of Australians have come to view the ‘state’ and its institutions and leaders as being part of a secret, nefarious conspiracy against the people.
According to an Essential Poll in May 2020, for example, one in five Australians believed that the media and governments deliberately ‘exaggerated' the number of COVID-19 deaths ‘to scare the population’. One in eight even stated the corona virus was not dangerous but was ‘being used to force people to get vaccines’.
With such a conspiratorial mindset moving from the political fringes to the societal centre, and government mistrust becoming so salient, many are turning towards alternative information sources and explanations, which are often found in parallel counter-public communities or ‘anti-publics’ both on and offline.
Within these echo-chambers, disinformation often thrives and becomes an alternative, unquestionable ‘truth’. What adds to this is that Australians' trust in traditional mainstream media continues to decline. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 38% of Australians have trust in the media.
As Australian cities have seen a rise in disruptions stemming from disinformation, incidents during council meetings have led to chambers being closed, and physical barriers erected.
Storytimes to promote gender diversity have been cancelled due to threats, and anti-trans fake news printed in local media. Last week another council went public in Victoria about the unprecedented level of abuse its staff were experiencing. Others have shared their issues with staff retention and wellbeing amidst community hostility.
As we’ve seen in neighbouring Indonesia, the consequences can extend from threatening democracy and its institutions to threatening lives.
Read more Indonesia’s misinformation program undermines more than it teaches
Across the archipelago, the main topics of disinformation relate to politics (69,3%), health (39,7%), religion (29,2%), the environment (21,4%), and riots (13,4%%).
Disinformation has caused riots and political instability in implementing local government programs. Fake news about child abduction in the conflict area of Wamena, Papua, led to a riot and killed 10 civilians this year.
Hoaxes also impacted the development of 'Nusantara', the new capital city of Indonesia, from the issue of the Chinese workers' invasion, the resignation of the capital city committee, and the use of Hajj funds to build Nusantara.
Read more Indonesia’s sinking city, and the blueprint for its new capital in Borneo
Once again, cities are thrust to the fore of disinformation campaigns.
In the digital media ecosystem in Indonesia, disinformation on sensitive issues such as state ideology and religion have been intentionally produced and amplified by biased media outlets.
The online entities, while on the one hand supporting the state narrative, simultaneously increased polarisation between government supporters and conservative Muslim factions. The Indonesian government's cherry-picking in combating disinformation and the targeted closing down of websites and social media for political ends has exacerbated social conflict.
Also, it is becoming more difficult to access data to understand and track disinformation.
According to an Indonesian government national survey, Facebook was the primary source of hoaxes in 2022, followed by online media, WhatsApp and YouTube.
To mitigate against its impact in the upcoming election in 2024, news organisations, fact-checkers communities, think tanks, and universities are collaborating in combating disinformation.
But the main challenge is now to access the social media data. Twitter (X) has shut off its free API. Meta’s stopped giving Crowdtangle access to Facebook conversations to new users. Without access to social media data, disinformation will be challenging to study, anticipate and mitigate.
In such a post-pandemic societal climate of widespread government and media mistrust and a significant proportion of the population holding anti-government conspiracy beliefs, disinformation campaigns are likely to further gain momentum, and cities are bearing the brunt. Understanding the breadth and complexity of disinformation in cities demands an interdisciplinary and international lens.
This article was co-authored with Mario Peucker.
As part of Social Sciences Week, Monash University is hosting an event on 7 September between 10am-12am that explores differing perspectives and experiences of disinformation as a far-reaching issue facing cities across Australia, and across the globe. You can register for the event here.
