Tag Archive for: Social Media

Snapshot of a shadow war

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The rapid escalation in the long-running conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia which took place in late September 2020 has been shadowed by a battle across social media for control of the international narrative about the conflict. On Twitter, large numbers of accounts supporting both sides have been wading in on politicised hashtags linked to the conflict. Our findings indicate large-scale coordinated activity. While much of this behaviour is likely to be authentic, our analysis has also found a significant amount of suspicious and potentially inauthentic behaviour.

The goal of this research piece is to observe and document some of the early dynamics of the information battle playing out in parallel to the conflict on the ground and create a basis for further, more comprehensive research. This report is in no way intended to undermine the legitimacy of authentic social media conversations and debate taking place on all sides of the conflict.

Tag Archive for: Social Media

Australia needs to engage its youth population around AUKUS

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Despite a push for openness and transparency in communicating the Australian National Defence posture, one group the Australian government is failing to converse with is its own citizens, especially its youth.

Communication is integral to AUKUS’s resilience and success. As Australia’s youth will be the generation who will be asked to provide for the national defence when AUKUS comes to fruition, it stands to reason that they must understand its value.

A multi-pronged and well-funded approach from the government is therefore needed for effective engagement with them. This approach must be focused on social media presence, outreach to youth organisations and schools and increasing access to AUKUS-related information.

As the agreement moves forward, all three partners must improve their messaging, particularly regarding Pillar II—advanced capabilities. Disjointed messaging between them that fails to account for each country’s socio-political environment risks losing public support and poses a threat to AUKUS’s survival.

Explanations of AUKUS can’t rely wholly on defence aspects but must include non-traditional security facets as well. A key topic Australian youth are most concerned about is the environment. So, in regard to nuclear submarines, Australian government officials must be prepared to discuss plans for disposal of nuclear waste and fears of a naval Chernobyl. Additional discussions must be had about what the youth role in the economy will be under AUKUS and the impacts of Pillars I and II for Australia’s economy and market. Telling them how the agreement benefits their daily lives now and into the future will go a long way to maintaining support.

The Office for Youth recently launched the Engage! Strategy, designed to improve young people’s involvement in government. The government can tailor elements of this strategy to specific needs of AUKUS messaging. Specifically, younger populations are increasingly getting news from non-traditional media sources. They are less likely to look for an official government statement, so the government must meet them in spaces they frequent. In fact, 68.8 percent of young Australians want the government to engage them on social media platforms.

To meet this demand for engagement, the government must be creative in its social media presence.

One example of innovative presence is NATO’s #ProtectTheFuture campaign, in which NATO experts played popular video games on Twitch with streamers from alliance countries. In partnering with Twitch streamer and Youtuber ZeRoyalViking to discuss NATO, cybersecurity and how video games can teach digital safety practices, they reached more than 40,000 people.

Australian government officials should do similar collaborations surrounding AUKUS with YouTube and Twitch streamers from Australia. These could be focused on explaining AUKUS or take a thematic slant aligned with the two pillars.

Keeping a finger on current trends and viral content also plays a critical role in the social media space. Part of the reason for the success of the NATO campaign was that the platform, games and streamers connected with what viewers were interested in at the time.

A comparable phenomenon can be seen with Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and social media account @KamalaHQ. What has brought Harris’s presidential campaign to the forefront of American youth was singer and songwriter Charli XCX tweeting that ‘kamala IS brat’. This tweet—based off the pop culture trend of Brat Summer—spread to Harris’s marketing campaign, in turn reinvigorating youth voters.

Social media engagement isn’t a panacea, however. Youth organisations, especially at schools across the country, are also key.

Whether it’s by sending AUKUS experts to speak at organisation meetings or hosting online webinars, there’s room for engagement through connecting with those who have intersecting interests. This could look like hosting a Q&A panel or trivia night with student political organisations. Outreach should also engage science and technology organisations and vocational institutions to discuss job opportunities that will become available due to AUKUS.

The final area the Australian government must harness for youth engagement with AUKUS is a singular, dominant digital presence. Creating a first point of contact online ensures that information on AUKUS is accessible for Australian youth who wish to learn more.

A common way to link information is through services such as Linktree or with a website. Currently, the AUKUS partnership has neither. By linking sources from all three governments to associated social media accounts, the public will see trusted, verified sources to turn to alongside traditional media avenues. Starting this process now would generate a solid foundation for issues or addressing misinformation that may come up in the future.

Youth engagement with AUKUS is vital to its long-term success. Through ongoing messaging campaigns, Australia must continue to convince its citizens on why AUKUS matters, how it affects them and what it changes about the Australian way of life—because the fact of the matter is that, without Australia’s younger populace on board, literally and figuratively, the future of AUKUS is uncertain.

Recent stabbings highlight danger of online misinformation

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Early misinformation identified a mentally ill man who stabbed 14 people in Sydney on March 13, killing six, as a Muslim or Jewish extremist. These falsehoods highlight the commonplace way in which Muslim and Jewish communities are scapegoated in times of crisis. To improve social cohesion in Australia, we must do more to prevent such instances of xenophobic and religious stereotyping.  

Soon after the horrific events at Bondi Junction in Sydney’s east, social media sites including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit were main conduits for the rapid spread of misinformation. X accounts with large followings, and even a British television presenter, initially alleged the attacker was an Islamist terrorist. Some social media users also suggested the attacker was anti-Semitic, speculating that an area with a high Jewish population was deliberately targeted and that the attack was somehow connected to the Israel-Hamas war.  

Others speculated online that the attacker was Jewish. Pro-Kremlin Russian-Australian Simeon Boikov was one key social media figure who amplified this narrative. Boikov is being sheltered by the Russian Consulate in Sydney to avoid arrest for assault. Within a matter of hours, his false claims had reached hundreds of thousands on X and Telegram and were even repeated by a national news outlet. 

Whereas the attacker may have been acting on feelings of misogyny, misinformation about his motivation and supposed background as either Muslim or Jewish quickly spread far and wide. Some social media figures who spread this misinformation apologised for their incorrect assumptions, but many other posts and comments still remain online.  

This misinformation is deeply problematic and harmful to Muslim and Jewish Australians. It is not uncommon for religious minorities to face retaliation over bouts of violent crimes and extremism, including wider geopolitical events abroad. In the first seven weeks of the Israel-Hamas war last year, there was a thirteen-fold increase in reports of Islamophobia made to Islamophobia Register Australia. In October and November of last year, the Executive Council of the Australian Jewry documented 662 anti-Semitic attacks in Australia.  

As made clear in the 2024 threat assessment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, religiously motivated violent extremism remains a real threat in Australia. But in no circumstance should faith communities at large be vilified and harassed for the acts of violent criminals and extremists. Religiously and racially motivated hate is antithetical to Australia’s aim of furthering social cohesion and the safety of all Australian citizens. 

As a society we need to be better prepared to prevent the deterioration of social cohesion in response to violent criminal and extremist activities. We saw similar threats to social cohesion emerge in the aftermath of a knife attack at an Assyrian church in Wakeley, Sydney, two days after the Bondi Junction attack. The Wakeley stabbing has similarly led to fears that Islamophobia may increase at the community level.  

Regardless of background, all Australians should call out racial or religious hate as it arises. A good example of solidarity was the #illridewithyou campaign aimed at protecting Muslim Australians on public transport from potential backlash emerging from the 2014 Lindt cafe siege. This grassroots campaign on social media demonstrates the role that even ordinary Australians can play in contributing to a safer and more socially cohesive society. 

Greater regulation of social media is also needed to prevent the spread of misinformation during times of crisis. A bill before the federal parliament would fine platforms for failure to comply with industry standards and codes of conduct in regulating misinformation and disinformation they carry. 

The esafety commissioner’s work in this space is also an important step to tackling the proliferation of terrorist and violent extremist material and activity online. X will  appear in court in May to determine whether they breached the law by failing to comply with the commissioner’s notice to remove online footage of the Wakeley stabbing.  

The online regulator has also recently issued legal notices to Google, Meta, X, WhatsApp, Telegram and Reddit to answer a series of detailed questions about how each is protecting Australians from terrorist and violent extremist material.  

People will continue to turn to social media for communication and for accessing information in times of crisis. But as the two recent stabbings in Sydney show, more must be done to resist the widespread proliferation of misinformation during times of heightened social tension. Increasing the regulation of social media and encouraging ordinary citizens to act in opposition to racially and religiously based misinformation are straightforward strategies that will go towards building a more cohesive Australian society. 

PNG to push out Facebook, taking a sharp turn into cyber censorship

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Facebook is king in Papua New Guinea (PNG) but its reign may soon be over. This week Communications Minister Sam Basil, a regular Facebook user himself, announced that PNG would shut down the social media site for a month so that his department can research how the network is being used. While there are mixed signals about whether the ban is a certainty or a proposal under consideration, the intention is disturbing and the enforcement of such a ban would set a dangerous precedent in our region.

Such a move—which would put PNG alongside China, Iran and North Korea—would completely upend the country’s interconnected and diverse digital ecosystem that’s relied on by the public, businesses and civil society.

Facebook—as it’s done elsewhere around the world—has successfully embedded itself into the fabric of how Papua New Guineans socialise, do business and engage with the world. You name it and there’s a Facebook group in PNG talking about it. Buyers and sellers, hobbyists, the politically interested, building contractors, tourists, health authorities and provinces congregate together under a multitude of Facebook groups.

Over the last five years, use of Facebook has grown more than fivefold, from 136,000 users to an estimated 730,000 active users today. Overall, total internet penetration in PNG is still low, hovering at around 11% of the 8 million population, but these numbers are growing quickly. An additional 110,000 active social media users jumped online in 2017–2018, and Facebook itself increased its PNG user base by 18% over the same period. The overwhelming majority of users, 92% to be exact, access the social network from a mobile phone.

Google searches show the extent of the country’s Facebook engagement. After ‘PNG’ the second most googled search term by Papua New Guineans is ‘Facebook’, with the fifth being ‘Facebook Login.’

And how does the Australian government communicate with Papua New Guineans? Through Facebook of course.

According to local media, the PNG government has said the Facebook shutdown ‘will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images, users that post false and misleading information on Facebook to be filtered and removed’.

The government’s concerns are all legitimate and most countries are facing a similar set of issues. But it’s important to keep in mind fake accounts, pornography and misleading information is a problem for most networks—including Youtube, Reddit and Instagram—all of which have small chunks of users in PNG. And if pornography is the problem, the PNG government should start a conversation with Twitter. A wide range of PNG accounts appear to be using the microblogging site to push out pornography domestically and internationally.

This may shock some, but the signs have always been there. Over the past decade the government has threatened to block political blogs, announced a ‘monitoring committee’ tasked with identifying citizens who express views the government believes are ‘subversive’, and introduced vague regulations that civil society groups claim protect politicians from criticism. Under the country’s overly broad ICT laws charges can be laid, for example, if someone is judged to be causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another person via the ‘improper use of ICT services’.

While the government has claimed the ban will be temporary, what if this doesn’t end up being the case? Even if there are current intentions to bring the network back online later this year, it’s just as easy, once political battles have been won, to put a ban extension on the table.

At the end of the day, it’s likely the PNG government’s skirmish with Facebook has more to do with reining in political debate than anything else. Only time will tell if this is an empty threat or the government really will flick the off switch. In the meantime, there are four issues that policymakers, industry and civil society must consider:

  1.    The PNG government can enact a ban on Facebook

Unfortunately, enacting such a ban isn’t difficult. The PNG government may not have a well-resourced public service, including on ICT and cyber issues, but it only has to ask the country’s telecommunications and internet service providers to block both www.facebook.com and the Facebook messenger application in order to impose this ban.

  1.    This is very bad for the PNG economy

Partial or full internet takedowns can cost a country hundreds of millions of dollars. Banning Facebook will make it almost impossible for most PNG businesses to easily reach their customers. It will also cut off isolated communities from local civil society groups and disrupt the communication channels of a host of local and provincial governments. The PNG government’s promise to look into creating a homegrown alternative social network is very unlikely to get off the ground. It would be expensive, resource-intensive and would require third-party assistance to gain any traction. The hardest part? Getting the public to actually use it.

  1.    This is also bad for Australia

With APEC around the corner (for more details, head to the PNG government’s official APEC Facebook page), this sharp turn into cyber censorship is a setback for all Australian organisations with an interest in PNG. This is also a blow for the Australian government, which has invested significant public resources in both PNG and in its cyber diplomacy. With one of our most important bilateral partners threatening such blatant cyber censorship, it shows that there’s a lot of hard and important work that DFAT must do close to home to convince our neighbours that a free and open cyber space is in their national interests. It’s vital for the Australian government to link up with industry to encourage the PNG government away from cyber censorship that will be detrimental to both the economy and to PNG’s hosting of APEC.

  1.    It’s terrible for PNG’s place in the world

A Facebook ban will of course stifle public debate and make it difficult for both local and regional media to report on the country. It will also make it difficult for the world to get a good glimpse into PNG and for Papua New Guineans overseas to connect back home. Intentionally advancing its own online isolation—in a world where it already struggles to attract international attention—is the very last thing that PNG needs.

Security implications of modern communication technologies in Northeast Asia

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Last month, ASPI and the Australian Department of Defence co-chaired the inaugural Northeast Asia Defence and Security Forum in Sydney.

It was a wide ranging discussion, with a particular focus on how all parties could engage each other and build trust in order to prevent more serious threats emerging—see the full report here and media coverage here and here.

Those engagement mechanisms need to be robust and flexible given the especially strong nexus between commerce, domestic politics, and security in the region, underlining the need to better integrate economic and strategic analysis (PDF) of northeast Asian defence issues. Ben Schreer has written in The Strategist about some of those issues, including the pressures for military modernisation to evolve into arms racing. Read more

ASPI suggests

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Welcome back for the second round-up of news and articles in the defence and strategy world, coming to you from Jakarta.

Being in Indonesia, I’ve been naturally thinking a lot about reform of the Indonesian military and Australian military engagement. Evan Laksmana’s 2011 paper on American military assistance and defence reform in Indonesia identifies how limits in the design of military-military engagement can seriously hinder long-lasting reform. And there are lessons here for Australia.

This week’s capability piece is an essay from a serving USAF officer who argues that the service’s focus on high-tech stealthy aircraft (PDF) is the wrong path.

Social media is becoming an inextricable part of modern warfare. It’s also now part of a developing area of intelligence analysis called Dynamic Twitter Network Analysis which uses data from Twitter and other social media outlets to gauge public opinion in zones of insecurity and instability. And as the conflict continues between Israel and Hamas, both on the ground and (bizarrely) in the Twitterverse, here’s an Atlantic article that looks at whether this is a violation of Twitter’s terms of use.

This New York Times article on the demographics of the US electorate contains some statistics on the views of Americans on the relative merits of capitalism and socialism which might be surprising—although they mirror the Lowy Institute’s findings that ‘just 60% of Australians say democracy is preferable to any other kind of government, and only 39% of 18 to 29 year olds’.

While in the US, the Washington Post takes a look at the lifestyle of four star generals.

Journal roundup

From the people who brought you Infinity Journal, a free peer-reviewed online journal on strategy, here’s the new issue of the Journal of Military Operations. You’ll need to sign up to view their articles but if the quality is anything like Infinity, it will be well worth the effort.

Sticking with a journal theme, the Australian Defence Force Journal has released its latest issue (PDF), including an article from Strategist contributor Albert Palazzo as well as pieces on Japanese subs for Australia, ANZUS, Australian influence in the South Pacific and UAVs.

The new issue of the Kokoda Foundation’s Security Challenges has articles on ballistic missile defence and China’s multilateral engagement so get your hands on a hard copy unless you can wait until it’s available online. Previous issues are available online and contain articles by most of the well-known names in Australian strategy discussions.

Natalie Sambhi is an analyst at ASPI and editor of The Strategist.

Tag Archive for: Social Media

Smart Asian women are the new targets of CCP global online repression

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The Chinese Communist Party has a problem with women of Asian descent who have public platforms, opinions and expertise on China.

In an effort to counter the views and work of these women, the CCP has been busy pivoting its growing information operation capabilities to target women, with a focus on journalists working at major Western media outlets.

Right now, and often going back weeks or months, some of the world’s leading China journalists and human rights activists are on the receiving end of an ongoing, coordinated and large-scale online information campaign. These women are high profile journalists at media outlets including the New Yorker, The Economist, the New York Times, The Guardian, Quartz and others. The most malicious and sophisticated aspects of this information campaign are focused on women of Asian descent.

Based on open-source information, ASPI assesses the inauthentic Twitter accounts behind this operation are likely another iteration of the pro-CCP ‘Spamouflage’ network, which Twitter attributed to the Chinese government in 2019.