Weaponizing Fake News: Uncovering Australia's ‘Death Tax’ Campaign

• In Event: Misinformation: How and Why Misinformation Is Spread

Abstract

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. We draw on theorems of agenda setting and backfire effects to trace the evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline and its weaponization as an election fear campaign. In doing so, we propose a new phenomenon, recursion theory, to understand the spread of fake news discourses and varying actors’ roles in weaponizing fake news for political purposes.

Authors

• Andrea Carson, La Trobe Univesity

• Andrew Gibbons, The University of Texas at Austin

• Justin Bonest Phillips, University of Waikato