Foreign digital army behind pro-One Nation posts flooding social media

An army of foreign influencers supporting Pauline Hanson on social media could be the first example of Indonesian “buzzers” being deployed on Australian politics.

In the past seven months, new Facebook groups supporting Hanson have been popping up – controlled out of Indonesia, but with a rapidly growing number of Australian followers.

One group has 117,000 members, with all three administrators based in Indonesia and dozens of posts daily supporting One Nation.

Some of the content targets Muslims, despite being posted by Indonesian accounts, often with a profile picture of a woman wearing an Islamic headscarf.

One such poster, named Yeti Marati, has posts calling for mosques to be closed down in Australia.

Another of her posts claims “Muslims won’t come to Australia if One Nation wins power”, generating many comments in support.

ANU researcher Ross Tapsell believes it could be the first time Indonesian “buzzers” – or election influencers – have been used to impact Australian politics.

“There is this underground, hidden industry – it’s an influence operations industry,” said Tapsell, who has spent the past decade researching disinformation in south-east Asia.

“A ‘buzzer’ is an organised digital labourer who is generally posting content on social media for some form of financial gain.”

Buzzer teams are available for hire, deploying social media accounts they have been crafting for years. But it can be a controversial occupation: last year, one buzzer was arrested for impeding an Indonesian corruption investigation.

“Their job is to just continue to post what is given to them,” Tapsell said.

“It’s very top-down, and they’re at the bottom of the rung. They often don’t meet their employers.”

A Current Affair messaged about 25 Indonesian Facebook accounts supporting One Nation and failed to receive a single reply. One account removed a video that had been questioned.

“Sometimes one person might be managing 15 different Facebook pages, and they would be putting out the same content on [each of them],” Tapsell said.

One Indonesian post viewed by A Current Affair accidentally included the instructions they were given to “ask your audience this question”.

The pro-One Nation content from Indonesia flooding Australian feeds appears to be highly co-ordinated, with identical images repeated across multiple accounts.

Tapsell said they were clearly not doing it because they were interested in One Nation, but rather for “financial purposes”.

“Because it is so cheap, and because it is so readily available, and it’s now a big booming industry, I think it was always inevitable that it was going to now be part of Australian political and online life,” he said.

One Nation has admitted to outsourcing virtual assistants for its candidates to the Philippines, but a spokesperson said it has nothing to do with this social media surge from Indonesia.

“We are not involved with any of it. We are not in any way responsible for it. We consider it to be deliberate foreign interference in Australian politics,” the spokesperson said.

“These accounts operate in foreign countries, over which we have zero jurisdiction. It is properly the responsibility of the minister for foreign affairs to raise this matter with the governments of these countries.”

Pollster Tony Barry from RedBridge Group, who witnessed One Nation pick up close to 3 million extra voters in poll numbers this year, said whoever was behind it, it seemed to be working.

“That is a real turbocharging of their vote in just six months,” Barry said. “Based on our research, there’s something not quite organic which is turbocharging that vote.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.