Re:Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Pa...
by threeseed on Sunday May 26, 2019 @06:52PM
(#20018074)
We recently had an Australian election in which there was a lot of fake news around a "death tax" imposed by one of the parties. That party lost in a close election in which at polling booths one of the top 3 issues was the death tax.
Trickery works. It's why everyone keeps doing it.
Re:Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Pa...
by nl on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:51PM
(#20018396)
The Australian election wasn't particularly close. The two-party-preferred margin was 3.2%, which is the mid-range in terms of margins this century (7 federal elections since 2000, 3 have had higher margins and 3 lower).
Yes the "death tax" was an outright lie. But there were lots of factors which went into that margin.
Also it's important to clarify that (for the most part - except possibly on some WeChat groups) - this wasn't a foreign campaign. It was mostly old fashioned paid advertising by the Liberal party itself.
Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.