Facebook’s parasocial turn is fuelling the Pauline Hanson moment

Don’t bother combing through the details of Australian politics to understand the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The radical right’s political moment was Made in America — or rather, at Meta Headquarters at One Hacker Way in Menlo Park. Time? January 2025.

That’s when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was pulling back on its social focus, namely the “family and friends” part. Instead, Facebook and Instagram would invest more in algorithmically driven creator content prototyped by TikTok.