Meta and Murdoch make AI pact and push Pauline’s polls

Meta and News Corp spread fake news to promote Pauline Hanson and create an exaggerated impression of her party’s elections. IA founder Dave Donovan reveals an attack on Australian democracy.

SENATOR PAULINE HANSON is again the biggest star in Australian politics. Whether it’s calling a fellow senator a female dog; declare that there is “there are no good Muslims”, double and then i get officially censored Due to these statements, the Senate; or be flew around By Gina Rinehart Hanson has rarely been out of the headlines lately.

But the biggest story rise Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (official AEC name)* party is in the polls. The rise of “One Nation” (PHON) is trumpeted most energetically, with constant breathtaking reports inflating Pauline’s party’s poll results.

Whether or not Hanson’s One Nation party eventually gains power, progressives may have good reason to attribute his newfound popularity to the negligent and/or insidious actions of two media behemoths: Meta and News Corp.

It depends on all this, Meta signed A US$50 million (AU$71.4 million) a year AI content licensing deal was struck with News Corp this week. Let’s uncover how it all fits together.

FACEBOOK ZUCKS!

Meta owns Instagram and Facebook, the world’s most widely used and influential social media platforms. He is also one of the most controversial for allegedly allowing and aiding Russian interests to use his platform. Influencing the 2016 US Elections.

Meta’s owner, 41-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, faced humiliating criticism from the US Senate Committee for this incident. After initially defiantly denying the problem and mocking critics, he later apologized And announced plans To combat fake news. Zuckerberg then decided to implement a series of measures to prevent fake political news from being published on his platform in an attempt to subvert democracy. He apparently did this apparently.

But now Facebook seems to be back to its old tricks; at least when it comes to the rise of Pauline Hanson and her party. As digital editor Dan Jensen explained in this column last month (February 2026), Facebook is allowing unknown actors (presumably strangers) to publish numerous fake news stories promoting Pauline Hanson doing interviews with public figures that never took place.

These stories used deepfake images, possibly using artificial intelligence, to further trick Facebook users into believing the stories were real. The practice was also something Facebook agreed to remove from so-called political articles after 2016, and there is a methodology and restrictions for doing so. They clearly did not apply in this case.

Independent A.Australia can now reveal that he used official Facebook tools to report one of his sponsored posts. A page that led to a page with the ABC logo and an AI image of a financial expert with Hanson in a supposedly heated exchange at ABC studios. It contained details of an interview that a simple investigation revealed never took place.

In other words, this was fake news pretending to be one of Australia’s most trusted news sources, from which Facebook directly benefited financially. Facebook rejected IA.Another alleged fraud was that ‘s presented undeniable evidence of fraud, said there was little evidence to substantiate our claims, and refused to remove the fake article so they could continue to profit from advertising revenue.

We will be writing more about Meta in the near future, detailing other allegations of impropriety in Facebook’s publication of fake AI-powered news articles. There are plenty of these fake sponsored articles going back several years. Many of these involve public figures and are often quite defamatory. But not the ones involving Pauline Hanson, which make everyone look like blown pieces.

Who pays the promotional budget for fake AI news?

IS META MURDOC FAKE?

Second foreign media network Independent A.Australia News Corp, which exposed Pauline Hanson deceiving the Australian public to promote her political fortune, is often colloquially referred to as the Murdoch media. It needs little introduction but suffice to say it is a completely unethical organization. famous for hacking A phone call from a dead British schoolgirl gave her family false hope that she was still alive. This led to the publication being forced to shut down one of the most popular English-language tabloids. World News.

It has been exposed countless times in this country, and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for its involvement in the activities of the Royal Commission, but as it owns around 70 per cent of the metropolitan newspaper circulation, as well as Australia’s only cable news channel, its political power has so far been too immense and fierce to be seriously challenged.

Simply put, it makes and breaks governments, allegedly at the whim of its aging owner, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, a naturalized American citizen, has repeatedly shown that he is willing to use media outlets as weapons to achieve his political goals, even going so far as to sacrifice their profitability.

Independent A.Australia News Corp’s online publication reveals multiple Facebook posts news.com.auIt promotes the so-called popularity jump of Paul Hanson’s party. IA.‘s investigations found that many of these posts were deliberately designed to mislead the public into thinking that PHON had greater popularity with voters and had a close chance of electoral success.

Below is a typical example of one of these inflated Murdoch media posts on Meta:

(First image post on Facebook)

The first interesting point is the lack of connection to any story. news.com.au Away from Facebook or any desire to learn more. This is unusual because it is virtually the only source of revenue for online news publications without paywalls and subscription bases, e.g. news.com.aucomes from advertising revenues.

Usually, advertising revenue is determined by the size of the target audience, that is, the number of people who see ads on the site. Facebook pays News Corp Media Bargaining Code and this is a set amount per year, usually renegotiated every three years. Other than that, money means eyeballs that don’t see an obvious path to ads, in this case.

You have to be savvy or a little curious to click on the image on Facebook and see that it takes you to another screen. Other than that, this is just Pauline Hanson’s party introduction.

It’s a very vague promotion as it doesn’t say what the percentages represent. Many may think this is an opinion poll, but it could also be an election result. Assuming this is an opinion poll, who conducted the poll? How many people participated in the survey? Did it belong to a constituency, a district, a region, a state, a nation, or a specific demographic such as gender or age? Many might guess that this is a national measure, as both parties, the jubilant Hanson and PHON newcomer Barnaby Joyce, sit as Federal members.

So what was done in the survey? Is it voting intention, approval rating, or something more vague? The only thing that is certain is that this is not a two-party preferred vote prediction, which is the most important factor in our two-party preferred voting system. The informed person may assume the percentages reflect the primary vote, which is important. But how many of the more than 141,000 Pauline Hanson sympathizers scrolling through Facebook who liked this free Pauline Hanson party ad fall into this category?

Let’s say you chose to click on the image and found that the image took you to another screen. The next screen is dominated by the same image but with a thin right margin. Above this margin is the same teaser as on the previous page, with most of the same statistics, and below that is the comments section. In the first little box it says ‘FULL STORY’ and then a link. You found it!

(Second “click” page on Facebook)

And if the Facebook user hadn’t clicked by now and had been careful, they would have noticed the link in the comments and clicked it, eventually getting some details.

In this case you will see that this is not a poll for the Federal election, it has nothing to do with Hanson or Joyce, it is the State election. This, combined with the vagueness and difficulty of verification of the Facebook post, is clearly misleading and deceptive.

Which state was not immediately revealed, just a “big” state.

In fact, you have to scroll down, past the obscure LED, and past the video before you find the text revealing that there hasn’t been an election in NSW for over 12 months and that an unpopular leader of the Labor Party has resigned.

In any case, most people who read Facebook never even read the story, they just assume One Nation is rising at the federal level and look at a cat video or the latest bombing in Tel Aviv or Tehran or whatever.

Our research shows that there are other similar places as well. news.com.au Pauline posts will show that the percentages on the poster are associated with a specific demographic group. like genderor old people, or some statistics, as long as it can be shown that One Nation is ahead in the end. The systematic nature of this practice confirms that this is not carelessness or negligence, but deliberate deception.

CONNECTION

The interesting thing about all this is that News Corp has done nothing illegal with its misleading and perverse presentations. This may be a breach of the toothless tiger Press Council, but News Corp laughs at being condemned by a body that can’t even fine it.

As for Meta, an unrivaled foreign megacorporation with close ties to the Trump cartel, the prospect of any accountability seems even more remote. The owner of Facebook is in close contact with the US President and his company openly admits Using CIA agents Setting guidelines for content and adapting its all-important algorithm.

Pauline Hanson is also a staunch ally of Trump and has been spreading support with divisive, anti-immigration, extremist rhetoric. That’s probably why AI scam interviews and misleading poll stories promoting Murdoch’s Pauline are still on the platform and flooding Facebook users’ timelines.

Meta-The Murdoch Media AI deal means two companies known for spreading fake and misleading news will collaborate to produce super intelligence. Announcing the deal, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said: Guard He often talks to Mark Zuckerberg and says his company is essentially a corporation now. “Artificial intelligence input company”. What could go wrong?

* Still the official name of Hanson’s party, as revealed by the IA on 11 February, although Hanson claimed the name had been changed to One Nation, Australian media outside the IA simply accepted this and have been inaccurately describing the party ever since.

This is a shortened version of the Independent Australia editorial sent to paying subscribers in the weekly newsletter, and brings together, among other features, all the stories published by IA in the past week. The entire article can also be read in the members-only area. You can subscribe to Independent Australia HERE.

Follow IA founder Dave Donovan on X/Twitter @davrosz and Bluesky @davrosz.bsky.socialIndependent Australia on Bluesky @independaus.bsky.socialX/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.

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