One Nation denies connection to cyber army of Indonesian supporters

A cyber army of Indonesian influencers supporting Pauline Hanson on social media has been labelled “deliberate foreign interference” by the party itself.

In the past seven months, many new pages supporting Hanson have been popping up on Facebook, with rapid growth among Australians, while being controlled from Indonesia.

One page has 117,000 members, with all three admins based in Indonesia and dozens of posts daily in support of One Nation.

Some of the content targets Muslims, yet is 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, which generated many comments of support from Australian fans of One Nation.

Another top contributor named Ayu Ollshop also posts about preventing “islamification” of Australia.

While her account name means “online shop” in Indonesia, she appears to be a real person, posting for years about food and daily life in South Sumatra, before a sudden switch to Australian issues.

On April 18, the Ayu Ollshop account suddenly pumped out three posts in support of Ben Roberts-Smith, who is currently facing war crimes charges.

There are also positive posts about other conservative favourites in Australia: Gina Rinehart and Holly Valance.

Hundreds of thousands of Aussies are consuming this content every day, and it’s easy to miss where it’s coming from, with the poster’s name appearing in small print on Facebook feeds.

Ed Coper is a political communications expert and author of the book Angertainment.

He says much of the foreign content is what’s described as ‘rage bait’ – making people angry to drive more clicks.

“It’s incredibly easy on social media just to make you really angry about something,” he said.

“Your gut instinct when you see something that’s ‘rage bait’ is to immediately engage with it and so people know they just have to make something that’ll make you really angry and they’ll get all the engagement.”

ANU researcher Ross Tapsell believes it could be the first time a shadowy industry operating in Indonesia has been used to influence Australian politics.

“So there is this underground, hidden industry, it’s an influence operations industry,” Tapsell, who’s spent the past decade researching disinformation in South-East Asia, said.

Indonesian elections are regularly influenced by social media, involving people known as “buzzers”.

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

It can be a controversial occupation; a “buzzer” was arrested last year in Jakarta for impeding an Indonesian corruption investigation.

“Buzzer” teams are available for hire, deploying social media accounts they’ve been crafting for years.

“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 around 25 different Indonesian Facebook accounts supporting One Nation and failed to receive a single reply, though 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 those 15 different Facebook pages,” 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 coordinated with identical images repeated across multiple accounts.

Tapsell said they were clearly not doing it because they’re 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 recently 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 One Nation 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.”

Whoever is behind it, it seems to be working, according to pollster Tony Barry from Redbridge Group, who’s witnessed One Nation pick up close to 3 million extra voters in poll numbers this year.

“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.”

One Nation statement:

We are very much aware of numerous social media accounts administered overseas purporting to support One Nation or publishing ‘pro’ One Nation content. 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. We have raised this issue with the government more than once.

One Nation’s social media accounts have huge followings. Senator Hanson’s “Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain” Facebook account, alone, has more than a million followers. We consider that whoever is controlling these overseas accounts (various countries include Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam) is ‘piggy-backing’ on our huge following; they know any mention of Senator Hanson or One Nation is likely to get a lot of views. Much of the content they produce is demonstrably – laughably – false.

We’ve raised this with a number of social media platforms. They sometimes act to remove these accounts, but of course the people running them just start new ones. It’s relentless.

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.