Meta and News Corp spread fake news to promote Pauline Hanson and provide an overblown impression of her party's polling. IA founder Dave Donovan uncovers an attack on Australia's democracy.
SENATOR PAULINE HANSON is the biggest star of Australian politics again. Whether it's calling a fellow senator a female dog; declaring there are "no good Muslims", doubling down and then getting formally censured by the Senate for those remarks; or being flown around by Gina Rinehart, Hanson has seldom been out of the headlines recently.
But the biggest story is the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (official AEC name)* party in the polls. The rise of "One Nation" (PHON) is most energetically being trumpeted, with constant breathless reports puffing Pauline’s party's poll results.
Whether or not Hanson's One Nation party will ultimately gain power or just more power, progressives may have good reason to blame her newfound popularity on the negligent and/or devious actions of two media monsters: Meta and News Corp.
Tied into all this, Meta signed an AI content licensing deal with News Corp for US$50 million (AU$71.4 million) a year this week. Let's uncover how it all fits together.
FACEBOOK ZUCKS!
Meta is the owner of Instagram and Facebook, the latter of which is the most widely-used and influential social media platform in the world. As well as one of the most controversial, with it having allowed and allegedly assisted Russian interests to use its platform to influence the 2016 U.S. Election.
The owner of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, 41, faced a humiliating grilling by a U.S. Senate Committee over this affair. After initially defiantly denying the problem and ridiculing critics, he subsequently apologised and announced plans to combat fake news. Zuckerberg then committed to implementing a series of safeguards to prevent fake political news stories from being posted on his platform to subvert democracy. To all appearances, this he ostensibly did.
But now it would appear Facebook is back to its old tricks — at least when it comes to the rise of Pauline Hanson and her party. As digital editor Dan Jensen revealed in this column last month (February 2026), Facebook is permitting unknown actors – likely foreign – to post a plethora of fake news stories promoting Pauline Hanson having interviews with public figures that never happened.
These stories used deepfake images, probably using AI, to further deceive Facebook users into believing the stories were factual. The practice was also something Facebook agreed to eliminate after 2016 from supposed political articles and it has a methodology and restrictions to do so. In this case, they were clearly not applied.
Independent Australia can reveal now that it used official Facebook tools to report one of its sponsored posts. One that led to a page with an ABC logo and an AI image of Hanson and a finance expert in a supposed fiery exchange in the ABC studios. It contained details of an interview that a simple search revealed to us never happened.
In other words, this was fake news pretending to be one of Australia's most trusted news sources, in which Facebook directly financially benefited. Facebook dismissed IA's undeniable evidence of the fraud, saying there was too little evidence to confirm our claims and refused to remove the fraudulent article, thereby continuing to profit from the advertising revenue, another alleged fraud.
We will be writing more about Meta, detailing other instances of alleged impropriety by Facebook in publishing fake AI-enhanced news articles in the near future. There is an abundance of these false sponsored articles going back several years. Most of them involve public figures, and often they are highly defamatory. But not the ones involving Pauline Hanson, which would appear to all be puff pieces.
Who is paying for her fake AI news promotional budget?
META MURDOCH FAKE?
The second foreign media network that Independent Australia has exposed deceiving the Australian people to promote the political fortunes of Pauline Hanson is News Corp, often called the Murdoch media colloquially. It needs little introduction, but suffice to say it is an organisation so utterly amoral, it famously hacked a dead British schoolgirl’s phone, giving her parents false hope she was still alive. It led to the publication having to close one of its most popular English tabloids, The News of the World.
It has been exposed countless times in this country, and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for a Royal Commission into its activities, but because it owns about 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 vicious to seriously challenge.
Put simply, it makes and breaks governments, allegedly at the whim of its ageing proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, a naturalised American citizen, has demonstrated time and again that he is prepared use his media outlets as weapons to achieve his political objectives, even to the extent of sacrificing their profitability in the pursuit.
Independent Australia has uncovered a vast number of Facebook posts by News Corp’s online publication news.com.au, promoting Paul Hanson’s party's alleged leap in popularity. IA’s investigations have revealed that a great many of these posts appear to be purposely designed to mislead the public into thinking PHON has more popularity with voters and chances of imminent electoral success than they may.
Below is the typical example of one of these puff posts by the Murdoch media on Meta:
(The initial image post on Facebook)
The first interesting point is that there is no link to any story on news.com.au away from Facebook, or any prompt to even find out more. This is unusual, since almost the only source of revenue for online news publications without a paywall and subscription base, like news.com.au, is through advertising revenue.
Usually, advertising revenue is determined by the size of the audience — the number of people seeing the ads on the site. Facebook pays News Corp under the Media Bargaining Code and that is a set amount a year, typically renegotiated every three years. Outside of that, money means eyeballs, which in this case aren’t seeing any obvious way to the ads.
You need to be savvy, or a little curious, to click on the image on Facebook and find that it takes you through to another screen. Apart from that, it is just a Pauline Hanson party promotion.
A very nebulous promotion, since it doesn’t say what the percentages represent. Most might presume it is an opinion poll, although it could be an election result. Presuming it’s an opinion poll, who took the poll? How many people were polled? Was it of an electorate, a region, a territory, a state, the nation, or a particular demographic, such as sex or age? Most people would guess it's a national measure, since both parties featured, the jubilant Hanson and new PHON recruit Barnaby Joyce, are sitting Federal members.
And what was being polled — voting intention, approval rating or something more obscure? The only certainty is that it is not an estimate of the two-party-preferred vote, the crucial factor in our two-party-preferred voting system. The informed may presume the percentages reflect the primary vote, which is also important. But how many of the 141,000+ Facebook scrolling Pauline Hanson sympathisers who liked this unpaid Pauline Hanson party advertisement would fall into that category?
Let’s say you did choose to click on the image and find that it takes you through to another screen. The next screen is dominated by the same image, but includes a slim right-hand margin. That margin is topped by the same teaser from the previous page, most of the same stats and then below that the comment section. In the first small box, it says ‘FULL STORY’ and then a link. You’ve found it!
(The second "click through" page on Facebook)
And if the Facebook user hadn't clicked away by now, and were attentive, they would notice the link in the comments and click it, where they would at last be able to find some detail.
In this case, you will find it is not a poll for the Federal election, has nothing to do with Hanson or Joyce, but a State election. That’s blatantly misleading and deceptive when combined with the Facebook post’s vagueness and difficulty in verifying.
Which state is not immediately revealed, just that it was a “major” state.
In fact, you have to scroll down, past the vague lede, past the video before you find text that reveals it is NSW, which doesn’t have an election for more than 12 months and Labor has an unpopular leader who is resigning.
In any case, most people reading Facebook will never even read the story, just accept that One Nation is surging federally and scroll down to a cat video, or the latest bombing in Tel Aviv or Tehran, or whatever.
Our investigations reveal that in other similar news.com.au Pauline posts, the percentages on the poster will be found to relate to a certain demographic, such as gender, or older people, or some statistic, so long as One Nation can be ultimately shown to be in front. The systematic nature of this practice confirms it is a deliberate deception, not carelessness or negligence.
THE TIE-IN
The interesting point about all this is that News Corp has done nothing illegal by its misleading and devious presentation. It might be a breach of that toothless tiger, the Press Council, but News Corp laughs at being censured by that body, which can’t even hit it with a fine.
As for Meta, an unchallengeable foreign mega-corporation with close ties to the Trump cartel, the prospect for any accountability seems even more remote. Facebook's owner is a close contact of the U.S. President and his corporation openly admits employing CIA agents to set the guidelines for content and tailor its all-important algorithm.
Pauline Hanson is also a staunch ally of Trump and finds support from the disaffected with crass, divisive, anti-immigration, extremist rhetoric and stunts. Which is probably why those AI scam interviews and Murdoch’s misleading poll stories promoting Pauline are remain on the platform and are swamping Facebook users’ timelines.
The Meta-Murdoch Media AI deal means two corporations known for spreading fake and misleading news stories will be cooperating to produce a super-intelligence. Announcing the deal, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson told the Guardian he often speaks to Mark Zuckerberg and that now his company is essentially an "AI input corporation". What could possibly go wrong?
* Still the official name of Hanson's party, as revealed by IA on 11 February, despite Hanson claiming the name had been changed to One Nation, which the Australian media, other than IA, simply accepted and so has since been inaccurately describing the party.
This is an abridged version of an Independent Australia editorial sent to paid subscribers in the weekly newsletter, which also collates all the stories published by IA the past week, amongst other features. The full editorial may 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.social, Independent Australia on Bluesky @independentaus.bsky.social, X/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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