My wife is an Aussie from rural NSW. She made a remark this year that "I've never seen so many brown faces on TV, Australia is changing!" in a standard and typically good response to seeing so...
My wife is an Aussie from rural NSW. She made a remark this year that "I've never seen so many brown faces on TV, Australia is changing!" in a standard and typically good response to seeing so much aborigonal culture being observed. At least at the very top level and a bit snidely with the "we thank the original custodians" type speech you get in places now.
It was marked for me because I'm from a VERY ethnically diverse part of the UK where seeing black, brown, asian, slavic, purple, green and orange (hyperbole, clearly) on the regular... was just that, regular. I never knew how absolutely henious some behaviours had been since I married an Aussie.
Seeing cowardly little racists keep getting in the way of progress by hiding behind memes is exhausting. At least when Nazi's stick their head above the pit they have the courage to wear their little buttons and badges so you can tell them to fuck off promptly. But the folks who hide behind memes are just invisible in the day to day of life if you're not on social media. That just sucks as you can't identify and talk to them about this madness, the echo chambers get them.
All this is to do, is make sure laws aren't passed that don't fuck up an already really damaged series of cultures. Why are we so hostile about learning from our mistakes?
Let alone seeing these disinformation machines continue to cause huge cultural conflicts in developed nations. America saw it with Trump, the UK saw it with Brexit, Aus is seeing it here. Social media is just the avenue that these things are being identified and fought over, what on Earth can we do about it beyond going "RIght, Social Media is banned?"
Indigenous Australians feel a "powerlessness" when tackling structural problems to improve their lives, the Uluru Statement says. Voice advocates compare it to the First Nations parliaments in Norway, Sweden and Finland for the Sami people.
Advocates say the Voice needs to be enshrined in the constitution rather than legislated. Such a change cannot happen without a referendum. If successful, the vote will change the nation's constitution for the first time in 46 years, creating a body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to advise the government on policies affecting their communities.
Opinion polls had long shown support for the change but now suggest the No vote is leading
Though some argue the shift reflects public sentiment, Yes campaigners blame it on an ecosystem of disinformation - which they say is being led by figures in the No camp and "amplified" by suspicious accounts on social media.
Independent experts say the most "pernicious" and pervasive falsehoods "spreading like wildfire" online concern race.
Amid all the noise, concerns are growing over the mental health of First Nations communities, who find themselves at the centre of an increasingly divisive debate.
And questions are again being raised over whether Australia is ready to grapple with the open wounds at the heart of its nationhood.
Some of the most difficult chapters include massacres and violence against First Nations people and the theft of their land and livelihoods.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians weren't counted in the nation's census until 1971, and for most of last century many of their children were forcibly removed by the government under assimilation policies.
The suicide rate among Indigenous Australians, for example, is almost double that of non-Indigenous Australians. And despite representing less than 4% of Australia's population, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people account for 32% of prisoners.
Disinformation 'ecosystem'
The debate online has been dominated by discussions of race, say fact-checkers and monitors.
"Race is a prime vector for abuse, trolling, disinformation and conspiracy theorising and on the No side of the debate, Twitter [X] is rife with that," says Dr Timothy Graham, a digital media lecturer who has analysed over 250,000 Voice-related posts.
The Australian Associated Press' FactCheck team - which has been hired to monitor content on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok - has noticed the same on those platforms.
The official campaign has only just begun, but they are already seeing volumes of misinformation and disinformation that outstrips what they saw at Australia's 2022 election, says editor Ben James.
However, some online accounts responsible for spreading messaging around racial division show signs of "inauthenticity" and bot-like behaviour, according to social media experts working with the Yes campaign.
Those accounts were recently created, have almost no history, and have been "duplicating the exact same content", says communications adviser Ed Coper.
One example he cites is an anti-Voice Facebook post which was shared over 53,000 times shortly after being created, while only tallying 92 likes and 23 comments. He argues this is evidence of an attempt to "game the platform's algorithm" and spread disinformation as "far and wide as possible".
Community harm
Mental health agencies say they are recording marked increases in reports of online hate speech and abuse.
"We've had a 106% rise in the last four months on abuse calls, which I'd put down to the Voice basically," says Marjorie Anderson, the national manager at 13Yarn, a crisis support line for First Nations Australians.
She describes the racist abuse on social media as "scary".
"We won't know the scale of the damage until after the referendum. Think about the responsibility if the Aboriginal suicide rate goes up and we can link that back to disinformation around the Voice" she says.
My wife is an Aussie from rural NSW. She made a remark this year that "I've never seen so many brown faces on TV, Australia is changing!" in a standard and typically good response to seeing so much aborigonal culture being observed. At least at the very top level and a bit snidely with the "we thank the original custodians" type speech you get in places now.
It was marked for me because I'm from a VERY ethnically diverse part of the UK where seeing black, brown, asian, slavic, purple, green and orange (hyperbole, clearly) on the regular... was just that, regular. I never knew how absolutely henious some behaviours had been since I married an Aussie.
Seeing cowardly little racists keep getting in the way of progress by hiding behind memes is exhausting. At least when Nazi's stick their head above the pit they have the courage to wear their little buttons and badges so you can tell them to fuck off promptly. But the folks who hide behind memes are just invisible in the day to day of life if you're not on social media. That just sucks as you can't identify and talk to them about this madness, the echo chambers get them.
All this is to do, is make sure laws aren't passed that don't fuck up an already really damaged series of cultures. Why are we so hostile about learning from our mistakes?
Let alone seeing these disinformation machines continue to cause huge cultural conflicts in developed nations. America saw it with Trump, the UK saw it with Brexit, Aus is seeing it here. Social media is just the avenue that these things are being identified and fought over, what on Earth can we do about it beyond going "RIght, Social Media is banned?"
Hannah Ritchie
Opinion polls had long shown support for the change but now suggest the No vote is leading
Disinformation 'ecosystem'
Community harm