Pieces of disinformation will be named and shamed as part of efforts to make Australians more informed about the federal election.
Australia’s electoral body has launched a new disinformation register to debunk misleading and deceptive information regarding how elections are run to protect the integrity of the country’s upcoming federal election. The new register comes in response to an uptick of election conspiracy theories circulating online in recent months due to it being a federal election year. According to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), the disinformation register is a regularly updated database containing examples of disinformation and misinformation that has circulated online from late 2021 onwards. The AEC explained that each piece of disinformation discovered by the commission would be presented in the register with information about which platform it was spread on, the timing, the factual information regarding the matter, and the actions taken by the commission to correct the record.
