Foreign Interference Through Social Media

Senator VAN: I do, thank you. I'll come at this from a different angle to my colleagues. What do you think of the indicators of foreign interfere through social media?

Mr Hawkins : The indicators?

Senator VAN: Yes. If you're looking for foreign interference through social media, what would indicate to you that it's happening?

Mr Hawkins : We would ask the social media if it were coming from an official foreign source. A lot of disinformation is private or clickbait, so our interest will be enlivened if we believe it's a foreign government and they're acting in a clandestine way. If it's a foreign government and they're open and transparent about it, then we have no problem.

Senator VAN: Sure. Through all the monitoring, whether it's through ACSC or through your agency, what do you look for? Assume you're scanning for this day and night. I should have put that question first.

Mr Hawkins : We don't do the scanning. I would assume they'd be looking at the various posts and drawing conclusions depending on where they were coming from. As I said, we would be particularly interested if there were evidence that there was a link to a foreign government and where they're clandestine—otherwise our interest would not be enlivened. If they're using it to put in malware, that would be another instance. But that wouldn't necessarily be foreign interference—that would just be a private criminal act rather than one of foreign interference.

Senator VAN: I'm not directing these questions. If the appropriate agency or your department picks these up, that's fine with me.

Mr McKinnon : In terms of our work, we've established a policy hierarchy in terms of the effects we are looking to identify and then seek to counter. In terms of the types of disinformation activity that we would categorise as having a low impact but is still of interest to us would be disinformation that has the potential to affect the climate of debate but has limited circulation. Obviously there's a substantive element and a level of transmission element. We categorise medium harm where disinformation could negatively affect Australia's reputation or policy aims—that impacts may be material but temporary. That's, again, using that basic model of substance and duration of impact. High-impact disinformation is disinformation that has the potential to directly harm significant Australian interest, especially our strategic standing in the region. The circulation is widespread and is likely to influence elites and decision-makers, and impacts are likely to be sustained. Those are a characterisation, but that policy model is what we have our attention directed to in terms of the ongoing monitoring of potential disinformation activity in the region and directed at Australia.

Senator VAN: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. So you're getting there to a little bit about the effect of foreign interference.

Mr McKinnon : Yes.

Senator VAN: That's particularly what I'm interested in. What effect does foreign interference through social media—putting aside the other types for the sake of this inquiry—have? Foreign actors are doing this for a reason. What would each of you, or all of you, say they are trying to achieve?

Mr McKinnon : We have observed a variety of actions where we can make assumptions and assessments about the likely motivation, but—

Senator VAN: No, not motivation—well, I guess it goes to that—but what are they trying to achieve by doing this?

Mr McKinnon : Neil can answer that.

Senator VAN: I'm happy for this to be a free-ranging conversation.

Mr Hawkins : I am drawing on the Director-General of ASIO's comments on this and other things. Essentially there are attempts to limit a polity's ability to make in-depth judgement; erode public confidence in institutions—we've seen this in the US and other places; interfere with private sector decision-makers; make the country more malleable to pressure; and erode your way of life, in a way. It's a fundamental threat, if it is a foreign government actor seeking to undermine your sovereignty in a way to make you more malleable.

Senator VAN: In my mind the effect or the end result that foreign actors are trying to have on Australian society is division, disruption, distrust and probably a handful of others, where society is looking at itself and questioning itself and questioning parts of it and you have real division within community and you see a breakdown and a distrust, and that has an impact on government, on policy, on business, on a wide range of things.

Mr Hawkins : If I may add, the culturally and linguistically diverse communities are also subject, through social media, to pressure to silence dissenting voices, and we have set up the National Security Hotline, or expanded that, to enable them to report that, and those reports go directly to the Counter Foreign Interference Task Force to assess and respond. Social media is not a foreign government necessarily, but often it is trying to silence dissenting voices—or we've seen cases of trying to get them to encourage investment back home, their original home, and putting pressure on them in ways that we do not accept in Australia.

Senator VAN: In effect, putting it in one jar, the effect they're trying to have is a breakdown of society such that we are fighting with each other more than looking outward and looking at threats or other things that are going on—such that we might be distracted, I guess, is one way to wrap it up. We are looking internally, fighting internally, doing things that are not necessarily in the national interest because we're focused on other things. Would you agree that would be the effect that we're looking at?

Dr Johnson : That may well be the effect that's sought, but, going back to earlier evidence that we were discussing with Senator Molan, the investment in communities and social cohesion, the efforts to promote and strengthen the inclusive national identity so that, were someone to try and interfere into our very strong multicultural fabric in a number of particular ways—this is an issue, by the way, which doesn't have a nexus directly just to foreign interference; there are non-state actors and there are also actors within Australia itself that have very strong views about what our national identity is and isn't. So it's an issue generally, but, because of the government's very strong investment in a number of pillars to strengthen social cohesion, including a real uptick in strengthening community engagement work, particularly with the CALD communities that Mr Hawkins was just talking about, the government, in the budget, gave us funding to increase our community liaison network, which is all around Australia. And we're bolstering that by about 10 extra people, which is a significant investment. That's also about putting greater ballast into our diverse but inclusive society. There, you're talking about the social division angle. It does have a potential nexus to CFI but it has challenges from other fronts as well, including the CVE work that we do.

Senator VAN: But we agree that it's the effect that they're after, that disruption, division and distrust.

Mr Colquhoun : It's one of and, probably, the predominant one. Sometimes it's other things, like encouraging diaspora to support the interests of a country overseas so the focus is on supporting and promoting narratives from the home country within Australia.

Senator VAN: Sure, but the one that should be troubling Australia and us as policymakers the most is that division, distrust, division. If that's the case, if we're monitoring for foreign interference through social media, wouldn't the approach to it be looking at the effect and where you're seeing that and tracing that back, rather than trying to—I'm sure the ACSC et cetera do their monitoring of signals coming in, and ASD and others watch it coming in across the bits and bytes. But, in my mind, it's the effect that we should be looking at and tracing back from there and seeing where that effect originated. Rather than looking at the origin and watching it come in, we should be monitoring for that. Do you think that's a reasonable approach to this issue?

Mr Hawkins : I totally agree that our goal is focused on one country, and that's Australia. It's not focused on any other countries. Our aim is to make Australia more resilient across all those sectors that are vulnerable to foreign interference. It is about Australia. Whether it's strengthening communities, whether it's protecting our critical infrastructure, protecting our institutions of democracy, research and universities, it's about Australia.

Senator VAN: But my point is—let me put it another way.

Dr Johnson : Before you elaborate, I completely understand where you're coming from. Can I assure you that that is the approach that we're taking in Home Affairs.

Senator VAN: I'm not saying you are or you're not.

Dr Johnson : What we do, for example, is—you're right, you're looking at effects. Those effects could be separate from the intent and motivation. For instance, there's potential for someone who's tried to achieve something but it has an ancillary effect which does exactly that thing in the community and could cause community unrest. Through our social cohesion function, that's exactly what we're looking for. To flip it around, if we saw a concerted campaign and it was having an effect registering in a particular community, the first activity is to deal with the issue by engaging with the community. Then what we do is we'd be working with colleagues and say, 'Where has this come from? What's the origin or provenance of this? But the immediate operational task, so to speak, is straight into the Australian communities as that resilience, ballast piece. Then, there can be a series of activities undertaken to work out the origin of that. Do you see what I'm saying?

We're working from the grassroots. We're beginning there and then connecting through the different co-ordinated arrangements that we've spoken about—centres of gravity in Home Affairs, and DFAT especially in the online work, but connected to other departments and agencies as appropriate. Does that provide the context?

Senator VAN: Yes, I get it. I'm going somewhere else. I believe Senator Molan has a clarifying question.

Senator MOLAN: Can you give us an example of where that process has been followed?

Dr Johnson : Yes. Through the COVID experience, for example, where we were looking at patterns of misinformation, we were engaging closely with different communities to try and understand how they were understanding the challenges of COVID—what it was, what you needed to do from a—

Senator MOLAN: Is that education or countering foreign interference?

Dr Johnson : I'm talking more in the social cohesion and misinformation space. Whether it's a nexus to foreign interference is a different issue, because—

Senator MOLAN: Okay.

Dr Johnson : Particularly in the COVID example, the issues of misinformation and rumour were just as potent. People were passing on information, through social media, which wasn't correct. It could potentially have a damaging health impact.

Senator MOLAN: But to your knowledge this wasn't coming from an overseas actor into our community in some non-transparent way?

Dr Johnson : Not to my knowledge.

Senator MOLAN: Any examples where foreign interference was involved and you then have gone out into the community and countered that?

Dr Johnson : Not directly on what we'd classify as foreign interference, according to Mr Hawkins' definition of 'foreign interference', but certainly issues that flow into the public domain could have similar impacts amongst community sentiment, so to speak.

Senator MOLAN: Is there just one example I can have in the back of my mind?

Dr Johnson : Not a countering foreign interference directly example but there are other examples.

Senator VAN: Switching channels just slightly, if we're looking at the back part of the title of the committee, 'foreign interference through social media', we talk about the social media element as a vector and it's just one vector. Would you say the social media part of the vector is mostly about access to people? We all use it these days so it has broad access and broad reach. Is the effect of using social media one of amplification? You take a message that might be organic within a community, or within a society, and then amplify it? Is that what they're trying to do when they trying to use foreign interference through social media?

Mr Hawkins : If I take a specific example—and I'd need to use overseas here, but the threat would be the same here—where a foreign actor tries to create divisions within society by using social media to exploit existing divisions that we've seen, either race or anti-vax et cetera. They use that to amplify the message and undermine the trust. We saw that in the elections and overseas. We saw it in the US. We have not seen that here. I should say—

Senator VAN: Can I just challenge you on that? I would argue, very clearly, that we've seen that here writ large. The anti-vax movement—I don't know whether you guys want to come around and see my inbox on any given day. There is division and distrust trying to be sewn through the anti-vax movement. How that's been amplified through social media is a very clear and stark example of foreign interference that's happening right now, or at least if it's not foreign it's trying to have the same effect as that.

Mr Hawkins : I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's disinformation. We haven't seen evidence that it is, for instance, in our elections which the AEC led. The conclusion was we did not identify any foreign interference, including through social media, that undermined the integrity of the elections. If we're going back to anti-vax, we would count that as foreign interference were there to be a government clandestinely operating behind that. So far, as far as I'm aware, we have not seen that evidence.
Senator MOLAN: Is there a problem?

Mr Hawkins : It doesn't mean there's not a problem. It just means the security and intelligence agencies are not enlivened—

Senator VAN: But are you saying—

Mr Hawkins : but it is still a problem of disinformation.

Senator VAN: Are you saying there wasn't or that you just don't know whether there was?

Mr Hawkins : I'm not aware that there was any foreign government's campaign behind that.

Senator VAN: You mentioned another situation: racism. Just this year, again, we saw another example of that with the Black Lives Matter thing—something that happened overseas and very quickly came here. There was undoubtably an organic element of it. Then it exploded, through social media—

Mr Hawkins : Indeed.

Senator VAN: There was absolute amplification of that, which caused distrust, division and breakdown of social cohesion here in Australia, very, very quickly. As to the rise of that—how quickly that happened—I don't think anyone can look me in the eye and say that there wasn't amplification going on. Whether it was through a foreign actor or not, my guess would be that if we're looking at what they're trying to achieve here and the effect that it had on Australian society—and there are many other examples of this that I can bring up—we're seeing the effect of it; we're seeing the damage of it. It did have an effect on Australian society. There's no argument about that. So I think we need to go back and look at how we're looking at foreign interference through social media and judge the impact and the damage done, and then go back and recalibrate how we're looking for it.

Mr Colquhoun : I think the difficulty here is that none of us—and I'm confident I'm speaking for everyone at the table—would question the amplification power of social media; that is not debated, and that can be done for both good and bad. Everybody could mention a thousand social media campaigns that have warmed hearts and minds—

Senator VAN: Sure.

Mr Colquhoun : and done completely the opposite. But then, is it an act of foreign interference? That is a very, very narrow subset of that, and that is a state actor covertly using the platforms to achieve that outcome. That's what Mr Hawkins was mentioning. So, in your example of the Black Lives Matter movement, clearly that was amplified through social media in enormous ways—

Senator VAN: Do you believe that was organic, though?

Mr Colquhoun : Yes, I do.

Senator VAN: Really?

Mr Colquhoun : Yes. That's a personal opinion, but yes.

Senator VAN: Wow! Okay.

Mr Colquhoun : Even if my personal opinion was: 'Absolutely not; it was an evil non-government actor or state actor,' we would then need to find the evidence that it was a state actor acting covertly to do that.

Senator VAN: And here's my final question: Have we looked for it?

Mr Colquhoun : That's not in my remit.

Senator VAN: Okay. Thank you, Chair.