From Australia to the Amazon: Indigenous Resistance to Disinformation in the Digital Age

From the 2023 Invasion Day Rally in Melbourne, organized by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance. Photo by Matt Hrkac.

First decimated by British colonizers’ diseases and then subjected to genocidal massacres, border skirmishes, and a government policy of removing children from their families, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia make up the most socioeconomically disadvantaged group in the nation. The legacy of this historical oppression lives on today in Indigenous communities that are plagued by high rates of suicide, poverty, and shorter life expectancy. Many lack the necessary energy, transportation, and medical infrastructure enjoyed by the rest of the nation. Despite this brutal history and present inequity, Australia has never recognized its First Nations in its constitution, in contrast to its former British colonial counterparts, New Zealand and Canada.

In recent years, Indigenous activists have pushed for the inclusion of such a recognition in the form of a Voice to Parliament—an advisory body of Indigenous delegates that would represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in matters pertaining to the federal government. Though rejected by two successive conservative administrations, the proposal to create this body through a constitutional amendment found new life during the 2022 campaign of now-Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who pledged to put the question to the Australian people. Initial surveys indicated broad support for the measure. In January of this year, approval polled at above 60%. The proposal received support from swathes of Australia’s public figures (including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, and Chris and Luke Hemsworth), former government officials, and influential businesses. But then the misinformation started. 

Throughout the campaign, distorted and outright false claims about the Voice to Parliament spread rapidly on social media, hampering the efforts of Indigenous activists. Right-wing accounts disseminated a slew of racially-charged falsehoods, including that the body would allow Indigenous peoples to take Australians’ homes, force citizens to pay rent to Indigenous Australians, and even that the Voice could enable the United Nations to “take over Australia.” Much of this rhetoric is grounded in preexisting perspectives on advantage and disadvantage in Australia’s political discourse, often shaped by considerations of race. 

Along with these baseless claims about the body, anti-Voice campaigners cast doubt upon the fairness of the voting process itself, echoing a culture of election denialism that has permeated the global far-right. The Australian Electoral Commission’s decision to disallow “X” markings on the ballot because of their ambiguity in denoting approval or disapproval elicited acidic rhetoric from Australia’s right-wing populists. Parroting online conspiracy theories, the leader of Australia’s conservative opposition party, Peter Dutton, called the change “outrageous” and accused the incumbent government of attempting to create a “process that’s rigged.” Much like claims of election fraud made by former U.S. President Donald Trump, this framing casts a politically calculated doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral system and poses a risk to the health of Australian democracy. 

A combination of the racially charged legacy of settler colonialism, a “brutally effective” disinformation campaign, and a limping economy gradually dropped support for the measure from the sixty-percent range to the mid-forties. On October 14, the day of the referendum, the vote’s outcome seemed all but certain. The measure lost at the national level and in every state, with over 60% of Australians voting against the change. 

The downfall of the pro-Voice campaign represents a devastating blow to efforts for reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and the state, but it also affirms a long-held tradition of historical revisionism and erasure. By forgoing formal representation in Parliament and concrete steps to correct the injustices Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples face, those who voted against this change have swept the ugly side of their nation’s history under the rug in favor of allowing the unjust status quo to persist. 

But this dynamic does not apply to Australia alone. While many nations have taken strides in recognizing the rights of their Indigenous peoples, misinformation and racial tension have driven other settler colonial nations to reject such expansions, demonstrating the complex and persistent legacy of colonialism in domestic politics everywhere. 

In many ways, the Chilean people’s rejection of their draft constitution in 2022 closely parallels Australia’s reactionary turn. The proposal, compiled by a democratically-elected body with gender parity, represented a fundamental break with the nation’s colonial and right-wing authoritarian past. If approved, the charter would have established Chile as a plurinational state, recognizing the existence of multiple nations within the country’s borders. This designation would reserve seats for Indigenous people in all elected bodies, grant them autonomy over their own lands and natural resources, and allow an Indigenous justice system to handle most legal affairs. These measures promised important steps in correcting the nations’ abuses against these peoples, many of whom continue to push back against the state and private industry’s efforts to use their ancestral lands for their own interests. 

Just like in Australia, the Chilean right-wing lambasted these proposals using racially charged and often baseless rhetoric. One Convention delegate argued that the draft would allow for an “Indigenous monarchy.” Others warned it would divide the nation and confer privilege to Indigenous groups. Online, misinformation took over social media feeds and dominated the national conversation. Voters internalized unsubstantiated claims that included warnings about having their property expropriated and living with fewer rights than Indigenous peoples, partially driving their eventual rejection of the process they once overwhelmingly supported.

These parallel referenda allow us to analyze how reactionary actors harness the dual forces of racial division and online misinformation to pursue their agenda. Agents in Australia and Chile have tapped into a latent desire to preserve a hierarchy that has stood since their nations’ founding, and they have effectively amplified that message through social media’s relatively unfiltered potential to shape national discourse. But this pattern extends beyond the borders of Chile or Australia. Around the world, the populist right has utilized social media to advance its conspiracy-laden agenda, invariably stoking racist sentiment and disseminating blatantly false information in order to taint the integrity of standard democratic procedure. In the United States and throughout Europe, it has emerged in the form of nativism, which similarly trains its fire on a marginalized “other”—migrants—that the dominant group perceives as disruptive to its hegemony. There and elsewhere, reactionaries have reached power by exacerbating divisions and propagating destabilizing misinformation. 

In understanding how these dynamics have played out in two contemporary case studies, the forces of progressivism can begin to develop a strategy against it. Those on the side of stable democracy and justice must wrest discourse-setting power from the populist right. This task is daunting, but it must begin by utilizing social media’s potential to emphasize unity instead of division. Doing so requires reframing the idea of progressive renewal as one that transcends divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, and other separating classifications. The economic challenges facing Indigenous Australians and Chileans mirror those hindering the rest of Australia and Chile’s working people. The forces preventing these groups from reaching the dignity all human beings deserve are fundamentally the same. Once the organizers and strategists agitating for an equitable future focus on that message of solidarity as a counterbalance to right-wing populist cleavage, the Left can begin to disrupt reactionaries’ dominance of the social media conversation.

Fortunately, there is some proof of concept for this brand of discourse-setting. In Brazil, the Munduruku Indigenous people’s successful media campaign to protect their ancestral lands from corporate mining highlights the viability of this strategy. Throughout the 2010s, corporate and illegal miners poured into the Munduruku Indigenous peoples’ territory, which encompasses nearly 500,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest. Through their activities, the miners contaminated the crucial Tapajós River and deforested swathes of the rainforest. Moreover, the Brazilian government planned to construct a massive hydroelectric project on the river that would have flooded dozens of Munduruku communities. To combat this encroachment, the Munduruku engaged in a coordinated media campaign against the state and the corporations encroaching upon their land, producing filmed statements and videos that circulated worldwide through social media platforms. Eventually, public pressure led the encroaching mining conglomerate to withdraw many of its mining permits, and the state eventually canceled its hydroelectric ambitions in the area. In this case and in others, those on the side of justice for Indigenous communities were able to effectively tap into social media’s organizing power, unite disparate peoples worldwide to support their cause, and achieve victory against the power of corporations and the state itself. But why leave such potential in the remote corners of the Amazon rainforest? In Australia, Chile, and any nation where the rights of Indigenous peoples continue to be stifled, we can and must mimic the Munduruku’s efforts by harnessing social media as a force for progressive change based on solidarity between all people. If done successfully, its potential to reframe the narrative is limitless.

Jonathan Pollak (CC ‘27) is a staff writer at CPR studying political science and economics. In his free time, he enjoys playing guitar, seeing live music, and going on Wikipedia deep dives.