Tell me about what you found.

There was a ABC live broadcast of Scott Morrison, Prime Minister at the time, who was speaking about the devastation of the floods and someone, some group mischievously had put a false super at the bottom, a caption that said, Scott Morrison blames flood victims for their own situation.

That spread virally across most of the platforms into LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram.

And it was fact-checked widely as well by at least six different fact-checkers.

What we found with that is fact-checking is just one tool in the toolkit to be able to deal with mis- and disinformation.

It's a bit of a whack-a-mole.

It's not systemic.

And what sorts of strategies have been deployed to counter this kind of misinformation by institutions like the AEC and others like it?

context? These news outlets, CNN, MSNOW and Politico, why has Trump targeted them specifically? And is there anything that you could compare them to here in Australia?

Yeah, well, I think this dates back all the way to 2016 when Donald Trump won the primaries and then was the presidential elect for the US in his first presidency.

And during that period, just before he was inaugurated, he declared the media to be fake news and he pinpointed particular news outlets and journalists and called them fake news and then went on to use that word more than a thousand times within a year and it became part of the global lexicon really.

with contagion effects happening across Australia as well, with politicians calling journalists fake news.

And now fast forward to 2026, he's spent 10 years trying to delegitimise the media, the mainstream media, to try and reduce the cultural authority that they have to be able to critique the news.

Now we've reached this turning point, it would seem, where it's not working for him anymore.

He's escalated beyond fake news to banning particular media outlets, usually those on the left, such as CNN, MSNOW and Politico, because they dare to critique him.

Do we have anything like that here in Australia protecting media?

So Andrea Carson, take us through, first of all, what's the problem that this is all designed to solve?

Well, I think you've summed it up nicely there, John.

It's about addiction and whether it causes harm to children in particular.

Those under the age of 16 are the subject of the Australian Act.

But it's also something capturing worldwide attention because of case after case of parents coming forward, sometimes with very tragic consequences where children have taken their own lives and they're attributing that back to social media platforms with online bullying, with messaging around eating disorders and so forth.

So this is something that is of grave concern to parents, not just in Australia, but across the globe.

And to be clear, one of the decisions that has been made today is that Meta has settled a large, a very large action that was being taken in the US.

followed it, yep.

Do you see gender as being an issue in Jacinta Allan losing her position as premier?

This is a really interesting question because we often talk about, and I studied the glass cliff.

The glass cliff is the phenomenon where things are looking pretty sour, and so at the last minute, power is handed over to a woman when they've been denied power up until that point.

And of course, this often happens in corporate leadership.

It also happens in politics.

The circumstances are usually so dire that the woman is destined to fail.

I don't think that was the case with Jacinta Allan.

Why do you think she was so unpopular with voters?