As the American election looms, author and scholar Bruce Wolpe and Planet America host John Barron have warned that the results of the election could be akin to “the Voice on steroids” and issued a stark warning for the Australian media industry.
Wolpe, who recently published the book Trump’s Australia and is a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, declared that “this is the most important election of our lifetime” at the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival over the weekend. A major concern for both Wolpe and Barron is the media’s role in how the election has played out.
While this isn’t Australia’s election, the experts argued that the results matter globally.
Media’s Role In Distributing Information
Barron and Wolpe tapped into the buzzy discussions surrounding misinformation and social media’s echo chamber, which have had huge implications for how the election has played out over the last few months.
“Because all of us now are selecting our sources of information, we tend to gravitate towards the ones we agree with. We are losing that town square effect, for instance, programs like The Drum where you get both sides of a debate,” said Barron.
Barron brought listeners back to a time when Australia was divided. Voting for the Voice Referendum split people between their views and it might give Australians more of an understanding of the current American climate.
“The results from this election will be the Voice on steroids,” said Wolpe.
“During the period where The Voice referendum debate was occurring, people’s tolerance to hearing somebody else’s opinion on the panel was so low. People who supported the Voice didn’t want to hear opponents and people who opposed the Voice weren’t watching ABC. That catch-22 meant that ratings went down. A lot of programs used to offer debates like that, where the viewer who might not be decided can make up their mind after listening to both sides,” he added.
“I’m concerned about where our ideologies are drifting, where we’re all reassuring ourselves by looking at sources that echo and amplify our beliefs, where we’re all receiving different information. If Trump becomes president, he’s going to use the apparatus of government to put media platforms he doesn’t like out of business. In his first term, he threatened Brian Roberts, head of Comcast, because he doesn’t like MSNBC. He also said that CNN should have its license taken away because of the 60 Minutes interview,” said Wolpe.
“He wants to use the government to silence media critics,” added Wolpe.
Days ahead of the presidential election, Elon Musk has allegedly been using X (formerly Twitter) as a Trump-promotion platform.
Musk has posted more than 3,000 times on the site in the last month, according to a tally by The New York Times, campaigning heavily for former President Donald Trump. The tech mogul has also shared dozens of claims about the election, including that votes will be rigged against his preferred candidate.
New research conducted by Queensland University of Technology associate professor Timothy Graham and Monash University professor Mark Andrejevic have found that since Musk endorsed Donald Trump on 13 July, engagement with Musk’s X account has seen a substantial rise, with view counts up by 138 per cent, retweets up by 238 per cent, and likes up by 186 per cent.
The research also found that other conservative and right-wing X accounts, including right-wing commentators Jack Posobiec, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr, have performed better in terms of visibility of posts compared to progressive and left-wing accounts such as US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Michael Davis, a research fellow at the UTS Centre for Media Transition, said that Musk’s position could have wide reaching ramifications for social media platforms more broadly and how they are regulated.
“Since Musk took over twitter then turned it into X, I think that’s it’s becoming more and more obvious that they’re not a neutral carrier,” he told B&T yesterday.
“It kind of puts into question the historical stance of social media platforms that they’re just mutual carriers of user content information, which is supported through laws such as Section 230 the Communications Decency Act and so on.
“The active moderation that you see here, the active promotion of one side of politics over the other, puts into question the idea that social media companies are not responsible and liable for the content they carry.”
However, Musk has heralded Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking program launched a year ago to tackle disinformation on X.
When Trump was elected in 2016, the misinformation landscape was in its infancy. “Fake news” caught on as a term as social media algorithms and advertising systems launched a sway of misinformation online. Now, the term is ubiquitous in the media landscape.
“What concerns me is that 40 per cent or so of young people get their news from social media. Five-second bursts of information do not create a good understanding of complex issues,” said Wolpe.
The Effect Of Trumpism On Australia
The world has watched closely as Trump and Harris have campaigned over the last few months.
Wolpe, using the term coined in his latest book, warns that “Trumpism” will be here to stay should Trump be re-elected for a second term. He defines Trumpism as the ideology underpinning Trump’s candidacy and his decision-making. They are made up of four pillars: Nativism, American isolationism, protectionism and nationalism.
But while Wolpe is certainly worried about the results of another Trump term, he urged Australians to remain strong in their trust in democracy here.
“I want you to come away appreciating that Australia has one of the strongest democracies in the world. Leave here proud of what we have. The country is going to be okay. It is under stress but Australia knows what it’s doing, and people around the world understand this,” he said.
However, Aussies are still implicated in the US election and its stirring of misinformation across social media. Because of how the news cycle works, Aussies who rise around 6 and 7 am are greeted with American news first thing.
“We’re an echo chamber for the United States. It’s the first thing on your mind,” added Wolpe.
