The Meme Factory at the End of the Political World

There’s a story doing the rounds this week about One Nation’s Facebook presence being propped up, at least in part, by overseas accounts running what amount to engagement farms. Foreign-operated pages, monetising outrage, targeting Australian political discourse. And the reaction online has been roughly split between “obviously” and “finally someone said it.”

Both reactions are correct, which is an uncomfortable place to sit.

The “obviously” crowd has a point. This isn’t new. Cambridge Analytica. The 2019 Australian federal election and the Topham Guerin meme machine. Russia’s well-documented interference in European elections. The playbook has been public for years. You don’t need a sophisticated operation to run it, either. Pick a divisive political figure, generate content that provokes strong feelings, collect ad revenue from the engagement. No ideology required. Just a spreadsheet and a low opinion of the audience.

The financial logic is genuinely clarifying. Platforms that pay based on engagement have, entirely predictably, created an incentive structure that rewards the most reactive content. Outrage is the product. One Nation content, anti-immigration content, grievance content of almost any stripe, it performs. Not because it’s true or useful, but because it makes people feel something strong enough to click, share, or comment. Someone in another country, with no stake in Australian politics whatsoever, can run a page supporting Pauline Hanson and get paid for it. The market has spoken, unfortunately.

What I find harder to sit with is the second reaction, the “at least it’s mostly fake” comfort. One person in the thread made this point and I think they’re right to flag it. There’s a temptation to discover that a lot of online support is manufactured and conclude that the underlying sentiment must be equally hollow. That’s not how this works. The content doesn’t create believers from nothing; it finds people who are already anxious, already feeling left behind, already primed for a simple explanation of a complicated world, and it turns the dial up. The amplification is fake. The frustration it’s amplifying often isn’t.

I don’t have a clean answer for that. I’ve lived long enough to know that economic anxiety and cultural dislocation are real things that get weaponised by people who have absolutely no intention of addressing them. That’s not unique to the right, but it’s particularly well-developed there right now.

The government’s response, or rather the near-total absence of one, is its own problem. Social media regulation in this country moves like it’s afraid of offending someone. Meanwhile the platforms have every financial reason to let this continue. Meta just had an IPO. Engagement is the number that matters. They are not going to fix this voluntarily, and our regulatory institutions haven’t shown much appetite for making them.

What’s left is the individual level, which feels inadequate but isn’t nothing. Not platforming this stuff. Not sharing it to dunk on it, because sharing is sharing. Talking to people in your actual life about how this content is produced and why. These feel like small gestures against a large machine, and maybe they are. But the alternative is deciding the machine has already won, which seems both premature and self-defeating.

The funniest observation in the whole thread, and I mean this sincerely, was someone pointing out that these nationalist pages are offshoring their work. If you’re running a One Nation fan account from a call centre in another country, there’s a certain irony there that does all its own heavy lifting.