On 13 July, the Australian government announced a new Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy designed to increase Pacific access to Australian content and foster engagement across the region, boosting capacity and capability through a variety of training and exchanges. Most of this training will rightly be led by media organisations for media organisations.
But Australia can’t forget about the important media-government exchange that is crucial for building trust in institutions. More time and effort need to be spent understanding how immense changes to media will affect societies in our region. In particular, the Pacific governments need to determine how they and media can best work with traditional and emerging forms of information platforms to build resilience across the landscape.
The future of news and communications is changing rapidly before us, and the problems can’t be solved through simply sharing more content. Artificial intelligence, social media innovation (or collapse), and a content-creation boom provide an array of opportunities and risks for consumers globally. In the Pacific, the risks are exacerbated by rapid improvements in internet connectivity and speed—and more information online is resulting in less trust. People have been given the power to find their own truths online, and they are looking far and wide for them, including turning to social media influencers.
Advances in technology are making it easier to manipulate audio and visual content to the extent that it is now cheap and easy to produce entirely fabricated deepfakes and artificial personas. While we haven’t had any Taylor Swift scale deepfakes in the region, we have seen the creation of multiple fake profiles of Pacific leaders, such as Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape.
In Tonga, we have also heard fake audio of a Tongan parliamentarian cursing at another member during session; that hoax led to public outcry and unfair calls for the parliamentarian’s resignation. While the matter was resolved, partly by members who had been present verifying the true audio, there is still ongoing damage to the reputation of those involved. There’s every reason to expect these attempts at falsifying content from leaders will become more frequent and sophisticated as more people can access the technology.
Aside from fake content directly causing mistrust online, the mere existence of this technology also means that individuals have plausible deniability of wrongdoing if they are truly caught in an act.
In Fiji, two parliamentarians denied accusations made in January of adultery and drug use on an official trip to Australia, saying that the images and text messages leaked online on a blog website were fake. To be clear, we are not suggesting that these accusations are true or false. We don’t know, which is exactly the point. People in a position of power can easily blame ‘fake news’ and fake media to deny any wrongdoing, muddying the waters even further for the public at the risk of making people more jaded.
If we’re not careful in responsibly managing the information space, consumers of information online will end up trusting no one, or will misplace their trust in others who may have other agendas or lack resources and capability to provide the answer people are looking for.
This is why there needs to be stronger communications between governments and media across the Pacific.
Media Associations across the region report that they do not feel empowered to ask for and receive the right information from the government, often receiving invitations to sporadic press conferences at short notice with no prior information or context. On the other hand, governments are frustrated by lack of critical thinking from media professionals and a declining ability to ask relevant questions of ministers and state leaders. Both groups acknowledge that misinformation and disinformation online often negatively shape the limited number of engagements, distracting from the real matter at hand and forcing groups to ask, and answer, questions about swirling online rumours and accusations made with little or no evidence.
Government and media participants who attend the misinformation and disinformation training delivered in the region by ASPI and the Royal Oceania Institute—an independent think tank based in Tonga—consistently ask, ‘how does Australia handle press conferences and government-media communications?’ While Australia’s own approach is not perfect, and each country and government will find a solution that works for them, there is not enough training and supported exchange of ideas across the region to help build those solutions. Media professionals and government communications officials from across the region should be invited to Australia to learn more about our systems and to share their own processes.
Pacific governments should also be supported in developing and implementing strong legislation aimed at countering false information and manipulative behaviour online. Legislation around false information is particularly tricky. If the definitions used are too broad, it could cast a net that is too wide and ultimately suppresses freedom of speech. It could do so through direct pressure and threat of severe consequences, such as imprisonment, or through self-censorship by individuals in a region where that behaviour is sometimes embedded in their cultural systems. If definitions are too narrow, they may not capture information manipulation—acts that aren’t necessarily spreading lies but are no less deliberately harmful to societies through their exaggeration or skewing of perspective.
Because the information environment is changing so rapidly, governments need to keep open channels of communication with their partners across the region to discuss opportunities and challenges, both at the political and working-group level, and exchange stories and experiences in this space regularly. There will never be a clear-cut solution to these rapid changes in the information environment, nor will Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or TikTok be the last technologies to disrupt the media landscape. Ongoing dialogue, training and support will be crucial to maintaining resilience against online harms and ensuring that, in the long term, the public will always have someone to trust online.