spk_0
SBS acknowledges the traditional owners of Country throughout Australia.
spk_1
I am Lera Shvets, and this is SBS Examines.
spk_1
I'm scrolling through a Facebook profile, which we've chosen not to name. It was created in late December 2025, and within a couple of months, it has amassed over 40,000 followers, with some of its videos gaining over a million views. In one of the videos shared by the page, an Australian man is drinking beer in a pub, announcing a great.
spk_2
17th through March 19th is going to be known as Ramadan Porkathon. Get your girls ready. We're going to have a great
spk_1
time. This was viewed over 200,000 times and has hundreds of comments, mostly racist and Islamophobic.
spk_1
In another video, an Afghan man is trying to wash his feet in a sink in a public toilet. In yet another, a so-called Christian protester holds a baby pig above his head. Jesus gave us freedom fleeing, saying that bacon represents Australia. All these videos are fake, generated with AI, and the page that runs them says it's Australian, but it's a.
spk_1
From Sri Lanka, this was the outcome of an AAP fact check review recently. It pointed out several hallmarks of AI generated content watermarks, street signs, and bank names in the wrong language, as well as unrealistic features like a woman eating pasta through her face covering. But why would someone intentionally create fake and divisive content on social media?
spk_3
There are some people who genuinely believe in it and will say stuff that seems inflammatory or intended to provoke outrage because they get a kick from doing it, but a lot of that kick is tied to the fact that it drives engagement and feedback loops, and then they start, they're making money from it. And you just have this bigger system that is kind of geared towards.
spk_3
This sort of rhetoric and these sorts of
spk_1
arguments. Philip Pond is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, where he runs the Fighting Harmful Online Communication Initiative. The initiative looks at digital media's influence on politics and society. He says there's a growing trend where outrage inducing content is created purely for profit. Creators get paid by social media networks for posting content that generates high engagement.
spk_3
I don't think anyone can give you a sort of, put a dollar value on it or give you a nice formula to explain what's going on there, but I think, yeah, absolutely, a lot of it is being driven by a desire for money and the way that these economies work.
spk_1
SBS examines studied the page and its AI generated videos and found other accounts and groups affiliated to it. Together they form a kind of network, re-sharing and amplifying its content. Even though they publish content claiming to be about Australia, transparency details suggest the page was created by a user in Sri Lanka. Some other groups in the network are based in Indonesia and in the Philippines.
spk_1
In November 2025, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK identified 126 Facebook pages forming a coordinated network catering to the audiences in the UK but based in Sri Lanka. The network publishes anti-immigrant and anti-government AI generated content and reaches over 1.6 million people.
spk_1
Researchers concluded the operation appears to be purely profit driven. One user associated with the network is even running online courses on monetization tools on meta and ways to earn money from different types of content. This phenomenon has been described as the outrage or rage bait economy.
spk_4
So some of the kind of normal social controls that would temper people's behaviour are absent in the online environment, and it turns out that you can monetize that fact, and it turns out that platforms can turn a big profit off of distributing this kind of content, and it's probably not very good for democratic society to build an economic model where people get rich off of disseminating information that foments hatred.
spk_4
Fear, anger, dissension, but that's what we've done, in effect.
spk_1
Mark Andrejevic is a professor in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. He works on issues of surveillance, social media, and digital culture. Some
spk_4
of the platforms allow you to monetize the use of their AI tools, and in this case the site kind of says that it's an AI account, but you know, people don't always pay attention to that.
spk_4
But because they're using the AI tools that the platform wants them to use, the platform includes them in their monetization programme, so there's incentive on the part of the content creator to create false, polarising political
spk_1
content. Andrejevic's research team received funding from the Australian Research Council to look at the relationship between patterns of media use and civic values.
spk_1
They found that hyper commercialism tended to correlate with a lower score on civic values, which includes things like social trust and political engagement.
spk_4
The people who scored the highest on civic values interestingly were public service radio and public service media and also the readers of hard copy newspapers, interestingly.
spk_4
The folks who scored the lowest were heavy social media users and also heavy users of commercial radio and commercial TV.
spk_1
In its recent report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute calls the outrage economy a strategic risk to the nation's social cohesion, with social media platforms rewarding speed, certainty, and spectacle over nuances. But what can be done about it?
spk_1
Andrejevic says stricter guard rails for this kind of content are needed.
spk_1
But he adds the solution is not straightforward in those
spk_4
places where the economic incentives kind of contradict our social values, that's usually a place where regulation intervenes. And you know Australia had floated the idea of creating penalties for the distribution of false content that was demonstrably harmful, but it's backed off of that, you know, there are political pressures there because there are some folks who say, you know, what you're calling false, I think is true, and who should be the arbiter of
spk_1
This episode was produced and presented by Lera Shvets. For more stories, visit SBS.com.au/examines.
