We need to inoculate ourselves from online disinformation, argues journalist Van Badham.
When protestors in hi-vis vests and work boots assembled outside the Melbourne headquarters of the CFMEU’s construction division in the early months of the COVID lockdowns, journalist Van Badham was researching a book about conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists.
The protest, which turned violent, was demanding the “CFMEU fight the lockdowns and fight all the health restrictions … at a time when COVID was killing hundreds of people every day in Victoria”, she says.
When Van saw images of the protest on the news, she recognised that the ring leaders belonged to extremist groups she had been researching for her book.
“They had bought their hi-vis on the Internet. They had bought it from Amazon. They were pretending to be union members, and they were not,” she said.
Van used the story to illustrate just how easily disinformation can spread in a highly online world. And now, “AI (artificial intelligence) is changing the game of disinformation and supercharging it rather extraordinarily”.
Speaking to the NSWNMA 2025 annual conference, Van said there had been a “concerted effort” to attack unions with disinformation – false information intended to mislead.
“Unions are a problem for authoritarians,” she said.
“There was a reason why the Nazi party came after us first; we’re strong and we’re powerful, we’re full of believers, we are people who put the collective ahead of the individual.
“That makes us very dangerous to projects that want to prioritise the power of a small group of individuals.
“Unions are democratic organisations that by their very existence prove the value of democracy. So demobilising, disenfranchising and dividing unions is absolutely crucial to the anti-democratic project.”
Van said unions have industrial and economic power to “stop corporations from doing things that hurt us”.
“We also have cultural power; every single union member is an advertisement to the rest of the community about the values of equality, about the values of democracy, about the values of enfranchisement, about the values of feminism and anti-racism and anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia and anti-bigotry.
“We stand for a cultural principle that we are all equal and that is a powerful principle.”
NO TIME TO CHECK
In another protest outside an Ikea store in Melbourne during the COVID pandemic, a crowd of about 700 spread the message that vaccinations are dangerous. “This protest, it turned out, was actually organised by a far-right group in Germany, and the Australians who participated did not even know who was calling the shots,” Van said.
She said health workers and the CFMEU were not the only workers to be targeted by disinformation.
“Librarians never thought they would be dealing with bomb threats at work. They are because of the crazy scare campaigns around drag queen story hour in Victoria.”
Because of disinformation, “council workers who are members of the Australian Services Union have been targeted with the most extreme threats of violence merely for working for councils that host drag queen story hours”.
She added that as a result of “disinformation about gender relations” some teenagers were refusing to be taught by female teachers “because the internet has told them those women are lesser and inferior to them”.
During the 2023 Voice campaign, majority support for a Voice to Parliament swung to a majority No vote because the No campaign was so effective at spreading disinformation online, Van said.
“The point is not that people believe it. The point is that people do not have the time to check if it was true.”
“Disinformation is not just about the people who believe the nonsense. It’s also about the people who get confused by the nonsense and it’s about the people who see the nonsense, want absolutely no part of it and drop out.”
The 60 per cent No vote in the Voice to Parliament referendum was not due to racism or hatred of Aboriginal people, “but because [voters] were subjected to the most feral onslaught of disinformation in Australian history”.
DON’T SHARE
Van Badham called for a “counter disinformation body ”, the equivalent of an ICAC [Independent Commission Against Corruption], to independently monitor disinformation.
We need to support institutions such as the ABC, she argued.
“Disinformation thrives when people don’t believe in institutions … or don’t believe media mastheads, or don’t believe the ABC. That’s how these messages get out.”
Her headline message, however, is “Don’t share”.
“Leave, go outside, reconnect with the world, find a friend. Do not share it. Do not ‘Like’ it. Do not be part of that system.”
Use fact- checking sites, she encouraged. When the topic is a workplace issue affecting nurses and midwives, get out ahead of disinformation when you can.
“Inoculation is everything. It doesn’t matter what it is – vaccination, working conditions – whatever people are trying to politicise, if you know it’s a lie, get out ahead of it.”