Revisiting the ‘Convoy to Canberra’ as an Afectively Polarised Populist Event

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

These events exemplify the use of such media for the organisation of populist protest movements, supported and inflamed by fringe news outlets and enhanced by algorithmic online content curation. This also exacerbates ingroup and outgroup identities and leads to polarisation between such populist groups and mainstream politics, and serves as a counterpoint to the more positive perspectives on the connective potential of social media for prosocial political activities.

The ‘Convoy to Canberra’ also links with the gradual decline of democratic satisfaction rates in Australia, and the decline in first-preference votes for major parties, while minor and micro-parties have gained traction. Media trust has also declined, and conventional media use has waned (though it grew again at least temporarily during the pandemic).

The project analyses relevant content across platforms, combined with digital ethnography; YouTube will be a particularly central site of study here. Access to other platforms is now considerably less straightforward, especially with current API access costs for what is left of the Twitter API.

The Convoy itself aired a fragmented list of grievances, which also undermined the protest’s efficiency as it brought together disparate groups which were united largely only by their opposition to vaccine mandates and their overall vaccine scepticism. There was a broad appeal to ‘freedom’, but how this was defined by different groups varied.

The Convoy provided a sense of belonging and connection to participants, however, in part also as a result of the collective ridicule (as ‘cookers’) that participants received from mainstream media and audiences. This can be seen as a form of affective polarisation. The presence of Pauline Hanson, Craig Kelly, and ‘Sovereign Citizens’ activists also made it easy to brand the entire Convoy as anti-vaxx, conspiracist, and racist, overshadowing the presence of any reasonable arguments against deep restrictions to personal, economic, and public life in Australia.

The various social media platforms used by protesters served various purposes: YouTube to create community; Twitter to enable cross-cutting and antagonistic communication; and Facebook to serve both purposes differently across its various communicative affordances (public and nonpublic pages/groups and personal profiles). Several of the public actors who emerged through the Convoy have also remained visible on social media, most recently for example as campaigners against the Voice to Parliament.