The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ashleigh Haw, who shifts our focus to the qualitative aspects of encountering and engaging with mis- and disinformation during the 2025 Australian federal election. Participants here were 35 voting-age residents of the Deakin, Dickson, Gilmore, and Werriwa electorates who had also participated in the survey and diary components of the research project. These were interviewed for the project, exploring their information resilience, civic reasoning, and critical media literacy.
This enabled the researchers to further explore the reasons that participants had for identifying certain content as mis- and disinformation, how they assessed this, and what further resources they believed might be required to better address such problematic information.
Generally, this observed a vibes-based approach to evaluating such content, and limited confidence in their abilities to do so; more education, media literacy initiatives, programmes, and resources were seen as required. There were no specific systems or processes for information verification, but generally simply a ‘sixth sense’ for problematic content – this also included emotional responses, contradictions with period beliefs, perceived bias in the content, and high levels of negativity.
The most common response was to just ignore the supposed mis- and disinformation; often, participants simply scrolled past the content rather than engaging with it in any significant way. This also represents a sense that they were too time-poor to spend any effort on verification – and participants in this study were possibly already engaging in more fact-checking by virtue of their participation than ordinary people would have been. The presence of problematic information on social media was simply taken for granted.
Participants’ views on who should address problematic information were mixed. Government, media organisations, platform providers, education systems were all identified as having a role here, with a strong emphasis on greater media literacy education but also significant scepticism about the efficacy of such interventions in the face of the flood of information people are confronted with on a day-to-day basis, and concerns about the biases that might be built into such media literacy initiatives. Notably, there was also considerable support for strong legislation on truth in political advertising.
