Dene-Hern CHEN, with Purple ROMERO and Sammy HEUNG in Hong Kong
From anti-transgender narratives about Olympic swimmers to fabricated comments from right-wing politicians, a slew of Facebook pages managed from Vietnam are capitalising on Australia’s febrile politics to promote AI-generated articles on websites designed for profit.
With names like “Swimming Secrets” and “Tennis Triumph”, the pages started in mid-2025 mimicking fan accounts posting athlete updates but sprinkled with falsehoods, such as claims Aussie swimmer Mollie O’Callaghan would forgo the next Olympics if a trans athlete were allowed to compete.
Several accounts — run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers — later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated articles and advertisements.
AFP has tracked over a dozen sports and human-interest pages promoting content that mixes actual news with fabrications, with some posts getting thousands of shares.
The websites display “almost industrial level forms of misinformation”, said open-source intelligence analyst Giano Libot.
“It’s designed for the algorithm in search engines to pick up,” Libot said.
“It also is reflective that, especially in Southeast Asia, we don’t have a lot of policy around it yet.”
Meta removed 13 pages in March after AFP contacted the Facebook parent company for comment, citing site violations.
The network is the latest to emerge from Vietnam, where low labour...
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