Right-wing group Advance begins Dunkley by-election attacks with fake news Facebook page

The right-wing lobby group behind the No campaign for the Voice to Parliament has turned its attention to the March 2 federal by-election in Dunkley by repurposing its faux neutral “news” social media account to run thousands of dollars of negative advertisements against the Albanese government.

Since the end of last month, Advance, formerly Advance Australia, paid for 20 targeted Facebook ads on its “Election News” Facebook page.

Election News was, until January 29, “Referendum News”, an anti-Voice Facebook page that posted and ran advertisements linking to news articles that were critical of the Voice to Parliament referendum and the Yes campaign. 

The page, which is categorised on Meta’s services as a “News & media website” despite being run by the conservative political group, features an authorisation that it is run by Advance but otherwise has the appearance of a neutral news page. It’s one of the handful of different Facebook campaigns run by Advance during the referendum, including the progressive-sounding Not Enough and the Indigenous-targeted Not My Voice.

In the past two weeks, Advance has targeted advertisements at more than 251,000 Victorian Facebook and Instagram users at a cost of up to $6,380 according to Meta advertising library dashboard PoliDashboard. These ads have been targeted specifically at Meta users in Dunkley and appear to be spread across demographics.

(For perspective, the Liberal Party’s Dunkley candidate Nathan Conroy has spent about half that in the same period). 

The advertisements contain news-sounding captions written by the group attacking the federal government, and link out to mainstream media sources. The most popular topics include cost of living issues, followed by attacks on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s credibility over the stage three tax changes and crime. 

An Advance spokesperson said the group chose to repurpose this Facebook page because of its success during the Voice referendum.

“Now with a crucial by-election imminent, we decided it is important to assist mainstream media overcome its inability to reach mainstream Australia with its must-read reports about Anthony Albanese’s cost of living crisis,” they said in an emailed statement.

The spokesperson said the group had not yet published a Crikey article on the Facebook page but would consider it if we wrote something “balanced, interesting and relevant to mainstream Australians”.

Those criteria seem to be a ringing endorsement for the Crikey article shared by then Referendum News on May 16, 2023 — a move their spokesperson was apparently unaware of.