A fake report of a night curfew for drivers aged over-60 are amid a slew of false road rules stories circulating online, the federal government warns.
Federal Transport Minister Catherine King confirmed the existence of an online ‘campaign’ in an interview with ABC Sydney’s Hamish McDonald last week.
She said she and other MPs had been contacted by email from voters outraged by the fake report of the curfew; other fake reports included driving all day with headlights on and fines for sipping water in the car.
“I was sitting on the couch over a weekend watching the telly, checking my emails,” she recalls.
“Suddenly I got a flurry of emails in my inbox, largely from my own constituents who were really outraged that the Federal Government was doing a curfew for over 60s, which was a surprise to me.
“I’m 60 next year; that would be a bit of a problem for me going about my daily business,” she told McDonald.
“The Australian Government doesn’t put curfews on licenses. We don’t actually set those sort of rules.” (Road rules are set by the states and territories, not federal government.)
“I’m thinking, like, ‘where on Earth is this coming from?’ That’s really how it started,” King says.
“It was quite a surprise to me but the thing that I felt really awful about is just how many older people really fell for it (and), when we took them through it, just how upset they were that they had fallen for it.”
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FAKE NEWS CIRCULATING
King told McDonald the fake over-60s curfew report generated the biggest response but wasn’t the only one circulating.
“This was the biggest one that we had; a large volume of people who really, really did believe it then emailed really angry, not saying ‘is this true?’ but just telling us off for ‘doing it’.”
On Google AI producing fake reports based on ‘scraping’ of these existing false stories, King says they have talked to these online platforms about it but problems still remain.
“It’s really hard. Some of them (fake reports) could be generated by AI, some of them could be foreign actors; we don’t know, (it) could be bot farms,” King says.
“The whole point of them is that they’re trying to create confusion and division, and they are really hard to trace.”
“It’s really difficult to find out who is behind it and try to counter them quickly but that’s the challenge we have in a world where you can see these things generated and spread so quickly.”
King told McDonald that the source of these reports remains unknown but their impact is not.
“There is a lot of destabilisation happening. We don’t know what the reasons are but the result is it does sew fear, anger and division; that is what it’s exactly designed to do,” she says.
“It’s designed to get a reaction. It’s designed to get people to click further and go further into finding out information that could be gathering information about you or it’s designed to destabilise and reduce trust in government.”
‘FAKE FROM FACTS’
When MacDonald asked about a possible social media ban for older people, she says critical thinking is what is needed to identify fiction.
“If you’re not reading it on an authorised government website … be highly sceptical,” she says of the fake road rules stories.
“We’ve just got to be really sceptical about these thing, even if it’s a friend who sent it to you and said, ‘this must be true’.
“Have a think, like really put your critical thinking skills on. We’re pretty sceptical generally about things and I think we should be about the things that come through social media.”
She says people need to do their research and use only reputable online sources.
The federal government also runs a website for reporting scams; click here to visit ScamWatch.
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