Chisholm during the 2016 federal election. An account called ‘Bill Shorten and Labor’ made Chinese-language posts almost every day during the election season, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison also has a WeChat account that posts Chinese-language articles (Figure 4). Fabricated and misleading content is reported to circulate on WeChat groups. Labor has reportedly written to Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, over concerns of malicious and misleading content and fake news. For example, rumours spread about Labor’s promise to increase the number of refugees and claims that Labor would close power plants. SBS News reported that some anti-Labor material on WeChat could be traced to members of the Liberal Party (Elvin, 2019). Figure 4: Australian WeChat accounts (Hollingsworth, 2019) Fake Accounts The unexpectedly large Twitter following of Senator Kimberley Kitching was brought to the public’s attention in May 2018 after it was revealed that 27% of her followers were probably fake Russian accounts. It has since been revealed that she is not the only one with large Russian followings. However, she is adamant that her Russian following never exceeded 3%, even after she lost more than 4,500 followers in a Twitter culling of fake accounts in early November 2018. It remains unclear whether she instigated the fake following, or if this was done by a third party. Similarly, several prominent politicians with fake Twitter followers have lost a significant number of followers due to culls carried out by Twitter. Table 2: Observed Strategies, Tools and Techniques of Social Media Manipulation in Australia Account Types Messaging and Valence Content and Platforms Communication Strategies Bots, Fake Human Pro-government messages, Disinformation, Facebook attacks on opposition, trolling Ads, Amplifying Content Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WeChat Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. 18