page ‘South Australian Conservative Support Page,’ which supported Liberal candidate Georgina Downer (Evershed, 2019). Similarly, ABC News reported on the page ‘Hands off our Democracy’ which contained no information about who was behind the group, despite using sponsored ads, to attack The Greens and activist group GetUp! (Figure 3). The AEC reported the page to Facebook, but it was deleted before action was taken (McGrath, 2019). Figure 3: ‘Hands off our Democracy’ (McGrath, 2019) Conspiracy Theories During the bushfire crisis in January 2020, disinformation and conspiracy theories spread about the cause of the fires. Conspiracy theories tended to focus on denying the impact of climate change and blaming The Greens. Disinformation spread across social media, entered major news outlets, was spread by government members of parliament, and was even picked up by American right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones (Knaus, 2020). Researchers discovered manipulative activity on Twitter around the #ArsonEmergency hashtag, which proposed the theory that arsonists were the cause of the bushfires, negating the role of climate change (Graham & Keller, 2020). There was evidence of misinformation and bot- and trolllike behaviour (Weber et al., 2020). The Australian falsely stated that 183 arsonists had been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, a figure which was picked up on social media by far-right figures. However, only twenty-four people had been charged with deliberately lighting bushfires (Macdonald, 2020). Dr Timothy Graham, from the Queensland University of Technology, found bot-like and troll-like accounts targeting the hashtags #arsonemergency, #bushfireaustralia and #australiafire (Stilgherrian, 2020). Trolling ABC News reported that a Labor MP had reported “a relentless number of fake Facebook profiles commenting constantly” across Facebook pages and newspaper outlets. The fake accounts used comments to manipulate, misinform, attack MPs, and in some cases promote the Liberal Party (Gregory, 2019). WeChat Politicians from the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are active on WeChat to target the country’s ethnic Chinese population. With an estimated 3 million WeChat users in Australia, a survey found that 60% of Australian Mandarin speakers used the app as their main source of news and information (Hollingsworth, 2019). WeChat is an important platform for campaigning, credited as central to the Labor Party’s win in the marginal Melbourne seat of 17