False information that should not be ignored

Since the beginning of the new financial year, the 485 visa adjustment has come into effect and has sparked a lot of discussion. After all, this move by the government potentially affects the future of many international students.

Last week, a protest organised by some international students, which did not receive much attention from international students or the community, was described as a protest by tens of thousands of people on some Chinese social media platforms. A small piece of news has become fake news in the Chinese media, which makes us reflect on how to provide more valuable and truthful news to our readers.

The Seriousness of the False News Problem and its Overwhelm
It is a basic human desire to get true information. And news is based on the true reflection of objective facts as the nature of the characteristics. However, with the rapid development of communication technology and the arrival of the new media era, the problem of false news, which has long plagued the news media industry, has become more and more serious. Especially nowadays, everyone has a microphone, all members of society are intentionally or unintentionally involved in the dissemination of news and information in the process – as long as there is a smart phone, you can take pictures, video or voice a key to disseminate the so-called information, objectively leading to the emergence of false news.

The rapid development of the Internet and the convenience of the application of communication technology, so that almost all members of society can participate in the dissemination of information, but the norms of communication have not been accompanied by the rapid development of communication technology and the establishment of one of the direct consequences is the spread of false news. The dissemination of news and information is a professional behaviour, which needs to follow the basic norms of news and information production and dissemination. However, for many members of the society, these norms have not become the threshold of their participation in the dissemination process, and at the same time, they also lack professional knowledge of news media and news works, thus, there is a wide space for the popularity of false news.

In today’s society with the rapid development of new media, there is fierce competition among the media, especially the new media which takes traffic as an indicator, and they do not hesitate to finish their reports with hearsay and fabrication, and write whatever they can to attract eyeballs. As a result, the quality of information cannot be guaranteed. Sometimes, when a hot story breaks out, major media outlets republish it among themselves. In some hotspot events, lax gatekeeping by the first media resulted in false news, which led to dominoes of errors by the reposting media, resulting in the collapse of public trust in the media. In addition, with the use of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other technologies, the production of fake news on the Internet has become even faster and easier, making it difficult for ordinary people to distinguish the authenticity of graphics and video content.

Let’s take a look at this process from the perspective of a news story about 485 visas that turned into fake news.

485 Visa Policy Adjustment Causes Controversy

From 1 July this year, the maximum age limit for applying for an Australian Graduate Temporary Visa (Type 485) will be reduced from 50 to 35 years old. For PhD graduates and Masters by Research graduates, the maximum age limit to apply for a Class 485 visa will remain at 50 years old. With the implementation of the new policy, many international students are worried that they will lose the opportunity to work in Australia and be forced to return home. The change has not only taken thousands of international students by surprise, but has also sparked widespread debate about Australia’s migration strategy amongst industry and migration experts.

The 485 Graduate Visa was introduced in 2007 and was originally intended to allow university or college graduates who intended to stay in Australia but did not meet the work experience requirements for skilled migrants to work in Australia for a period of time to make it possible for them to meet the relevant requirements. Initially, there was less than 24 months, and visa holders who could not apply for a different visa before the end of the visa were required to leave Australia.

The 485 Graduate Work Visa has now become an important factor in attracting international students to Australia. Previously, 485 visa holders were able to work full-time in Australia as a primary or secondary applicant with a high degree of flexibility, making this type of visa one of the most attractive temporary work visas in the world. Particularly in the absence of stringent skills requirements, employer sponsorship and minimum wage standards, some students have used the visa to gain valuable work experience on which to apply for permanent residence. At the same time, more people are using the visa to gain up to eight years of work experience in Australia by taking a simple two-year diploma course. In South Asian countries, many study abroad consultants have used this as a way of recruiting large numbers of students to become permanent workers in Australia. However, policy changes in the new financial year have shattered many of these dreams.

International students coming to Australia seem to follow an unwritten rule: study – get a transitional visa after graduation – get a job – apply for permanent residence, but this is more like the brainwashing effect of the study migration industry on international students, and the agents don’t share all the information with these students who don’t have a good understanding of Australia’s policies. The agent will not share all the information to these students who have no idea about Australia’s policies. The language bottleneck, cultural differences, and the financial and psychological pressure of high tuition and living costs have left international students with no time to understand Australia’s immigration policy. In fact, Australia’s immigration policy is not necessarily linked to studying in Australia, and many professions are not on the list of immigrant-eligible occupations. Due to the massive influx of international students in recent years, many of the professions on the list have been taken down, resulting in many international students investing a lot of time and money in the early stages of the cost, but it is still a basket case; however, the immigration agents have already made a lot of money.

The alarmist talk is aimed at creating chaos in the world
The tightening of 485 visas is expected to affect nearly 20,000 students, and some are worried that they will not be able to stay in Australia once their visas expire. Students taking part in protests in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra told SBS they had expected the 485 visas to provide them with the necessary work experience to stay in Australia, and indeed some have recently organised vigils in various cities to demand a fair transition period. The problem is that the protests, which were only attended by a handful of students, have been described by some Chinese-language WeChat platforms as ‘tens of thousands of students protesting against the Australian government’s tightening of the 485 visa on 17th October! — No doubt it is a proper headline, even though there are photos showing that only a few students were at the protest.

This is not an isolated case. Just this past weekend, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia experienced a major malfunction, with multiple accounts being charged repeatedly, resulting in overdrafts on some accounts. When it comes to Chinese language internet platforms, it’s ‘the sky is falling! A large number of Chinese Australians have been hit by the malfunction. ‘A large number of Chinese Australians have had their bank accounts emptied!’ It’s a complete statement – based on certain facts, but exaggerated in order to attract attention and increase traffic. This is a typical practice in the Chinese language media, whereby the English language reports are laundered, and then the information is selected, filtered and presented in a more exaggerated way, only that the information has already been seriously distorted when it reaches the recipients – the readers.

The essence of WeChat is the title
Information is different from knowledge in that knowledge helps us to live and work, whereas information enables us to know and make decisions. Modern people value information at the expense of knowledge, striving to know everything without distinguishing the details of what they know in order to make a judgement, and so a great deal of information in the form of headlines has appeared on mobile platforms. This is the nature of WeChat’s information.

When people read the headlines, they think they already know what is going on without looking at the details. So the headlines become exaggerated and easy to remember, and at the same time create room for false information. In a short period of time, the content of an incredible headline can become something that everyone believes.

There are currently over 800,000 WeChat users in Australia. Due to language barriers, WeChat has become an important source of information for Chinese Australians, but it’s important to be vigilant about this kind of misinformation. After all, the information that people are exposed to on a daily basis can have a huge impact on their views and political opinions. Imagine if people left China and still received information via WeChat or watched Chinese TV programmes even though their bodies had been turned over the wall, it would be difficult to see a huge change in the way people think before and after leaving the country – after all, the source of information would still be the same. As WeChat becomes indispensable, more users will enter a kind of information vortex, meaning that no matter where they live in the world, they will still be living under the same set of narratives and censorship as they do in mainland China. This will do more harm than good to the integration of new Chinese immigrants into the Australian community.

The two examples mentioned above, at a glance, you would believe that the 485 visa affects the right of many people to stay and work in Australia, without thinking whether granting a 485 visa means that the Australian government agrees that these people can stay and work in Australia for a long time? Fake news is so destructive to the society. The second example makes you think that the Federal Bank of Australia is deliberately targeting Chinese customers, but in fact, different people are affected and there is no question of targeting the Chinese. Of course some Chinese were inconvenienced by the incident, but the focus of the problem was not on the Chinese at all.

Of course, it seems to be a daily news report that provides this kind of content, but the practitioners may not be able to pass the minimum standard of journalism, but nowadays, social media platforms are flooded with this kind of unintentional false news.

Government regulation is not an option
Like many people around the world, Chinese people now get their news from social media rather than traditional news media. In Australia, there are more than 100 Chinese-language news publics on WeChat platforms that publish news specifically for Chinese Australians. Many of these public numbers push articles about which restaurants are popular, where there are discounts, or other lifestyle topics. However, due to their readership model, they often exaggerate and exaggerate in order to attract attention, and some even create fake news and spread rumours, as their readership determines their advertising revenue. Moreover, the proliferation of fake news is not only a problem for WeChat, but also for Facebook and Twitter. There have been calls for the Australian government to step up its legislative oversight, and recently there have been some signs of this.

Due to the widespread popularity of digital platforms, while they bring unlimited convenience to the audience, they may also become a tool to disseminate misleading or false information that is very harmful to the hands. The rapid spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation poses a significant challenge to the functioning of societies around the world. The Commonwealth Minister for Communications, Mr Rowland, has said that around 75 per cent of Australians are concerned about the harmful effects of misinformation and disinformation. Recently, the Australian Federal Government introduced new laws to address the dangers of misinformation and disinformation in the digital age. Regulators will have the power to impose large fines for misconduct by some major technology companies to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the platforms of technology companies such as Meta and X. The bill aims to provide regulatory support for the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the platforms of technology companies such as Meta.

The bill seeks to strengthen the voluntary code by providing regulatory support. Specifically, the bill will empower ACMA to review the effectiveness of digital platform systems and processes, and will increase the transparency of the measures taken by platforms to protect Australians from misinformation and falsehoods in the use of social media. It is hoped that the new bill will have a binding effect on Chinese-language digital platforms to enhance the verification of information. More importantly, Australia’s mainstream media needs to reach out more to the Chinese community and international students to ensure their voices are heard, otherwise it’s no surprise that ‘bad money drives out good money’. Currently, The Australian, SBS and ABC are the only three mainstream media outlets that produce Chinese-language Australian news. The Chinese community is in dire need of media platforms with a voice from their own community and a conscience to provide better news to the Chinese community in Australia.

More resources for the community
Multicultural communities have always provided information platforms that are more relevant and influential to their own communities. For example, Chinese newspapers were already published in gold mining towns more than 160 years ago during the gold rush era. Community-supported Chinese-language media, while not as exhaustive as the mainstream media about Australian life, did distribute important social and governmental information. Today, there are community radio stations in Australia, and the government encourages immigrant communities to broadcast in their own language to disseminate messages and information about their community, as it is a basic human right for everyone to be able to access information in the language they are most comfortable with.

In today’s information society, this is even more important. Because of the Internet, every multicultural Australian in Australia has the potential to be influenced by information from other countries through the Internet. This information can be distributed in an organised and systematic way with the intention of influencing these communities, or it can be created inadvertently by people but spread due to the misperceptions and limitations of the distributors and their biased attitudes towards things. In any case, if the Australian community is to deal with such a large number of messages and platforms that are so easily created and uncontrollable, the community can only build a more credible, trustworthy and quality information platform on the one hand, so that the right messages are valued by the community on the other. Of course, how to disseminate and enable everyone to enhance the ability to distinguish the authenticity of information also becomes important. Information Literacy and Media Literacy are becoming an important part of the basic life skills of modern people.

Therefore, it is necessary for society to provide more resources in this area. Otherwise, the general public will easily become unable to distinguish between right and wrong, and it will be difficult to reach a consensus when society makes a decision, and there will be no basis for discussion when important decisions are made. In that case, society will have to pay a heavy price in the long run for making wrong decisions.