Facebook's Own Payouts Are Fueling AI Fakes of Australia's Leaders

For years the fear about AI in elections was a foreign spy service with a cause. What arrived in Australia instead was cruder and, in its way, more corrosive: a foreign business with a payout form. New research published on September 9, 2026 finds a Sri Lanka-linked operation built more than 200 Facebook pages impersonating Australian politicians with AI deepfakes, not to elect anyone but to get paid ².

The account comes from ABC News (Australia) national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre, drawing on eight months of tracking by Reset.Tech, an independent digital-harms nonprofit, led by chief research officer Dr Rys Farthing ². After mapping the pages, Farthing rejected the state-interference frame outright, calling the operation foreign influence for commercial motivations and a foreign distortion of Australian political discourse ². The operators, the researchers concluded, iterate on whatever generates clicks and revenue, regardless of whom it damages ².

The pages were built to look like Australia itself. They ran under mass-appeal names such as I Love Australia, Life in Australia and Beautiful Australia, gathering followers with easy patriotism before turning political ². Targets included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, Senator David Pocock, Senator Fatima Payman, Allegra Spender and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, with some summaries of the research also naming former prime minister John Howard ².

The funnel was familiar to anyone who has watched junk Facebook grow. Some pages opened with bait — AI animals, attractive women, or generic praise of Australia — then pivoted to short Facebook Reels in which politicians appeared to make inflammatory statements they never made ². Recurring themes were nationalistic, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim messaging, plus bogus polls designed to drive engagement and sexualized AI images and videos of female politicians ². Two examples show how personal it got: a fake clip of Payman asking not to be deported to Afghanistan, and a fake clip of Pocock claiming he had joined forces with One Nation ².

Roughly one in 10 of the network's pages had been monetized through Facebook's in-house scheme that pays content creators for engagement ². That is the engine the headline points to: the same incentive that rewards a cooking video rewards a fake prime minister, as long as people watch and react ². Australia was only one outlet. The same coordinated network of 1,864 pages, reaching an estimated 5.9 million users, was also running in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Mexico ².

What the platform did not do is the most damaging part of the report. Across the targeted Australian posts Reset.Tech observed, only one in three carried an AI label, and only one in 33 was deleted ². That was despite content that violated Facebook's own policies on inauthentic behavior networks, hate speech and AI deepfakes ². The researchers noted that a small team could map the network with relative ease, and asked why a platform with far greater resources could not ².

Pocock, an independent senator targeted by the network, said his team had been sent a bunch of deepfakes of him over the last few months and that he is concerned deepfakes really undermine the democratic system ². He pointed directly at the business model: based on outrage, on eyeballs on screens for as long as possible, and on clicks ². Burke, himself targeted, said that at the last election he saw for the first time photos of himself online with people he had never met, and that more recently he had seen videos and interviews of colleagues saying things they have never said ². He urged Australians to check their sources ².