Expert: Rys Farthing, Chief Research Officer, Reset Tech (report author) Reset Tech's eight-month monitoring of Facebook found more than 200 pages impersonating Australian political figures - including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, independent senators Fatima Payman and David Pocock, and crossbencher Allegra Spender - and linked the network back to an influencer business in Sri Lanka. The template was a short Reel in which a politician was falsely shown saying something inflammatory; the report says the content centred on anti-migrant, anti-Muslim or nationalistic themes and baited users into participating in polls, and that some female politicians were targeted with sexualised images and video. The two clips above are fabrications. Senator Payman, a Muslim, did not say she feared being deported to Afghanistan; Senator Pocock did not announce any alliance with One Nation, and told the ABC he had not seen the specific clip but that his team had been sent "a bunch of deepfakes of me over the last few months". Reset Tech chief research officer Rys Farthing rejects the framing of traditional foreign interference. "What we see here is foreign influence for commercial motivations," she said - "AI slopaganda" produced at what the report describes as massive industrial scale: "They work out which [posts] get them the clicks, which ones bring the money in, and then they create more like that again." The report's containment numbers are the sharpest finding. Roughly 10 per cent of the network's pages were being monetised under Facebook's in-house creator payment scheme, yet only one in three posts carried an AI label and only one in 33 were deleted - despite Reset Tech calling the pages a clear breach of Facebook policies on inauthentic behaviour networks, hate speech and AI deepfakes. Globally, Reset Tech believes the same Sri Lanka-based operator runs 1,864 coordinated pages with 5.9 million followers, running the same playbook in France, Italy, the UK, the US, Canada and Mexico. "We have a handful of researchers, and we were able to find this and detect all of these networks with ease," Dr Farthing said. "If we can do it, I don't quite understand how these companies that have billion-dollar revenues can't do it." Senator Pocock said the business model is the problem: "Their business model is based on outrage, on eyeballs on the screens for as long as possible, and on clicks." Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who was deepfaked by the same network, said it was more important than ever for people to check their sources. Meta told the ABC it was "reviewing the pages identified and will take action against any that violate our policies". Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/foreign-ai-network-deepfaking-australian-politicians/107129044