When bad actors are literally bad actors

A new vaccine is approved for a fast-spreading emerging disease. The TGA did its job well. State and Federal Health ministers are briefed. Budgets are approved and allocated. Departments and health authorities develop their plans. The rollout is announced. Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trained to administer the vaccine.

The system worked as it should.

Then, within days, a cluster of social media accounts, confident, polished, apparently Australian, are producing video after video claiming the vaccine was insufficiently tested, that it has a range of terrible side-effects and that pharmaceutical companies are getting rich off the public's fear.

The content spreads. Millions of views. Alarmed constituents contact their MPs. Traditional media picks up the controversy. The concerns get front-page coverage. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing stands up a rapid communications response. Ministerial offices field calls. 

The rollout slows. Disease cases rise, along with preventable deaths.

Behind the scenes, the accounts were being run by an offshore group of content entrepreneurs who identified "Australian vaccine reluctance" as a profitable niche. They hired voice actors, used AI-generated scripts ignoring facts, but had no real view on the vaccine's safety and no stake in Australian public health.

They were running a passive income business. Political anxiety drives views. Views drive ad revenue.

The Australian government just spent a month responding to content production. Costing millions of dollars and hundreds of lives.

Does that sound like an unlikely scenario? It's already happening.

In April 2026, a CBC News investigation found exactly this type of operation. A network of 20 YouTube channels promoting Alberta separatism had accumulated 40 million views. The operators were based in the Netherlands, hiring actors through Fiverr and Upwork to front the content. One of those actors, based in Indiana, summarised his qualifications plainly: "I don't know anything about Canadian politics."

The operators' interest was ad revenue. They had no stake in Canadian politics.

Watch the CBC investigation:

Australian government consultation, sentiment monitoring, and ministerial communications all assume vocal opposition is genuine opposition - people with a stake in the outcome, motivated by real concern.

That assumption is broken.

Spikes in apparent community concern could reflect genuine public anxiety. But they could also reflect an offshore entrepreneur who noticed a topic trending. 

At volume, an agency's response machinery treats both as the same. Consultations get commissioned to understand the depth of concern. The consultation environment is seeded with the same inauthentic content. Policy strategy gets built on a corrupted signal.

Particularly when there is genuine controversy or industry opposition to a policy, content creators can see a profit opportunity. And the opponents of a policy position may embrace and further amplify the fake opposition as it amplifies their own views.

It's now difficult to separate genuine concerns from fake ones, making it difficult to tune policies for constituents - or even manage political situations effectively.

So what can governments and agencies do?

While there's often pressure to respond quickly to negative coverage, it's important to start by gauging how much is real, how much is fake and whether the community can tell the difference.

The first step should be to investigate before responding. High-volume, rapid-onset opposition from accounts with no prior history warrants scrutiny before they shape your agency strategy. Establish whether apparent community concern is organic before commissioning a response.

Where there are active consultation processes, redesign them toward harder-to-fake formats. Online submissions and social media monitoring are easy to flood. Face-to-face engagement, deliberative processes, and direct stakeholder contact are not. They're slower and more expensive, but help you size the real concerns.

Move from monitoring media to scrutinising sources and intent. Separate sentiment monitoring from policy signals. Social media volume isn't necessarily a measure of community concern. Weigh it against consultation data, direct stakeholder engagement, and evidence from people genuinely affected.

Finally, build detection capability into your communications teams. Staff running public engagement need to have the skills and tools to recognise the signals of coordinated inauthentic content, such as production consistency, account age, script similarity and offshore indicators. The tools and training exist, but you need them in place before you face a backlash.

Most importantly, always keep in mind that political and policy damage doesn't require intent. While there are genuine bad actors out there - nations, corporations and lobby groups - who have an interest in derailing government policies and even governments themselves, they aren't the entire landscape anymore.

The bad actors opposing your policy reform may be literal bad actors, reading from AI-generated scripts, churning out videos and other content for clicks and ad revenue alone.

It doesn't take large groups to organise a significant social media campaign against your Minister's signature policy. All it takes is the potential for a decent financial return.

So it's up to agencies to ensure that this doesn't impede good policy, cost money or lives.