A report launched today (Tuesday March 24) reveals widespread transparency gaps, misleading claims and covert political campaigning across social media platforms during the 2025 Australian federal election, raising concerns about what Australian voters are really seeing online.
Led by Professor Daniel Angus from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, the 2025 Australian Election Advertising on Social Media report draws on real-world advertising data collected directly from voters' smartphones and highlights and urgent need for electoral law reform.
Professor Angus said the results showed how difficult it had become for voters, regulators and journalists to see who is trying to influence political debate online and how.
"Online political advertising is largely invisible to public scrutiny," Professor Angus said.
"Our research shows voters are being targeted with political messages that are difficult to track, often poorly disclosed, and in many cases misleading or deliberately decontextualised."
The report recommends:
- National truth in political advertising laws to cover misleading factual claims
- Real-time disclosure of third-party funding and donors
- Consistent blackout rules across broadcast and digital media
- Greater platform accountability to stop the deliberate mislabelling of lobby groups as 'community organisations' or 'non-profits.'
- Sustained investment in independent monitoring infrastructure, such as the Australian Internet Observatory
"Australia's electoral laws were designed for an analogue era," Professor Angus said.
"If we want to protect democratic integrity, regulation, transparency and independent oversight must catch up with the realities of digital campaigning."
Due to limitations of platform-provided ad libraries, members of the team worked with the Australian Internet Observatory to develop the Mobile Online Advertising Toolkit (MOAT). The study captured real-world advertising exposure by recruiting participants in key electorates to install MOAT on their smartphones in the weeks leading up to election day.
This allowed researchers to collect more than 22,000 ads, providing rare insight into what Australians actually saw on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Professor Angus said this new method was critical to understanding modern election campaigning.
"By collecting ads directly from participants' devices, we were able to see how political influence operates in practice, not just what platforms choose to report," he said.
The report found that while political advertising made up only a small proportion of total ads, it was dominated by third-party groups, many of which appeared to present themselves as grassroots organisations while obscuring their political or financial backing, a practice known as astroturfing.
Researchers also identified widespread use of misleading and decontextualised claims, particularly around cost-of-living issues, by both major political parties and third-party advertisers.
The study further detected scam advertisements and impersonation, raising concerns about the growing use of artificial intelligence and deepfake-style content in the advertising ecosystem.
"These practices undermine trust and make it harder for voters to make informed decisions," Professor Angus said.
"Without stronger oversight, this kind of opaque campaigning risks becoming the norm rather than the exception."
The study was conducted through the Australian Ad Observatory, part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). The research was undertaken in collaboration with colleagues from Monash University, the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne, with participant recruitment supported by McKinnon.
The full report is available online at https://apo.org.au/node/332660.
Main image: Professor Daniel Angus
