Hidden ads and misleading claims flood election feeds: report
Author QUT Media
Date 24 March 2026
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 Prof Daniel Angus from the ARC Center of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at QUT’s 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. It also raised concerns about artificial intelligence as a political tool.
“Online political advertising is largely invisible to public scrutiny,” Professor Angus said.
“Yet 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.”
Unlike platform ad libraries, the study captured real-world advertising exposure by recruiting participants in key electorates to install the Mobile Online Advertising Tool (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 method was critical to understanding modern election campaigning.
“Most political content online is unpaid and organic, and even paid advertising is often poorly disclosed,” he said.
“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.”
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 political messaging.
“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 led by Professor Angus in collaboration with colleagues from Monash University, the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne, with participant recruitment supported by the Susan McKinnon Foundation.
Read the full report 2025 Australian election advertising on social media: An Australian Ad Observatory report
