Cover not available
Article published In:
Discourses of Fake News
Edited by Scott Wright
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:5] 2021
► pp. 696–718

Recursion theory and the ‘death tax’

Investigating a fake news discourse in the 2019 Australian election

ORCID logo | La Trobe University
ORCID logo | University of Texas at Austin
ORCID logo | University of Waikato

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.

Keywords: fake news, death tax, Australian federal election, recursion theory, disinformation, misinformation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and literature
    • 2.1Defining fake news
    • 2.2What is the death tax story?
    • 2.3Refutation and backfire effects
    • 2.4Agenda setting theory
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Content analysis of media stories and Facebook posts
  • 4.Data and findings
    • 4.1Frequency and spread of the death tax story
    • 4.2Key actors using terms
      • 4.2.1Politicians
      • 4.2.2Media organisations and online actors
    • 4.3Journalistic refutation and adjudication
    • 4.4Real versus fake discourses in media
    • 4.5Recursion of fake news discourses
      • 4.5.1First fake news discourse: Labor’s franking credit policies amount to a death tax
      • 4.5.2Second Discourse: Greens support a death tax
      • 4.5.3Third discourse: Labor-Green alliance
      • 4.5.4Fourth discourse: Labor will implement a death tax
      • 4.5.5Fifth Discourse: Labor lost election because of the death tax
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21030.car
References
Australians Against Destructive Leftism
2019 “Unions are pushing bull shitten to introduce death taxes. what does this mean for you? ok so sadly your mum and dad pass away. their estate which ordinarily is passed onto the children and divided…” Facebook, April 15 2019.Google Scholar
Australian Government
2018 “Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983” Federal Register of Legislation. URL: [URL]
Benns, Matthew
2019 “Angry retirees boo Labor’s ‘death tax’ at fiery hearing.” The Daily Telegraph, February 4 2019.Google Scholar
Caisley, Olivia
2019 “Retirees’ paradise in revolt as ALP eyes super savings.” The Australian, February 5 2019.Google Scholar
Cameron, Sarah and Ian McAllister
2020 “Policies and performance in the 2019 Australian federal election”. Australian Journal of Political Science, (55) 31: 239–256. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carson, Andrea and Liam Fallon
2021 Fighting Fake News: A Study of Online Misinformation Regulation in the Asia Pacific. Melbourne: La Trobe University. [URL]
Carson, Andrea, and Lawrie Zion
2020 “Media Coverage.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 431–53. Canberra: Australian National University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clench, Sam
2019 “ ‘Abhorrent’: PM rips into One Nation.” News.com.au, March 26 2019.Google Scholar
Cooke, Nicole. A.
2017 “Post-truth, truthiness, and alternative facts: Information behavior and critical information consumption for a new age.” Library Quarterly, 87(3): 211–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Emerson, Craig and Jay Weatherill
2019 “Review of Labor’s 2019 federal election campaign.” Australian Labor Party, URL: [URL]
Farhall, Kate, Carson, Andrea, Wright, Scott, Gibbons, Andrew, and William Lukamto
2019 “ ‘Political Elites’ Use of Fake News Discourse Across Communications Platforms.” International Journal of Communication, 131, 4353–4375.Google Scholar
Farkas, Johan and Jannick Schou
2018 “Fake News as a Floating Signifier: Hegemony, Antagonism and the Politics of Falsehood.” Javnost – The Public, 25:3: 298–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frydenberg, Josh
2019 “Death taxes – you don’t say, Bill!” Josh Frydenberg MP [website] 23 January, URL: [URL]
Giusti, Serena and Elisa Piras
2021 Democracy and fake news: Information manipulation and post-truth politics. Routledge: London.Google Scholar
Gleicher, Nathaniel
2018 6 December. “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Explained. Facebook.” URL: [URL]
Harris, Rob
2019 “Greens snub Burnside over death tax push.” Herald Sun, March 6 2019.Google Scholar
Holderhead, Sheradyn
2018 “Inheritance tax in union’s list of demands for Bill”. Daily Telegraph 20 July. URL: [URL]
Jana Laura Egelhofer and Sophie Lecheler
2019 Fake news as a twodimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda, Annals of the International Communication Association, 43(2), 97–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krippendorff, Klaus and Mary Angela Bock
2009 The Content Analysis Reader, Thousand Oaks: Sage.Google Scholar
Kruger, Anne
2019 11 June. “How a ‘zombie rumour’ about taxes spread in Australia.” First Draft. URL: [URL]
Lau, Richard R. and Ivy Brown Rovner
2009 “Negative Campaigning.” Annual Review of Political Science. 121: 285–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Peter
2019 How the internet led to division, distraction and civic disengagement. Podcast. Big Ideas with Paul Barclay, ABC RN 1 July. URL: [URL]
Manwaring, Rob
2020 “The Australian Labor party.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 277–94. Canberra: Australian National University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell E. and Donald, L. Shaw
1993 The evolution of agenda-setting research: Twenty-five years in the marketplace of ideas. Journal of communication, 43(2): 58–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McNair, Brian
2018 Fake news: Falsehood, fabrication and fantasy in journalism. Oxon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mills, Stephen
2020 “Party campaign communications.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 455–72. Canberra: Australian National University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Minear, Tom, Rob Harris, and Claire Bickers
2019 “Burnside backs death tax in battle for Kooyong.” Herald Sun, March 4 2019.Google Scholar
Murphy, Katharine, Christopher Knaus, and Nick Evershed
2019 “ ‘It felt like a big tide’: how the death tax lie infected Australia’s election campaign.” The Guardian, June 7 2019.Google Scholar
Neuman, Russell. W. Lauren Guggenheim, S. Mo Jang, and Soo Young Bae
2014 “The dynamics of public attention: Agenda-setting theory meets big data.” Journal of Communication, 64(2): 193–214. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler
2010 “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior, 32 (2): 303–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Jason Reifler and Peter A. Ubel
2013 “The Hazards of Correcting Myths About Health Care Reform.” Medical Care, 51(2): 127–132. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Ethan Porter, Jason Reifler and Thomas J. Wood
2019 “Taking fact-checks literally but not seriously? The effects of journalistic fact-checking on factual beliefs and candidate favorability.” Political Behavior: 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Justin B.
2019 “Negative Political Communication on Social Media and the Gender Gap: A Study of Men’s and Women’s Reactions to Presidential Candidate Attacks on Facebook in 2012 and 2016.” Politics & Gender: 1–29.Google Scholar
2020 “Leave the Attacking to Others: Assessing the Effectiveness of Candidate Endorsed and Independently Sourced Televised Attack Ads in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Mass Communication and Society: 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pingree, Raymond J., Dominique Brossard and Douglas M. McLeod
2014 “Effects of Journalistic Adjudication on Factual Beliefs, News Evaluations, Information Seeking, and Epistemic Political Efficacy.” Mass Communication and Society, 17(5): 615–638. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Remeikis, Amy
2019 “PM announces first-home scheme at Liberal party campaign launch – as it happened.” The Guardian, May 12 2019.Google Scholar
Tandoc, Edson. C. Jr., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling
2018 “Defining ‘Fake News’”, Digital Journalism, 6:2, 137–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turner, Sandy
2019 “A vote for labor is a vote for death taxes. your legacy should go to your family, not the state. did you work hard all your life to support a failed system…” Facebook, April 19 2019.Google Scholar
Wardle, Claire
2018 “The Need for Smarter Definitions and Practical, Timely Empirical Research on Information Disorder.” Digital Journalism, 6(8): 951–963. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Warren, Matthew
2020 “Fake news case study during the Australian 2019 general election.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 241: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar