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According to Liberal sources, party officials have consulted Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the most senior Victorian Liberal in federal parliament, and he strongly supports suspending Mr Duong from the party.

Victorian senator James Paterson and Victorian MP Tim Wilson - long-standing critics of the Chinese Communist Party - also support the move to suspend Mr Duong.

Senator Paterson said he supported suspending Mr Duong, but all Australians deserve due process and "only the courts can determine guilt or innocence".

"Any party member facing serious charges like these should be suspended until the facts of the case are clearly established," Senator Paterson said.

Mr Duong, also known as Sunny Duong, is suspected to have links with Beijing's overseas influence arm, the United Front Work Department.

The investigation by counter-espionage agency ASIO and the Australian Federal Police at least partly focuses on Mr Duong's alleged activities in trying to influence figures in the Liberal Party's Victorian branch, security sources have confirmed. The evidence won't suggest alleged plans to engage in foreign interference were advanced, but only preparatory.

The AFP alleges Mr Duong has a connection to a foreign intelligence agency, but has not named which country.

Mr Duong has been connected to the Liberal Party since the 1980s and ran as a candidate for the party in the state seat of Richmond in 1996.

While he has been involved with the party for a number of decades, senior Liberals played down his influence, saying he was never a major figure.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg supports suspending Mr Duong from the party.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The 65-year-old had not been returning associates' phone calls in the months leading up to his arrest on Thursday. He was granted bail in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Thursday afternoon and will appear for a committal mention hearing on March 11 next year.

Mr Duong had complained to one associate that he had been stopped by authorities when returning from an overseas trip and had his computer and phone searched.

The arrest followed a year-long investigation by the Counter Foreign Interference taskforce, led by ASIO and the AFP. A number of Melbourne properties connected to Mr Duong were raided by the AFP on October 16.

If convicted, Mr Doung faces a maximum 10-year jail term.

He is the first person charged under Australia's foreign interference laws enacted by the Turnbull government in 2018, which criminalised the act of working with a foreign country to influence Australia's democracy.

The most important news, analysis and insights delivered to your inbox at the start and end of each day. Sign up to The Sydney Morning Heralds newsletter here, The Ages newsletter here, Brisbane Times' here and WAtoday's here.

Anthony is foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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Frydenberg supports suspension of Liberal Party member charged with foreign interference - Sydney Morning Herald

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

One of the recurring themes from the left about the election results is that they lost or didnt do as well as they had hoped not because their ideas are terrible, but because about half of all Americans are racists or morons or illiterate or just plain bad people.

Whatever else it is, it is certainly a different approach to persuasion.

Part of the liberals problem is that they were misled by their own pollsters, who told them repeatedly in a variety of ways that most of America agreed with them on most issues. They were so convincing that donors (looking at you, Mike Bloomberg) were persuaded to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on races that were never really close.

Ive already noted in this column that among the losers in this election cycle are opinion researchers. But the extent of the inaccuracy is worth examining.

Opinion researchers spent a lot of time talking about the shy Trump voter and they will blame those voters for missing the actual results so badly. But thats nonsense. The real problem is that pollsters systematically oversampled Democrats because thats who they thought would actually show up or because it made their numbers look better.

The bias-driven inaccuracy spread well beyond the presidential race. In the North Carolina Senate race, Real Clear Politics had Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham ahead of Sen. Thom Tillis in every survey leading up to election, with the average 2.6%. Mr. Tillis is ahead by a point.

In South Carolina, Ron Faucheuxs average of surveys had Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham up by 3 points; he won by 10. In Montana, Mr. Faucheuxs average had Republican Sen. Steve Daines and Democratic challenger Steve Bullock even. Mr. Daines won by 10. In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was supposed to win by 10, while he won by 20. In Kansas, Republican Roger Marshall was supposed to win by 3; he won by 12.

You get the point. In every instance and at every turn in this campaign, the polling bias was in one direction and was based not only on a misapprehension of Trump voters, but also on a misapprehension of all voters.

The intellectual and moral collapse of opinion research was widespread and uniform.

The job of the opinion researchers in any campaign is to tell the truth, especially when its ugly. He or she is supposed to tell a candidate: Thats a great idea, unfortunately, everyone hates it.

In this cycle, few of those conversations happened. Consequently, folks on the left in places as diverse as MSNBC and The New York Times expressed their outrage or disgust at the election results and the idea that their countrymen might not be as woke as they had imagined or been told by their pollsters.

But really, they are angry because they were surprised and looked foolish because they expected something that was never going to happen the mass acquiescence of ordinary Americans to the more daffy and dangerous parts of the liberal agenda.

Thats the risk when the one person in politics who is supposed to tell the truth the researcher becomes just another cog in the propaganda machine.

Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.

Link:
Liberal propagandist pollsters predicted blue wave that was never going to happen - Washington Times

Lindsey Graham Getty Images

All the liberals in California in New York, you wasted a lot of money. This is the worst return on investment in the history of American politics.

Thats Senator Lindsey Graham relishing his reelection to a fourth term and sticking it to his Democratic rivals in a Tuesday night victory speech after he apparently beat Jaime Harrison, who shattered campaign records with his massive fundraising bounty.

Graham, once a fierce critic of President Trump but now a loyal supporter, also slammed those who predicted that hed lose his Senate seat in South Carolina and that Joe Biden could win in a landslide. To all the pollsters out there, you have no idea what youre doing, he said.

Heres a clip from his speech:

Graham kept his seat even as Harrison managed to raise $57 million during the final full quarter of the campaign, breaking Senate fundraising records. The previous record-holder was Beto ORourke with $38 million raised for his losing bid for the Texas Senate seat. In total, Harrison raked in $109 million, while Graham brought in $64 million.

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Lindsey Graham taunts coastal liberals over 'the worst return on investment in the history of American politics' - MarketWatch

Americans of all political stripes are arming up in 2020. Photo: Keith Srakocic/AP/Shutterstock

For anyone that talks about how Biden will take their guns, remind them that we had 8 years of Obama/Biden where that never happened, reads a popular post in a progressive subreddit. But Donald Trump has definitely suggested he would take guns away from people without due process. The average liberal who supports much stronger gun-control measures may understand this as a criticism of the Obama administration, but this wasnt posted in your average left-leaning internet forum. It comes from r/liberalgunowners, a Reddit community of over 100,000 people who defy the archetype of the gun-hating cosmopolitan Democratic voter.

Gun control tends to be a clear red-and-blue issue in American politics, but the general uptick in gun ownership among people across the political spectrum 2020 will be a record year for firearm sales in the U.S. points to the possibility that the Democratic Party may include more gun owners in the future than it has in the recent past. In rapidly growing online and real-world communities, theres a sizable, vocal bloc of progressives who are voting for Biden but think the Democratic Partys position on gun control is backward.

Plenty of lefties liked guns before Trump became president, but the escalation of right-wing violence on top of a global pandemic has made things feel extra apocalyptic for a lot Americans in blue states. The demographics of gun buyers appear to be shifting, too, reports Politico. Retailers are selling to more women, and more Black men and women, than in previous years. The membership of r/liberalgunowners has also grown enormously this year. In November 2018, it had around 24,000 subscribers; in 2019, it reached 39,951; and now it has over 100,000. A recent poll posted in the subgroup asked, Do you expect calm or violence eruption in the U.S. after election night 2020? If the poll is a good indicator, about 80 percent of the subgroups members foresee postelection conflict.

You cant say youre for civil rights and have a civil right youre absolutely interested in curtailing, says Lara Smith, the spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, an organization founded in 2008 that provides gun-skills courses for as little as $10 a year and has 4,500 members. She says thatDemocratic lawmakers are totally ignorant when it comes to how guns actually work.

In keeping with national trends, Smith says Liberal Gun Club membership has grown a lot in the past year. People are really concerned about this particular ultra-right-wing threat theyre perceiving, she says. I cant tell you the number of friends of mine who have always [thought of me as their] crazy gun friend who have called me and said, I want to buy a shotgun. I want to buy a handgun. Where do I go? She has been hosting beginner shooting lessons in her backyard to meet the increased demand for gun skills that the pandemic and the upcoming election have inspired.

As opposed to understanding firearms as the primary cause of gun deaths in the U.S., the Liberal Gun Club is interested in investigating root-cause mitigation, or, what causes violence beyond the easy access to deadly weapons. If you dont understand how the tool works, then you dont understand what problem youre solving or not solving with it, Smith says, noting the ineffectiveness of AR bans.

Liberals get everything wrong about guns, Adam Selvage, a truck driver who lives in Albuquerque, told me. He started the Facebook page Pro-Gun Democrats in 2012 after going out shooting with his then-girlfriend; they got to talking about how they were the only people they knew who were incredibly liberal and still like shooting. At the beginning, his page had likes in the single digits, but eight years later, it has upwards of 2,500 followers and has sprouted a Facebook group where members can chat privately about firearms.

Many of his fellow Democrats, Selvage says, have a negative view of guns because they know what they see on TV, and the guns on TV are illegal in the United States, for the most part. They get scared because they think guns are just used for killing people.

Every pro-gun lefty I spoke with expressed dismay at the Democratic machines devotion to gun control. It makes sense that the party would come out against guns after all, a 2019 Pew study found that 86 percent of Democrats and left-leaning independents support stricter gun laws. According to Smith, the push for gun control by politicians like Michael Bloomberg, whose organization Everytown for Gun Safety has poured tens of millions of dollars in digital advertising into this election cycle, is both authoritarian and Republican and appeals to upper-class liberal white women.

Heres the whole thing about Parkland, she says. How many Black kids are killed every day? No one cared until it [happened] to a bunch of cute white teenagers. It was when white kids died that people started caring.

For Yafeuh Balogun, the founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, an organization that teaches firearms skills to people of color as part of a commitment to self-defense and militant culture, guns are an integral part of his progressive ideology. His father was a marine and Vietnam veteran who was shot in the face in combat. Nevertheless, a formative part of Baloguns childhood involved his dad teaching him and his siblings how to use guns safely.

Owning firearms, according to Balogun, is a way to have agency over communities that have been failed and brutalized by the police state. Guns are tools to push toward self-determination, he says. In a utopian sense, we would hope for a world that doesnt need weapons. We would hope that we can have a world where people can live in unity and harmony across the color spectrum. Thats not the case. (To quote a popular post in r/liberalgunowners, Armed minorities are harder to oppress.)

Gun-loving libs are not, to paraphrase Barack Obama, clinging to their guns as a way to express their frustration with being left behind by globalization or whatever. For Randy Miyan, the executive director of Liberal Gun Owners, gun ownership feels like an essential part of the human experience. He gets frustrated with the Democratic Partys aversion to guns because, he says, its ahistorical. Liberals and leftists treat the 1960s as year zero, he told me. We have had a specialized relationship with specialized projectile weapons for 73,000 years. Theyre archaeologically normative.

Liberal Gun Owners, an organization without an official membership model, grew out of a Facebook group and remains mostly dedicated to moderating discussions between its 4,000 subscribers on the social-media platform. Miyan became involved with Liberal Gun Owners shortly after Adam Sorum, one of the few Democrats in his rural Minnesota community, founded the Facebook page in 2007. (The mission of Liberal Gun Owners, which is registered as a 501(c)4, is to provide a community for gun-loving lefties as well as to look for solutions for gun violence beyond gun control.) The earliest iteration of the group, Miyan explains, was a shitshow of 4chan, 8chan bullshit. Whenever you do something online and dont put a gate around it, every regressive asswipe and jerko on the internet is going to find you. When Miyan finally earned the role of moderator, the new sheriff was in town, he says. He created a set of rules and protocols to turn the group into a healthy space for gun-toting lefties.

Miyan grew up in a working-class family of Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and now lives in North Carolina, but his affinity for guns is part of his spiritual questing. From age 21 to 31, Miyan studied to become a Buddhist monk, and though he ultimately chose to follow a more conventional path of getting married and having children, his time studying under Tibetan monks taught him the importance of compassion, love, and nonviolence. Theres a notion out there that guns couldnt possibly be an extension of compassion, that their very existence is regressive, he explains. You can be involved in self-defense and firearms and have that be an extension of love for your kin.

For Miyan, self-defense is self-care. In a similar vein, a recent post to r/liberalgunowners that received 3,700 thousand upvotes shows a sticker on a container of huge bullets that reads, The tree cant be harmed if the Lorax is armed.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Self-Defense Is Self-Care: How the Growing Ranks of Left-Wing Gun Owners See the Election - New York Magazine

If youre looking for up-to-the-minute results on election night, Wikipedia might be one of the first sites to pop up in your Google search. But, in this case, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia of human knowledge likely wont have the immediate answers you seek. And thats by design.

In yet another election cycle defined by copious amounts of misinformation from a variety of sources, Wikipedia wants and is set up to be a carefully curated resource of impartial facts. Theres no rush to be the first to declare a winner (quite the opposite, in fact). Its also difficult for trolls to vandalize associated pages, let alone keep those edits up for a prolonged period of time or to allow them to spread.

For the 2020 United States presidential election page, as well as the pages for presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, only editors whose accounts are at least 30 days old and who have made at least 500 edits can change the article. This is what Wikipedians, the editors who run the site, call extended confirmed protection.

The election page lock was put in place on October 21 by Molly White, who goes by the handle GorillaWarfare on the site. Shes been a Wikipedia editor for almost 15 years and also serves as an administrator. This gives her some additional abilities, like the power to lock pages. But White is not anticipating any major issues on Wikipedia with regard to the upcoming election.

For the most part, things will be business as usual on Wikipedia, White told Recode. Wikipedia editors and administrators have plenty of tools at our disposal to ensure that our readers are only seeing accurate information, even as things are changing quickly behind the scenes.

This probably wont be the case elsewhere online. Like Wikipedia, social media companies run on user-generated content, and theyre once again scrambling to come up with ways to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. After being blamed for influencing the outcome of the 2016 election, Facebook is particularly concerned with how it will handle Election Day this year.

But Wikipedia, which will be 20 years old on January 15, has been around longer than Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This will be the sixth presidential election in Wikipedias lifetime, and the sites all-volunteer army of thousands of editors has used those years of experience to develop and refine methods of combating lies and inaccuracies during prominent breaking new events while also identifying and deleting anything incorrect or poorly sourced that happens to make it onto their pages.

Wikipedia editors are currently discussing how to handle Election Day and its results in public forums on the site. Theyre debating how many sources to use for election-related updates, which ones to rely on when a presumptive winner is declared, and how long after polls close to start adding the results to the page.

Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia, not a news organization, and so we are much more concerned with being accurate than we are with being quick, White said.

Indeed, Wikipedias stated mission is to be a repository for all human knowledge. The site has 55 million articles across its 300 versions the most popular version, English, has 6.2 million articles. Wikipedia is also one of the most-read websites in the world, with 1.5 billion unique visitors per month.

So while huge social media platforms tend to expose their users to content that generally fits their existing worldview and political sensibilities, Wikipedia has quietly emerged as a website for people who are actively seeking accurate information. Whats behind the effort is a community that strives to provide that information as neutrally and as accurately sourced as possible.

Wikipedia is ruled by consensus, its articles are fluid, and discussions over how and why they should be changed are ongoing. Wikipedia putting up information about the presidential election is no different.

Most pages associated with the election and candidates have some kind of edit protection on them, though the level of protection might vary. For example, while Harris currently has extended confirmed protection, her opponent, Mike Pence, has a page that is only semi-protected. That means edits can only be made by registered users whose accounts are at least four days old and have made at least 10 edits though, again, this might change as Election Day nears.

Similarly, many United States politics-associated pages are also subject to additional rules limiting edits to reverse a previous edit or requiring a consensus to apply any edits that have been challenged. To reach consensus, editors will typically argue their respective viewpoints on an articles accompanying talk page, citing various Wikipedia rules and procedures to back up their case until a majority of editors agree on what to do next. Administrators can block or ban editors who dont follow those rules.

When it comes to the election results, editors are still hashing out whether the Associated Presss projections are a good enough single source or if at least three news sources should be used. Theyre also considering just locking certain pages from edits for everyone except administrators for a set period of time.

With standards, rules, and a community of editors to uphold them, moving slowly has been a Wikipedia superpower, Noam Cohen recently wrote in Wired. That, Cohen added, makes the site a less attractive target to those bent on campaigns of misinformation with immediate payoffs. Vandalism is hard to add, usually doesnt stay up for long, and therefore doesnt spread widely.

While Facebook and Google have spent billions of dollars on content moderators and other measures to combat misinformation and abuse on their platforms, Wikipedias editors do this work for free. Wikipedia is hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which covers its associated costs, including servers, software, and legal fees. The Foundation relies on donations and gifts and gets a lot of them: The organization received $113 million last year alone.

The Foundations role is to support those folks in every way that that they need us to, Ryan Merkley, Wikimedia Foundations chief of staff, told Recode. That means everything from keeping the servers up and running, to running our security operation, to communications, fundraising. But also working with trust and safety, and then supporting [editors] with the tools that they need in order to edit.

Some of those tools include bots that can quickly detect article vandalism and either get rid of it or flag it to an editor. Editors can also add articles to their watch lists to be immediately alerted of any changes (nearly 550 editors have put the 2020 US presidential election page on their watch lists). And they can lock pages that might or already have become targets for vandalism.

The Foundation has also done some of its own work to prepare for the election.

We put together an internal task force, with staff representatives from every part of the foundation who relate to disinformation, Merkley said. So that includes the security team, trust and safety, legal policy, communications, our partnerships group that works with the other platforms that engage with Wikimedia content.

The guiding principle behind Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute anything to it. This being the internet, not everyone operates in good faith or knows what theyre talking about, so the site has a longstanding reputation for inaccuracy. Thats no longer wholly deserved, but Wikipedia itself will tell you that its not a reliable source for this very reason.

The site has also been criticized for systemic bias, with a lack of representation from certain demographics theres a lot of white English-speaking men who contribute that can create a hostile environment for minority editors. The lack of diversity also has the potential for bias to make it into the articles themselves. The Wikipedia Foundation and Wikipedians have made efforts to improve this, but they still have work to do.

Other things get overlooked on a site as big as Wikipedia, too. For instance, you might stumble across vandalized articles, usually lurking in Wikipedias lower-trafficked corners, that have managed to escape the notice of editors. You may even find a version of Wikipedia that contains thousands of articles written by someone who doesnt really know the language theyre supposed to be written in.

While anyone can become a Wikipedia editor, only a tiny fraction of Wikipedias readers actually will. And its deceptively difficult. The initial process of making an edit is as simple as signing in and changing some text, but Wikipedias editorial rules and processes and the various code words and language around them can be a barrier to doing it correctly, which is necessary for the edit to be accepted.

But the people who get it, like White, may spend a considerable amount of their time doing unpaid work on the site. They might also become the target of harassment as a result. White, who spends two or three hours a day working on Wikipedia, said shes been doxxed, threatened with violence and lawsuits, and people have even tried to get her fired from her day job because of it.

It is at best frustrating and at worst extremely frightening, but I both care deeply about the importance of Wikipedia and I am also a very stubborn person who does not like to feel like I am giving in to threats, White said, attributing some of that harassment to her position as an administrator, her gender, and the controversial articles and topics she often works on (she created the Boogaloo movement page, for example).

And Wikipedia is important. Its one of the top results for most internet searches, and so, for better or worse, Wikipedia is the site people are most likely to visit when they want more information about something. That means the stakes are high when big topics are involved.

Notably, its coverage of Covid-19 has drawn praise. This involved the creation of a WikiProject dedicated to the virus with over 200 participating editors (anyone can join!) who may focus on pandemic case data, the viruss impact on specific locations, or the industries affected. One professor who studies misinformation told the Washington Post that Wikipedia was a ray of hope in a sea of pollution and handled the virus exceptionally well.

Theres a lot of really great work done through these WikiProjects, especially during times of crisis where a lot of hard-hitting, late-breaking stuff is coming out, Zachary J. McDowell, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Recode.

So if Wikipedia, with its high visibility and wide-open door for anyones contributions, can still provide readers with well-sourced, neutral articles, why cant the social media platforms that play such a big role in the spread of misinformation do the same? Clearly, some of them see the merits of Wikipedias work; Facebook and Google use Wikipedia articles to provide additional knowledge in user searches.

Social media is designed to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible, both to show them as many ads as possible and to collect their data, which is then used to show them even more ads. They are incentivized to keep your attention, not to ensure that what youre reading or seeing is accurate. That business model is unlikely to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, Wikipedias model is quite different.

[Wikipedia has] no algorithms designed to serve content in certain ways to some people, Merkley said. None of that structure exists which can be later gamed, in order to advance this post about a person or to target this message to that person.

Wikipedia is also very transparent, Merkley said. An articles associated history and talk pages will tell you, in great and granular detail, all the edits that have been made, who made them, and any associated discussions between editors about them.

This transparency helps create trust, but good luck getting, say, Facebook to implement it. Facebook is notoriously secretive about its algorithms, which determine what you see on the site, from ads to posts from your friends to recommendations for groups you should join or people you should befriend. These algorithms create filter bubbles of information that tends to line up with your political viewpoints, offering little exposure to anything that might conflict with them. You get what Facebook thinks you want to hear or watch what YouTube thinks you want to watch, and thats not always whats true.

It is essentially a game where the entire system is already rigged for disinformation, fake news, McDowell said. Its monetarily incentivized to get people riled up and to click. It will always be a game where those who are trying to control the information flow will be the ones who are one step behind.

McDowells studies include Wikipedias value as a teaching tool for information literacy. He stresses that Wikipedia itself shouldnt be seen as a source but rather as a collection of information, clearly cited, that users can follow if they want to learn more or verify what theyve read.

Having a critical eye toward information is absolutely imperative right now, McDowell said. And a lot of people dont.

For their part, social media platforms have, in recent years, tried to hold back the flow of misinformation in some cases, including during the election. Facebook has made rules around political ads, voter suppression, and even premature declarations of victory. But social media still receives plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle, and it will almost certainly be blamed for influencing the outcome of the election in some way, regardless of the winner.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, will just tell you who reliable sources say the winner is as soon as its editors reach a consensus on what those sources are.

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Wikipedia is better prepared for Election Day than Facebook or Twitter - Vox.com