Protesters march outside a conference of the so-called alt-right in Washington. Credit:Al Drago/New York Times That the arson at Springvale was not being treated by the police as a terrorist attack didn't seem to matter. Nor did the patient response from a staff member at Channel 7, saying the alleged arson had actually been well covered as the main story on the Friday 6 o'clock television bulletin, on Facebook and on the Yahoo7 online site. What followed was an exchange that perfectly captured the crowded and contested media landscape of the digital age, where sources of news can become perversely narrow, and facts often matter far less than opinion. "As of 10:40am … I hadn't seen anything about this on your Facebook page," Hassa fired back. "Your links do not prove your point. They validate mine."

Contacted by Fairfax Media, Hassa did not reveal the sources of "alt media" he relied on, but he was far from the only person on Facebook to brand the Springvale fire a "terrorist attack". Or to rely on reports containing something less than fact. With the rise of Donald Trump in the US, a special significance has been attached to a nebulous collection of hyperventilating websites known as the "alt-right" that rallied around his candidacy, churning out a diet of attitude, fake stories and outright prejudice, amplified by social media. Islam and feminism are also a favourite target, but so are mainstream conservatives (branded "cucks"). The aim is radical change, to "drain the swamp" as Trump puts it. It is a type of online vigilante movement that is gradually finding voice in Australia, too, a trend made more attractive by the potential to make money. "They take an element of the truth, but they twist it to suit their narrative," said Joshua Roose from the Australian Catholic University, who has investigated the factors spurring people to become involved in the political fringes.

But alt-right is also said to be merely a fashionable badge to mask white supremacists, particularly after Richard Spencer, the man credited with coining the term alt-right in the US, was filmed last weekend leading a chant of "Hail Trump" at a conference for supporters in Washington. "I've absolutely no interest in white supremacy, Nazis, anything like that," said the founder of an alt-right website in Australia. "I've got friends of every colour, of every race." He called himself "Bruce Wayne" and told Fairfax Media during a Skype call he was a 26-year-old construction worker originally from rural Victoria who had always voted Liberal. "It was really the US election that got me interested in the alt-right, or however you want to describe it. It's too broad a term," he said, calling himself a "dissociated member of the left and the right". But he said he started www.altrightaustralia.com a few weeks ago as a hobby, to see if it became a popular platform.

He has posted stories asking "Could Kerry Packer have been Australia's Trump?", made fun of aliens landing in the outback and being taken to Nauru after authorities finished responding to domestic violence callouts, and parodied "the moderate Kingdom of Saudi Arabia". "You are not going to get kids in their mid-20s and earlier. They are not going to read a news article from The Age, The Herald-Sun, Channel 9," he said. These days, the internet has a pervasive influence on news delivery. About 70 per cent of Australians have an active Facebook profile, according to consumer surveyors Nielsen, and sharing stories online with friends or through the Facebook news feed is now a major source of information, in some cases the primary source. Alt-right groups have proved clever colonialists in this terrain, adding their own twist to news. In the US experience, where there is an audience, the advertisers are quick to follow. "With social media, they've been able to inject themselves into conversations with people that otherwise would not have ever engaged with that sort of thinking," one US academic studying the alt-right told The Washington Post.

In Australia, The Unshackled was founded a few months ago by Tim Wilms and Sukith Fernando as "the new battle front against the progressive left, social justice warriors and political correctness", releasing regular podcasts and articles with an aim to increase appeal by introducing videos. It's Twitter feed features photos of Pauline Hanson alongside Trump, France's Marine Le Pen, Britain's Nigel Farage and local right-wing favourite Cory Bernardi. "There is quite a large market on Facebook for people who enjoy our content," Fernando said recently in a podcast with another similar website. "We've been pleased with the progress so far." But what exactly the alt-right is is heavily debated. The ideology is prominently right-wing and aggressively parochial, but fluid. Personal celebrity has a powerful role. Prominent alt-right figures in the US such as Milo Yiannopoulos have almost a million followers, and favour photo memes and videos to spread their views.

Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz from the University of Technology Sydney describes it as a "swarm" of followers, eager to be outraged. "One of the things we've discovered is they splinter," Jakubowicz said. "They are hostage to the egos of their organisers." Media critique is a constant theme of alt-right forums, especially allegations that major outlets are deliberately suppressing or distorting the news to suit a "leftist" or "globalist" agenda, fuelled by rants against "political correctness" and the "establishment". In Australia, a site XYZ claims to be a corrective to the public broadcaster (and it carries ads). "ABC publishes fake news about fake news" was one headline last week, another a call to "Make Australia Pretty Good Again".

But for all the complaints about mainstream media, alt-right forums revel in winning attention. Mentions in an article by the news site Buzzfeed about an alt-right Twitter feed in Australia clustering around the #DingoTwitter hashtag last month became a point of pride for some postings. Studies suggest that, of racist material online in Australia, about 40 per cent resided on Facebook, Jakubowicz said. But he also cautioned that the Australian market was much smaller than in the US, and already crowded with voices such as Pauline Hanson and prominent right-wing shock jocks in the media. As for "Bruce Wayne", he was in little doubt the alt-right internet had a huge impact on the US election. But if he was to go commercial with his website to mimic the experience in Australia, he would do so under his own name.

"Something written in the style of the alt-right, I think can really get the younger demographic involved. Or at least a tiny bit interested in what's happening in politics."