Exclusive: Wayne Swan to issue a call to arms for progressive parties globally to fight back against threats to democracy

The Australian Labor party’s national president, Wayne Swan, will issue a call to arms for progressive parties to fight back against misinformation proliferating on digital platforms, declaring nothing can be off the table “including breaking up the social media platforms where the concentration of their market power is damaging society”.

Swan will use a conference hosted by the Chifley Research Centre to foreshadow that over the next 12 months, the ALP will bring together a “coalition of centre-left and progressive parties from across the globe to drive this debate forward and take action to check the domination of firms such as Facebook”.

According to a copy of his speech seen by Guardian Australia, Swan will argue progressive and centre-left parties have been flatfooted in responding to the “disruption and chaos” that social media giants have enabled, “and we haven’t done enough to share our experiences and coordinate our responses across borders”.

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“2020 must be the year when we change this,” the party president will say.

Swan’s comments come as the Guardian reveals that an Israel-based group has covertly gained control of 21 popular far-right Facebook pages, using them in a coordinated way to deliver distorted and false information to more than 1m followers across the world.

The network has operated with relative impunity for more than two years, publishing more than one thousand posts a week, and disseminating large volumes of material in the lead-up to the May election that vilified Muslim politicians Anne Aly and Mehreen Faruqi, and promoted One Nation and Fraser Anning.

The intervention from Labor’s president also follows the establishment of a new select committee of the Australian parliament to examine foreign interference through social media. The committee will inquire into and report on the risks posed to Australia’s democracy by foreign interference through social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter and WeChat – and report in the new year.

Swan in his speech to the Chifley conference will argue the conservative side of politics internationally is “smashing progressive political parties in organised social media, particularly under the radar communications disguised as political news or non-politically motivated views”.

He will say the rise of the digital platforms has created an environment where news consumers self-select information, which has “contributed to the rise of echo chambers and filter bubbles”.

“There’s no shared media experience any more, and misinformation can spread online quickly, easily and virtually unchallenged,” Swan will say.

“Secondly, hostile and bad-faith actors can weaponise controversial and misleading information at will to sow division and create chaos in our politics.”

He says Labor’s experience in the May election of the death tax fake news that circulated on Facebook during the campaign “warped” the policy debate. Conservatives on social media “effectively circulated false claims about a Labor death tax”, he says.

“More and more people across the world are waking up to the threat posed to democracy by the social media giants, and a global problem requires a global response.”

Swan says three principles should inform efforts to rebalance the public square. “First – the social media giants should be recognised for what they are, which is publishers.

“Second – as publishers, the social media giants need to take responsibility for ensuring that the content on their platforms isn’t riddled with misinformation or hate. Third – a step change is required in the level of transparency and accountability that the social media giants are held to around how they collect, store, use and share our data; including who they are partnering with, and how their algorithms are shaping user behaviour.”

He says breaking up the platforms must be an option to consider. “Without these essential reforms it becomes harder and harder to win the battle of ideas and be an effective machine for changing hearts and minds as well as a machine for winning elections.

“We need a continuous campaign to reinforce the importance of using the power of collective action through communities, workplaces, unions and governments, to improve the standard of living and build a better society.”

Labor has already urged the joint standing committee on electoral matters to investigate whether the digital behemoths are having a negative impact on Australian democracy after Facebook demoted but refused to take down fake news about the “death tax” circulating during the May election.

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Guardian Australia revealed as part of an investigation into the death tax misinformation that the Labor campaign pressed Facebook repeatedly to deal with the false claims shared on the platform during the federal election, and escalated their complaints in the final week.

But the social media giant declined to play censor. Simon Milner, the Singapore-based vice-president of the social media giant in the Asia-Pacific, told Labor after the election in correspondence seen by Guardian Australia: “We do not agree that it is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false.”

In an interview with Guardian Australia in August, the ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, blasted Facebook’s practices, and said the social media giant should have removed the bogus death tax claims given its own independent fact-checking processes had found the material to be false.

Sims said Facebook had the capability to deal with the proliferation of fake news on the platform, but the social media behemoth is instead “palming off responsibility” to protect its bottom line.

The industry body representing Google, Facebook and Twitter has already rejected the ACCC’s proposal for an industry code of conduct to fight fake news, warning that the recommendation would turn Australia’s media regulator into the truth police.