On the final debate of the election campaign, it was the last chance for Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten to take aim at each other.

Scott Morrison and the Coalition government have been targeted by propaganda social media accounts affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

A paper prepared by cyber propaganda researchers Dr Michael Jensen, Dr Titus Chen and Tom Sear revealed a clear bias against the Liberal government by Xi Jinping’s communist party, the ABC reports.

The researchers spent five months from November 2018 to March 2019 analysing the Australian content on 47 of WeChat’s most visited official accounts in mainland China — 29 of which were aligned with the CCP.

“Our evidence suggests that accounts aligned more closely with the Government in Beijing have a clear anti-Liberal (government) story coming out of them,” Dr Jensen, a senior research fellow at the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, told the public broadcaster.

“The top topic in articles mentioning Australia was the criticism of the Liberal government and specifically Scott Morrison.”

One post berated Mr Morrison for attempting to join WeChat during the election campaign.

“There is a country whose head has been kicked hard by kangaroos, and now seeks to befriend us,” one post read. “What the Australian Prime Minister Morrison is doing is nothing more than to win over the support of the Chinese in Australia.”

There was little evidence of attacks on Bill Shorten and Labor in the researchers’ dataset, although it was noted this was happening elsewhere on WeChat.

Dr Chen noted China had been critical of Australia’s involvement in Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing alliance made up of the United States of America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

“Canberra has been criticised for the so-called anti-China migrants’ policies, especially the rich immigrants that are involved in Australian politics (and) the way the media portrayed the Huang Xiangmo case,” Dr Chen said.