Politics does not simply use mass communication. It is increasingly organised through it. Television, YouTube, mobile devices, social media, recommendation systems, advertising, analytics, political institutions and audiences are no longer meaningfully separate channels: they form a coupled environment in which every response can become input to what happens next. As these relations multiply, possible pathways of information, identity, attention and influence multiply with them. The problem is combinatorial. No individual, broadcaster, platform, political party or audience can contain the resulting whole, yet the whole continually selects from its own activity: what attracts attention is repeated, repetition alters expectation, expectation alters response, and response returns as new information. Coherent political patterns consequently emerge without requiring coherent political design. News24 is one conspicuous Australian expression of this larger machinery, not its cause and certainly not its political boundary. The same dynamics operate across left and right, commercial and public media, parties, movements and platforms. What matters here is how populations become statistically organised by communication systems whose participants may be extremely successful within their immediate incentives while understanding remarkably little about the cumulative system they are helping to reproduce.
Gullibility is a poor word for one of the most important capacities human beings possess. We are influenceable because we have to be. Language, culture, education, trust and collective organisation depend upon people allowing information from other people to alter what they believe, expect and do. No individual can independently verify more than a microscopic fraction of the world on which everyday judgement depends. We inherit categories, explanations, norms and expectations from other minds, and this extraordinary openness is simultaneously one of our greatest collective capacities and an enduring vulnerability. Repetition alone can increase the perceived truth of a proposition, including where people possess relevant prior knowledge (Fazio et al., 2015). The point is not that some unfortunate class of people is gullible. The point is that influence is constitutive of being social. Propaganda exploits no exotic defect. It operates through machinery without which culture itself could not exist.
News24 is more interesting as a system than as a political opponent. The organisation formerly known as Sky News Australia says that its name has changed but its “brand of news” has not, and describes the rebrand as an embrace of the heritage and editorial credentials of News Corp (News24, 2026). News24 is a specimen, not the boundary of the argument. The same analysis applies to left-wing, centrist, state, corporate, activist and platform media wherever political identity, institutional incentives and recurrent communication begin selecting one another. Different factions privilege different enemies, virtues and explanations while reproducing the same underlying machinery: compression, repetition, affiliation, antagonism and recursive selection. Disassembling the political agenda of one outlet exposes the more general process by which political agendas reproduce themselves. The useful questions are structural: who owns or governs an institution, what forms of communication does it repeatedly produce, which distinctions organise that communication, how does the material circulate, what attracts further attention, and what political possibilities become easier to reproduce as those patterns persist? Australia’s communications regulator treats source diversity, content diversity and exposure diversity as separate dimensions of a healthy media environment because counting outlets does not tell us how information and influence are organised (ACMA, 2026a). Ownership is one part of the architecture through which public knowledge is produced.
This also removes the comforting assumption that the people operating these systems must understand the larger systems they reproduce. Political actors, presenters, executives, campaigners, platform designers and audiences can follow locally successful scripts without comprehending their aggregate consequences. Money, reach, status and political power are evidence that a strategy succeeds within its immediate selection environment; they are not evidence that it sustains the larger conditions on which that success depends. A media organisation can increase engagement while degrading trust. A political movement can consolidate identity while weakening institutional legitimacy. A platform can increase extraction and dependence while damaging the informational environment it requires. Economic actors can accumulate extraordinary wealth while contributing to ecological, political or infrastructural instability that ultimately threatens the continuity of the system in which that wealth has meaning. Local optimisation and systemic intelligence are not the same thing. The problem is consequently larger than left and right: participants across the political field can become highly adapted to incentives whose cumulative effects weaken the social, informational, institutional and environmental relations upon which they also depend.
There is now unusually direct evidence for examining this particular organisation. Copland, Bruns and Graham (2025) analysed 20,000 Sky News Australia YouTube videos from March 2020 to January 2021 and traced their dissemination through publicly accessible Facebook spaces. They describe the channel’s transformation from a relatively small domestic cable outlet into an international component of what the authors call “network propaganda”: professionally produced material entering partisan digital networks in which media organisations, political actors, influencers, platforms and audiences participate in its circulation. By June 2024, they report, the channel had 4.14 million YouTube subscribers and 4.5 billion views. Their conclusion is strong, but its most useful implication is structural rather than partisan. Distribution no longer ends when a broadcaster transmits a message. Audiences share it, opponents react to it, platforms rank those reactions, aligned actors recirculate it and producers learn from what travelled. Communication returns as information about communication. The audience is no longer simply the destination. It becomes part of the machinery selecting what is likely to appear next.
This is where “the people” enter the machine. Populist communication does not merely locate an already coherent public and give it a microphone. It helps produce the identity it claims to represent. Research on populist securitisation describes a recurrent organisation of social space around a threatened people and a dangerous elite, while large comparative experiments show that anti-elite identity framing can itself affect persuasion and mobilisation, with relative deprivation increasing susceptibility to mobilisation (Wojczewski, 2020; Bos et al., 2020). The mechanism requires no invented grievance. Housing stress, insecure work, declining trust, cultural displacement, institutional failure and economic pressure may all be real. Their political meaning remains underdetermined. Populist communication can organise such grievances relationally: this happened because of them; they are taking something from you; people like us know what is really happening; institutions denying the account merely demonstrate their distance from ordinary life. Insecurity can become identity, identity can organise attention, attention can produce measurable engagement, and engagement can tell a communication system which distinctions remain productive.
The statistical character of the process matters. Culture is not a collection of messages stored independently in millions of heads. It is a distributed pattern of recurrence in which some descriptions, identities and responses become easier to reproduce than others. People do not need to believe exactly the same thing, encounter it at the same moment or respond in the same way. Recurrent signals need only produce enough alignment in attention, expectation and response for a larger pattern to emerge across the population. A crowd finding a rhythm remains a crowd of different people; what becomes coherent is the relation among their movements. Culture works at vastly greater complexity and across many timescales, but the principle is similar: daily controversies, electoral cycles and narratives repeated across years can reinforce, interrupt or redirect one another. Exposure alters familiarity; familiarity alters judgement; judgement alters behaviour; behaviour becomes new information for institutions and platforms. Fazio et al. (2015) demonstrated that prior knowledge does not eliminate the illusory-truth effect, while the American Psychological Association’s consensus work on misinformation concludes that repeated false claims can increase belief across age groups and that even knowledgeable people remain susceptible (APA, 2023). This should extinguish the comforting fantasy that propaganda is principally something done to stupid people. Intelligence does not place a person outside culture, language or social influence. Nor should the evidence be exaggerated in the opposite direction: contemporary research warns against assuming that exposure to online misinformation automatically produces large behavioural effects across whole populations (Budak et al., 2024). Influence is probabilistic. That is exactly why recurrence, distribution and selection matter. A communication system does not need to control everyone. It needs only to keep altering the probabilities from which subsequent communication and action emerge.
News24’s claim to represent ordinary Australians becomes more revealing at this level. A large corporate media organisation can speak in the language of rebellion without ceasing to be a large corporate media organisation. News24 explicitly locates itself within News Corp, while simultaneously promising “real news”, “honest views”, open discussion and representation of the many voices of Australia (News24, 2026). There is no logical contradiction in a corporation criticising elites, and corporate ownership does not prove that any particular editorial claim is false. The analytical question is how elite and people are defined within recurring commentary. Populist framing can make concentrated wealth and ownership less salient while bureaucrats, academics, regulators, journalists, scientists, activists or other cultural opponents occupy the category of elite. “The people” likewise can become a selectively assembled political identity rather than a demographic fact. A corporate institution may consequently present itself as an insurgent voice of ordinary citizens while also participating in the selection of which grievances, opponents and explanations receive repeated visibility. No claim of conscious fabrication is required for that structural tension to be examined.
Nor is this merely a complaint about bias. Bias is unavoidable; selection is a condition of communication. The deeper problem is recursive selection. Anger can attract attention. Attention can produce circulation. Circulation then supplies behavioural evidence about what attracts attention. Where antagonism repeatedly succeeds in generating response, the disturbance becomes part of the reproductive environment of the pattern: dissonance produces attention, attention reproduces the communicative form, and the returning form supplies further dissonance. Repetition does more than repeat content: it establishes rhythm. Certain subjects return, certain opponents recur, certain emotional responses become familiar, and audiences become increasingly prepared for the next variation before it arrives. The pattern does not require complete synchronisation. Partial alignment is enough, and it can arise spontaneously from repeated coupling rather than deliberate orchestration. Producers, political actors and platforms then encounter an environment already altered by the previous round. Copland, Bruns and Graham’s account of Sky News Australia’s digital expansion describes such a multi-actor network rather than a simple broadcaster-to-viewer pipeline (Copland et al., 2025). Systematic reviews of online polarisation likewise describe interacting informational, individual and social mechanisms rather than a single controlling cause (Arora et al., 2022; Iandoli, Primario and Zollo, 2021). ACMA reported in 2025 that 72 per cent of Australian adults who used a digital platform in the first half of that year believed they had encountered some form of misinformation online (ACMA, 2025). That figure does not tell us who was correct about what they encountered, nor does it measure News24. It does reveal an informational environment in which uncertainty about the reliability of communication has itself become widespread. Under those conditions, distrust is not outside the media system. It can become material from which further media are made.
Complex systems generate coherent macroscopic patterns from local interactions among heterogeneous participants; synchronisation and partial synchronisation are standard examples of this kind of emergence (Arenas et al., 2008; Dörfler and Bullo, 2014; Rodrigues et al., 2016). Communication systems reproduce compatible patterns of behaviour without central instruction. Presenters receive audience feedback; audiences learn which performances signify membership; political actors observe which frames travel; platforms measure what retains attention; organisations observe which formats expand reach. Participants occupy local positions inside a process whose larger organisation is distributed across their relations. No participant needs to contain the whole because the whole persists through the recurrence of those relations.
Autocracy, plutocracy and kleptocracy depend upon particular informational conditions. Autocratic power becomes easier to consolidate when institutional constraint is experienced as illegitimate obstruction, opponents as enemies and loyalty as a superior test of truth. Plutocratic power becomes easier to reproduce when concentrated economic power becomes less salient than cultural antagonism. Kleptocratic power becomes easier to defend when judgement attaches primarily to identity and allegiance rather than consistent standards of institutional accountability. Recurrent communication organised around insecurity, antagonistic identity and institutional distrust degrades the informational relations through which pluralistic democracy constrains these forms of power.
The danger is consequently not that Australians will all be persuaded to believe the same thing. A functioning propaganda ecology does not require consensus. Opponents can become more hostile while becoming more tightly coupled: watching, quoting, condemning and recirculating one another, each side providing the other with evidence of threat and material for another cycle. Agreement is unnecessary because coordination can occur through opposition as readily as assent. People can occupy different positions while their attention and responses become organised around the same recurring distinctions. Political language then begins supplying the conditions to which subsequent political language responds. The categories persist even as the people occupying them change. The enemy changes; the structure of enmity remains available. The outrage changes; the expectation of outrage persists. The presenter changes; the role remains. What appears to be a sequence of independent controversies becomes a recurrent cultural organisation capable of surviving the replacement of almost every individual component. The herd, in this sense, is not a mass of identical minds. It is the larger statistical pattern produced as different minds repeatedly adjust to signals, institutions and one another.
The Herd Reich corrupts the contemporary neologism “Nerd Reich” by shifting attention from technical elites to the statistical organisation of populations through recurrent communication. Technological power, political ambition, concentrated wealth and mass behavioural organisation converge without any one element controlling the whole. Populations become organised statistically before they become organised politically. What matters is not a single message but the pattern formed by messages returning at different frequencies and intensities, reinforcing some expectations while allowing others to fade. Influence changes distributions of attention, trust, expectation and response; repeated distributions become cultural structure; cultural structure changes which political performances are viable; political success changes the communicative environment again. The movement is recursive. Insecurity becomes identity, identity becomes antagonism, antagonism becomes attention and attention feeds back into further insecurity.
That is where News24 matters as a case study. It is not uniquely responsible for these dynamics, and treating it as an isolated villain would reproduce the same compression being criticised. It is an Australian instance through which a much larger problem can be examined: contemporary communication systems increasingly possess the technical capacity to measure reaction, select material associated with it and feed the result back into culture at extraordinary speed. What is selected need not be true, false, left or right. It needs to recur. The political danger appears when recurrent forms make collective interpretation harder: distrust without discrimination, grievance without causal depth, identity without permeability, certainty without correction, enemies without end. A society exposed to those selection pressures does not collapse in a single event. It continually reconstructs itself from the altered probabilities left by previous cycles. Eventually the most important statistic is not how many people believed any particular story. It is what kinds of people, institutions and political futures the communicative environment has made progressively easier to reproduce.
References
Arenas, A., Díaz-Guilera, A., Kurths, J., Moreno, Y. and Zhou, C. (2008) ‘Synchronization in complex networks’, Physics Reports, 469(3), pp. 93–153. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2008.09.002.
This major review surveys how synchronisation emerges across complex networks of interacting oscillators and how network structure shapes collective dynamics. It provides the general systems basis for the essay’s claim that large-scale coherence can arise without central coordination.
Arora, S.D., Singh, G.P., Chakraborty, A. and Maity, M. (2022) ‘Polarization and social media: A systematic review and research agenda’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 183, 121942. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121942.
This systematic review maps the informational, social and individual mechanisms associated with polarisation on social media. It supports the treatment of polarisation as an interacting systems effect rather than the product of a single controlling cause.
American Psychological Association (APA) (2023) Using Psychological Science to Understand and Fight Health Misinformation: An APA Consensus Statement. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
This consensus statement synthesises psychological evidence on misinformation, including the effects of repetition, familiarity and correction. It supports the argument that susceptibility to repeated claims is a normal feature of cognition rather than a defect confined to a particular group.
Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) (2025) Majority of Australians encountering misinformation online. Canberra: ACMA.
This ACMA release reports Australian survey data on perceived encounters with misinformation across digital platforms. It establishes the broader national information environment in which uncertainty about the reliability of communication has become widespread.
Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) (2026a) Media Diversity Measurement Framework. Canberra: ACMA.
This framework defines media diversity across source, content and exposure rather than simply by counting outlets. It supports the essay’s distinction between the number of media organisations and the deeper organisation of influence, visibility and public knowledge.
Bos, L., Schemer, C., Corbu, N., Hameleers, M., Andreadis, I., Schulz, A., Schmuck, D., Reinemann, C. and Fawzi, N. (2020) ‘The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment’, European Journal of Political Research, 59(1), pp. 3–24. doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12334.
This cross-national experiment tests how populist identity framing influences persuasion and mobilisation across fifteen countries. It supports the claim that communication does not merely address an existing public but can help organise political identity and response.
Budak, C., Nyhan, B., Rothschild, D.M., Thorson, E. and Watts, D.J. (2024) ‘Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation’, Nature, 630, pp. 45–53. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07417-w.
This article reviews evidence on the harms of online misinformation and cautions against assuming that exposure automatically produces large behavioural effects. It constrains the essay’s argument by keeping influence probabilistic rather than treating audiences as mechanically controlled.
Copland, S., Bruns, A. and Graham, T. (2025) ‘Sky News Australia as network propaganda: how a niche cable channel became an international right-wing propaganda machine’, Media International Australia. First published online 24 December 2025. doi:10.1177/1329878X251406899.
This study analyses 20,000 Sky News Australia YouTube videos and their circulation through Facebook networks, describing the outlet within a transnational network-propaganda system. It is the essay’s most direct empirical bridge between the former Sky News Australia operation, now News24, and the recursive circulation dynamics being analysed.
Dörfler, F. and Bullo, F. (2014) ‘Synchronization in complex networks of phase oscillators: A survey’, Automatica, 50(6), pp. 1539–1564. doi:10.1016/j.automatica.2014.04.012.
This survey examines the mathematical conditions under which distributed oscillators synchronise across complex networks. It reinforces the central theoretical point that coordinated macroscopic behaviour can emerge from local coupling without a coordinating authority.
Fazio, L.K., Brashier, N.M., Payne, B.K. and Marsh, E.J. (2015) ‘Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), pp. 993–1002. doi:10.1037/xge0000098.
This experimental study shows that repetition can increase perceived truth even when participants possess relevant prior knowledge. It directly supports the essay’s rejection of the idea that propaganda works only on the ignorant or unintelligent.
Iandoli, L., Primario, S. and Zollo, G. (2021) ‘The impact of group polarization on the quality of online debate in social media: A systematic literature review’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 170, 120924. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120924.
This review examines how group polarisation affects the quality and structure of online debate. It supports the account of antagonism as a recurrent communicative condition that can be reproduced through interacting social and platform dynamics.
News24 (2026) News24.com.au: The new name for Sky News Australia. News Corp Australia.
This is News24’s own account of the Sky News Australia rebrand, including its continuity of editorial identity and explicit connection to News Corp. It supplies the primary-source basis for the essay’s description of how the organisation publicly defines itself.
Rodrigues, F.A., Peron, T.K.D.M., Ji, P. and Kurths, J. (2016) ‘The Kuramoto model in complex networks’, Physics Reports, 610, pp. 1–98. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2015.10.008.
This review develops the Kuramoto model as a general framework for studying synchronisation across complex networks. It provides further theoretical grounding for the essay’s use of partial synchronisation, entrainment and emergent statistical coherence.
Wojczewski, T. (2020) ‘Enemies of the people: Populism and the politics of (in)security’, European Journal of International Security, 5(1), pp. 5–24. doi:10.1017/eis.2019.23.
This article analyses how populist politics constructs a threatened people in opposition to dangerous elites and other enemies through narratives of insecurity. It supports the essay’s account of how insecurity can be organised into identity, antagonism and recurring political distinction.
Daedelus Kite 