Cover not available

Article published In: Discourses of Fake News
Edited by Scott Wright
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:5] 2021
► pp. 696–718

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Recursion theory and the ‘death tax’

Investigating a fake news discourse in the 2019 Australian election

ORCiD logo with link | La Trobe University
ORCiD logo with link | University of Texas at Austin
ORCiD logo with link | University of Waikato
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21030.car
Abstract
Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Jana Laura Egelhofer and Sophie Lecheler. 2019. Fake news as a twodimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda, Annals of the International Communication Association, 43(2), 97–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and literature
    • 2.1Defining fake news
    • 2.2What is the death tax story?
    • 2.3Refutation and backfire effects
    • 2.4Agenda setting theory
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Content analysis of media stories and Facebook posts
  • 4.Data and findings
    • 4.1Frequency and spread of the death tax story
    • 4.2Key actors using terms
      • 4.2.1Politicians
      • 4.2.2Media organisations and online actors
    • 4.3Journalistic refutation and adjudication
    • 4.4Real versus fake discourses in media
    • 4.5Recursion of fake news discourses
      • 4.5.1First fake news discourse: Labor’s franking credit policies amount to a death tax
      • 4.5.2Second Discourse: Greens support a death tax
      • 4.5.3Third discourse: Labor-Green alliance
      • 4.5.4Fourth discourse: Labor will implement a death tax
      • 4.5.5Fifth Discourse: Labor lost election because of the death tax
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (40)
References
Australians Against Destructive Leftism. 2019. “Unions are pushing bull shitten to introduce death taxes. what does this mean for you? ok so sadly your mum and dad pass away. their estate which ordinarily is passed onto the children and divided…” Facebook, April 15, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Australian Government. 2018. “Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983” Federal Register of Legislation. URL: [URL]
Benns, Matthew. 2019. “Angry retirees boo Labor’s ‘death tax’ at fiery hearing.” The Daily Telegraph, February 4, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caisley, Olivia. 2019. “Retirees’ paradise in revolt as ALP eyes super savings.” The Australian, February 5, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cameron, Sarah and Ian McAllister. 2020. “Policies and performance in the 2019 Australian federal election”. Australian Journal of Political Science, (55) 31: 239–256. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carson, Andrea and Liam Fallon. 2021. Fighting Fake News: A Study of Online Misinformation Regulation in the Asia Pacific. Melbourne: La Trobe University. [URL]
Carson, Andrea, and Lawrie Zion. 2020. “Media Coverage.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 431–53. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clench, Sam. 2019. “‘Abhorrent’: PM rips into One Nation.” News.com.au, March 26, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cooke, Nicole. A. 2017. “Post-truth, truthiness, and alternative facts: Information behavior and critical information consumption for a new age.” Library Quarterly, 87(3): 211–221. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Emerson, Craig and Jay Weatherill. 2019. “Review of Labor’s 2019 federal election campaign.” Australian Labor Party, URL: [URL]
Farhall, Kate, Carson, Andrea, Wright, Scott, Gibbons, Andrew, and William Lukamto. 2019. “‘Political Elites’ Use of Fake News Discourse Across Communications Platforms.” International Journal of Communication, 131, 4353–4375.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Farkas, Johan and Jannick Schou. 2018. “Fake News as a Floating Signifier: Hegemony, Antagonism and the Politics of Falsehood.” Javnost – The Public, 25:3: 298–314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frydenberg, Josh. 2019. “Death taxes – you don’t say, Bill!” Josh Frydenberg MP [website], 23 January, URL: [URL]
Giusti, Serena and Elisa Piras. 2021. Democracy and fake news: Information manipulation and post-truth politics. Routledge: London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gleicher, Nathaniel. 2018. 6 December. “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Explained. Facebook.” URL: [URL]
Harris, Rob. 2019. “Greens snub Burnside over death tax push.” Herald Sun, March 6, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holderhead, Sheradyn. 2018. “Inheritance tax in union’s list of demands for Bill”. Daily Telegraph. 20 July. URL: [URL]
Jana Laura Egelhofer and Sophie Lecheler. 2019. Fake news as a twodimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda, Annals of the International Communication Association, 43(2), 97–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krippendorff, Klaus and Mary Angela Bock. 2009. The Content Analysis Reader, Thousand Oaks: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kruger, Anne. 2019. 11 June. “How a ‘zombie rumour’ about taxes spread in Australia.” First Draft. URL: [URL]
Lau, Richard R. and Ivy Brown Rovner. 2009. “Negative Campaigning.” Annual Review of Political Science. 121: 285–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lewis, Peter. 2019. How the internet led to division, distraction and civic disengagement. Podcast. Big Ideas with Paul Barclay, ABC RN, 1 July. URL: [URL]
Manwaring, Rob. 2020. “The Australian Labor party.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 277–94. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell E. and Donald, L. Shaw 1993. The evolution of agenda-setting research: Twenty-five years in the marketplace of ideas. Journal of communication, 43(2): 58–67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McNair, Brian. 2018. Fake news: Falsehood, fabrication and fantasy in journalism. Oxon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mills, Stephen. 2020. “Party campaign communications.” In Morrison’s Miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, 455–72. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Minear, Tom, Rob Harris, and Claire Bickers. 2019. “Burnside backs death tax in battle for Kooyong.” Herald Sun, March 4, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murphy, Katharine, Christopher Knaus, and Nick Evershed. 2019. “‘It felt like a big tide’: how the death tax lie infected Australia’s election campaign.” The Guardian, June 7, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neuman, Russell. W. Lauren Guggenheim, S. Mo Jang, and Soo Young Bae. 2014. “The dynamics of public attention: Agenda-setting theory meets big data.” Journal of Communication, 64(2): 193–214. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior, 32 (2): 303–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Jason Reifler and Peter A. Ubel. 2013. “The Hazards of Correcting Myths About Health Care Reform.” Medical Care, 51(2): 127–132. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Ethan Porter, Jason Reifler and Thomas J. Wood. 2019. “Taking fact-checks literally but not seriously? The effects of journalistic fact-checking on factual beliefs and candidate favorability.” Political Behavior: 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Phillips, Justin B. 2019. “Negative Political Communication on Social Media and the Gender Gap: A Study of Men’s and Women’s Reactions to Presidential Candidate Attacks on Facebook in 2012 and 2016.” Politics & Gender: 1–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020. “Leave the Attacking to Others: Assessing the Effectiveness of Candidate Endorsed and Independently Sourced Televised Attack Ads in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Mass Communication and Society: 1–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pingree, Raymond J., Dominique Brossard and Douglas M. McLeod. 2014. “Effects of Journalistic Adjudication on Factual Beliefs, News Evaluations, Information Seeking, and Epistemic Political Efficacy.” Mass Communication and Society, 17(5): 615–638. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Remeikis, Amy. 2019. “PM announces first-home scheme at Liberal party campaign launch – as it happened.” The Guardian, May 12, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tandoc, Edson. C. Jr., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling. 2018. “Defining ‘Fake News’”, Digital Journalism, 6:2, 137–153. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, Sandy. 2019. “A vote for labor is a vote for death taxes. your legacy should go to your family, not the state. did you work hard all your life to support a failed system…” Facebook, April 19, 2019.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wardle, Claire. 2018. “The Need for Smarter Definitions and Practical, Timely Empirical Research on Information Disorder.” Digital Journalism, 6(8): 951–963. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Warren, Matthew. 2020. “Fake news case study during the Australian 2019 general election.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 241: 1–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Alba, Beatriz, Alexandra Vázquez & David Lois
2025. Attitudes towards the inheritance tax: paradoxical thinking and misinformation / Actitudes hacia el impuesto sobre sucesiones: pensamiento paradójico y desinformación. International Journal of Social Psychology: Revista de Psicología Social 40:1 ► pp. 98 ff. DOI logo
Vaughan, Michael, Hendrik Theine, David Schieferdecker & Nora Waitkus
2025. Communication about economic inequality: a systematic review. Annals of the International Communication Association 49:3 ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
Phillips, Justin, Andrea Carson & Simon Jackman
2024. Issue agenda-setting in the voice to parliament referendum: using big data to explain voice discourse on traditional and social media. Australian Journal of Political Science 59:3 ► pp. 344 ff. DOI logo
Tomassi, Andrea, Andrea Falegnami, Elpidio Romano & Peivand Bastani
2024. Mapping automatic social media information disorder. The role of bots and AI in spreading misleading information in society. PLOS ONE 19:5 ► pp. e0303183 ff. DOI logo
Carson, Andrea & Scott Wright
2022. Fake news and democracy: definitions, impact and response. Australian Journal of Political Science 57:3 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Gibbons, Andrew & Andrea Carson
2022. What is misinformation and disinformation? Understanding multi-stakeholders’ perspectives in the Asia Pacific. Australian Journal of Political Science 57:3 ► pp. 231 ff. DOI logo
Wright, Scott
2021. Discourses of fake news. Journal of Language and Politics 20:5 ► pp. 641 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue