Waleed Aly writing in The Age (27 January 2023) said: The Voice ‘… is [was] a subtle proposal, but it lands in an age with the least subtle of temperaments… Ours is now a politics of perpetual deconstruction in which majorities only seem to gather around disaffection, with very few exceptions.’
Then Ed Coper, (author of ‘How to defeat Fake News’) also wrote, in [ITAL]The Age[ITAL] (19 February 2023), ‘It’s our first social media referendum… Social media was never intended to be the place where we formed our opinions about critical issues of importance, it was designed to be a viral advertising platform’.
Whether or not you agree with these comments there is no doubt that the social media platforms are the perfect tools to propagate doubt. They can then ease the anxiety that has been created, even in otherwise thoughtful readers, by welcoming readers into the fold. And of course if a person’s anxiety is thereby mollified that person is a likely agent of further dissemination of largely-untested claims. One of the worst aspects about social media’s role in such campaigns is that the most scurrilous, provocative claims become a cheap source of copy for some of the big news outlets.
I don’t mean to imply that the referendum would have succeeded in the absence of social media or that all social media is inherently negative. Indeed a lot of social media can inform quickly and responsibly.
It is rather that this was always likely to be a difficult campaign to win because it lacked cross-party support and because constitutions are not (and should not be) easy to change. It was fertile ground for disinformation. It is always an uphill battle to ‘win’ a referendum unless the question is ‘uncontroversial’. But I would have felt a lot better, (but still sad) as a citizen, and as a person who believes the time for change is long overdue, if the loss had been a close one. I’m sure the proponents of the referendum, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, are bereft. I now believe not only that our Indigenous folks should be closely listened to in finding the ways to Close the Gap federally but that each state must proceed diligently to their own ‘voice’ and treaty agreements.
Frank Lynch, Mullumbimby
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
