Foreign YouTuber using AI to promote One Nation to thousands

This YouTuber promotes One Nation to thousands in an Aussie accent. He's a foreigner we traced to the other side of the world In short: An ABC NEWS Verify investigation has uncovered a YouTube political commentator from overseas who is using AI to fake an Australian accent and promote One Nation to tens of thousands of people. The account, Oceania Unfiltered, has accrued more than 3 million views and receives thousands of comments on its Australian and New Zealand political commentary. The investigation also uncovered groups and pages sharing tips on generating social media content for profit, with one describing Australia as an untapped market. "G'day. Good to see ya. Pull up a chair. Grab a cold one if you've got it, because we need to have a serious yarn about what's been going on down in Canberra this week." This YouTuber seems very Australian. He often presents from a room with coloured lights, using colloquial language and slang to speak almost exclusively about one topic — Australian politics. "Aussies cannot just sit back, have a whinge at the pub over a beer, and hope she'll be right," he says in a different video. He frequently promotes One Nation and its leader Pauline Hanson and is critical of Anthony Albanese. He rails against the "uni-party" and the "political establishment". A spokesman for One Nation said the channel and its creator is not associated with the party. The channel has received thousands of comments across his videos from seemingly real Australians engaging with his content. But this YouTuber is not Australian. He appears to be a man ABC NEWS Verify has traced to the other side of the world. And artificial intelligence has been used to give this channel its distinct Australian voice. Signs of AI The channel is called Oceania Unfiltered and claims to deliver, "sharp, independent analysis on the political, economic and cultural issues shaping Australia and New Zealand". The earliest video about Australian politics was posted in February and the channel has accrued more than 3 million views across dozens of videos. The presenter appears to be a Brazilian man, named Junior Lutero De Alcantara, sometimes shortened to Junior Lutero. His commentary is often spliced between real Australian news clips. He appears on several YouTube channels — mostly speaking in Brazil's official language Portuguese — discussing everything from world politics to aliens to conspiracy theories. On a second YouTube channel appearing to feature Junior Lutero, older videos are presented in Portuguese before suddenly pivoting to a thick North American accent in newer videos. Many of these are critical of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and praise US President Donald Trump. It is unclear whether the real Junior Lutero is running all these accounts, including Oceania Unfiltered, or if someone else is using his likeness. ABC NEWS Verify attempted to contact Junior Lutero numerous times but received no reply. We also engaged a Brazilian producer to try and contact him — they also received no reply. A day after our first attempt to contact him in May, warnings started appearing on some videos which read, "Made with AI. Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated". These could be seen after expanding the video caption box. After ABC NEWS Verify sent questions to YouTube, all videos on the channel had the AI warning placed in the caption box. Another small AI label was also placed below the video title where it could be viewed without clicking. "All content uploaded to YouTube is subject to our policies, which we enforce consistently for all creators on our platform, regardless of whether their content is generated using artificial intelligence," a spokesperson for YouTube said in a statement. "YouTube also requires creators to disclose when they upload photorealistic or meaningfully altered and synthetic content, and we display clear disclosure labels to provide viewers with context at a glance." We also asked experts in AI detection to look at the Oceania Unfiltered content, with one video from September 1 singled out for deeper investigation. "The video is a lip-sync deepfake," said the University at Buffalo's Media Forensic Lab. "AI-generated speech lip-synced onto real footage of a person, with synthetic audio and visuals manipulated to match it," the analysis by Siwei Lyu, Jialing Cai, and Regina Chen stated. The experts found unnatural changes around the eye of the presenter and found one of his moles disappeared. In an older video they found "unstable boundaries and texture flicker". Put simply, AI has been used to manipulate Junior Lutero's face and voice. ABC NEWS Verify found a 2021 video where Junior Lutero speaks in English with a Latin American accent. The clip sees the content creator asking Facebook to review a decision that restricted the monetisation on his page and does not show signs of AI-manipulation. The real Junior Lutero has filmed several of his videos in a town in Brazil's São Paulo state. ABC NEWS Verify has chosen not to name the town. The town was identified using landmarks in the backgrounds in three videos on other channels, which don't appear to show signs of AI manipulation. Transparency information on the Oceania Unfiltered Facebook page, which also features Junior Lutero's likeness, shows the page is managed from Brazil. Oceania Unfiltered now has more than 45,000 subscribers on YouTube with its clickbait-style headlines. Timothy Graham from QUT's Digital Media Research Centre said the channel "crosses the borderline" of misleading its audience. While the primary motivation appears to be personal financial gain, he said the impact can still be political. "The effects and the impact of this stuff is more or less identical to what the intended, if not actual, outcomes of foreign influence operations would be," he said. "What you end up with is divisive content that is injected into organic communities in Australia." The comments on the videos indicate at least some viewers are unaware the presenter might not be authentic. "You are spot on in your comments. Thank you for your continual posting of issues that affect Australians," one said. "You are one of my favourite go-to political analysts. Keep up the good work and thank god Aussies are waking up and using their vote for change!" another said. Oceania Unfiltered is part of the booming online "slop economy" — where individuals can generate revenue through engagement on social media, using cheap AI content. "It's just a way of getting a quick buck," said David Hobson, a researcher from Canada's Center for Media, Technology and Democracy. 'More attention … more money' Monetisation allows content creators on popular social media platforms to earn a share of the revenue their posts generate. "Essentially the formula is more attention, more engagement, more money," Dr Graham said. ABC NEWS Verify has identified groups and pages where a network of creators have shared tips and tricks on how to generate revenue on Facebook, critiqued other AI slop pages, and even discussing finding the right niche to generate engagement. The Oceania Unfiltered Facebook page history showed how the creator behind it searched for and settled on a niche. Disclosure data gathered from Facebook reveals the page had been monetised. Between 2013 and 2026 it was renamed seven times — mostly different variations of Junior Lutero's name — until it became Oceania Unfiltered in March. Older reels talked about a range of topics before the pivot to Australian politics this year. After ABC NEWS Verify asked Facebook's parent company Meta questions, the company disabled the page for violating its inauthentic behaviour policy which a spokesperson said "prohibits people from misrepresenting who they are or where they are located". "We require creators to disclose when they post realistic content that has been created or altered with AI, and content that breaches our policies is not eligible to earn money on our platforms," the spokesperson said. ABC NEWS Verify identified this post which contained a step-by-step guide on making an Australian YouTube channel — and claimed the country is an untapped market. We contacted dozens of creators on Facebook, in an effort to ask about their posting and business model, but none replied. Mr Hobson said online money-making models have existed for a long time, but now there's a difference. "AI now makes it possible to generate this content at incredible scales," he said. "It's up to the platforms whether this changes or not." Slop from all over the world In 2022, independent think tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, published a paper examining a "growing global industry" of disinformation targeting US audiences. The report's author, Elise Thomas — now a senior open-source investigator with the Centre of Information Resilience — told ABC NEWS Verify that creators with a commercial interest are the most innovative. "Their stuff has to work, otherwise they don't get paid," she said. "They are the quickest to adopt new technologies, they are most precise and effective in terms of targeting." Earlier this year, Canada's Center for Media, Technology and Democracy published research focused on the "slop economy", specifically on Facebook. The report described "a coordinated network of 340 Facebook pages — largely operated from Vietnam — targets users in Canada, Europe, and the US with AI-fabricated stories about politics, celebrities, and sports to drive traffic to fabricated news websites and generate ad revenue". "As far as we can tell, they do whatever it takes to get clicks," Mr Hobson said. ABC NEWS Verify examined hundreds of Facebook posts using Australian political buzzwords, and clickbait terms, to try and measure the scale of the local "slop economy". We found accounts being run by people from locations like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. The content ranged from low-quality posts fishing for engagement, to higher quality AI-generated imagery. There are also AI political slop pages, which carry names like "Australia Unyielding" and "The Real Australia". In some cases, transparency information reveals that these accounts are operated by people overseas. These pages also post in groups with names like "Australia Pulse" and "Australia Life". These groups are a hotbed for foreign individuals looking for engagement by posting their own AI-generated imagery. Both the groups and pages have genuine Australian members, alongside the foreign accounts. Australians who interact with the content, generate revenue for creators if the account is monetised. "Australian people are lucrative when it comes to delivering us content," Dr Graham said. "We are cash cows because when we look at content and engage with it … the revenue that comes out of that is just so much higher compared to other countries." Mr Hobson said the currency creators get paid in might suggest why they target countries like Australia. "If you're based in Vietnam or Sri Lanka, any of these countries, if you're getting paid in American, Canadian, Aussie dollars — that translates a lot into your local currency," he said. Additional research by Maryanne Taouk