The role of online crisis actors in teachers’ work and lives

ABSTRACT

It is not surprising that various sources have recently described the teaching profession in Australia as ‘in crisis’. The consequences of pandemic policy have provided opportunities for groups to exploit the cascading crises facing teachers. We argue the online political ecosystem recognises teachers as a trope useful for retaining or gaining power. Astroturfing is the process by which political actors seek to present policy platforms emerging in an organic way from ‘the people’. We detail how teachers were targeted as political leverage, within political frames that centred vaccinated teachers. We examine theTeachers’ Professional Association of Australia (TPAA), an example of an astroturfed member group. Using a qualitative approach to digital sociology we analysed the strategies used by the TPAA to manufacture a crisis associated with teacher vaccinations and answer this research question: in what ways was digital astroturfing present in the TPAA campaign against mandatory vaccinations? We find sufficient evidence to indicate that astroturfing did occur, and was employed by the TPAA in an effort to weaken traditional union movements in Australia producing a form of union uberfication. Such a development poses an existential risk to existing teacher associations and trade unions and more broadly to the health of democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching
• social media
• astroturfing
• labor unions
• trade unions
• teachers’ work
• crisis
• political
• COVID-19

A profession in crisis

Teaching is a challenging profession, and perhaps never more so than recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions. It is not surprising that various sources have recently described the teaching profession in Australia as being ‘in crisis’ (for example, see Longmuir, 2023). Cascading natural disasters such as bushfires, COVID-19 and floods (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021) have resulted in significant teacher shortages (Fray et al., 2023); this led to hundreds of students being supervised in study halls by school leaders because there were not enough teachers for the day to day business of schooling (Welch, 2022). The teaching profession, which has for many years been held together by good will, appears to have become unsustainable (Heffernan et al., 2022) as teachers struggle to deal with the demands of supporting students and the effects of their own experience of disaster-related trauma (Berger et al., 2018). The concepts of a growing teacher attrition problem, a teacher shortage and the increased challenges of teaching within a crisis context are of global concern (Mitchell et al., 2022). The United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession recommendations ‘note with alarm the persistent and increasing teacher shortages around the world. These shortages are exacerbated by the continued attrition of teachers, the use of contract and unqualified personnel to fill teacher gaps, the lack of professional development and support, inadequate working conditions and salaries, and the enormous hardships faced by teachers working in crisis contexts’ (International Labour Office ILO, 2024, p. 1). Crucially, Santoro’s (2021) scholarship suggests that teachers are not necessarily ‘burnt-out’ but that they may actually be ‘demoralized’ – meaning their work is being challenged and compromised by policies misaligned with their core values. It is this disconnection and demoralization that some organisations seek to leverage in order to gain and wield political influence.

This article makes a novel contribution to the field of education crisis to consider the shock doctrine (Klein, 2007) of powerful actors in education politics that exploited the controversy surrounding teacher vaccinations in Australia over the COVID-19 pandemic. The notion of ‘education in crisis’ is not new (see for example Apple, 1992). Prior to the pandemic, teaching was often described as troubled (see McCollow, 2016) or in crisis (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). These arguments often focused on the quality of education (Treagust et al., 2015), or the quality of teachers (Singh et al., 2021). Various governments enacted new policies in an attempt to address concerns such as the ‘literacy crisis’, the ‘numeracy crisis’ or the ‘reading crisis’ (for an example of this rhetoric, see Black et al., 2015). These manufactured (or ideological) crises were recently compounded by the material challenges presented by natural disasters. The combination of these events makes it easy to understand why schooling in Australia might have arrived at a crisis point but, as we will demonstrate in this paper, the politics of vaccinations provided opportunities for media and astroturfing lobby groups to exploit the cascading crises facing the teaching profession. We posit the online and communicative political ecosystem recognises school teachers as a political trope useful for retaining or gaining power. This is of concern for educational researchers because such politicking works to shock the public into believing that an education crisis is so severe that it will have catastrophic repercussions unless immediate action is taken. To demonstrate this argument we detail how teachers were opportunistically targeted as political leverage during the pandemic, paying particularly attention to the use of political frames that centred vaccinated teachers. The study presented in this paper uses a digital sociological approach to answer the following question: in what ways was digital astroturfing present in the Teacher’s Professional Association of Australia (TPAA) campaign against mandatory vaccinations?

We need to make it very clear from the beginning that we will not be taking a position on whether or not teachers should have been required to be vaccinated to keep their positions during the pandemic. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Queensland, the Australian state with the strongest chapter of TPAA, has recently ruled that the vaccine mandates for police employees, ambulance officers and nurses were unreasonable (Thomasson & Attwell, 2024). We do stress, however, that a philosophical discussion of these measures is necessary. It serves no real purpose to avoid the issue, regardless of our individual beliefs about vaccinations, but there is not enough room in this paper to do that discussion the justice it deserves and demonstrate how concerns about the issue played out online. We concentrate instead on alerting education researchers to the political maneuverings occurring in social media spaces, spaces where there are thriving education communities. These maneuverings, which are intent on gaining power in the guise of the common good, took advantage of pandemic chaos to politicise schooling by manufacturing an education crisis related to the vaccination status of teachers. It is the manufacturing of the crisis by two opposing political actors that concerns us here.

We present our argument by considering political actors that exploited events in the pandemic to convince teachers to get vaccinated and others that defended unvaccinated teachers. The ramifications of such political framing was that education was positioned by sets of political actors as being even deeper in a crisis than could be thought possible during a pandemic, unprecedented flooding and teacher shortages. Education was presented as being in an ideological crisis where the battle for civil liberties was unfolding. We show this approach to ‘not letting a good crisis go to waste’ through the response to one viral and tragic event (the Wieambilla shootings in Queensland, Australia) that presented unvaccinated teachers as ‘monsters’, and the political maneuverings of Red Union (an umbrella group comprising of various professional organisations purporting to provide industrial protection to teachers, nurses, doctors and others) who used digital astroturfing techniques to amplify the crisis through supporting unvaccinated teachers. Astroturfing is the process by which political actors, corporate organisations and individuals seek to present their particular policy platforms as having emerged in an organic and democratic way from the people (Kovic et al., 2018). Digital astroturfing means that it takes place in the digital environment, often via social media.

This paper begins by examining the reporting on the Wieambilla shootings, a tragedy in Western Queensland, Australia. The attack took place on 12 December 2022, when police were following up on a missing persons report. Subsequently, two police officers and a bystander were shot and killed by the residents of the property, who were then killed by responding police officers. The shootings are now described as Australia’s first fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack (due to the end-of-days Christian ideology espoused by the terrorists) but were originally linked to conspiracy theories as one of the residents/terrorists, Gareth Train, was active in various online conspiracy theory forums. He had supported anti-government and anti-police views, as well as anti-vaccine views. All the terrorists were widely reported as being unvaccinated teachers and strongly opposed to vaccination programs. We then consider the political maneuverings of Red Union, which campaigned for the rights of unvaccinated teachers as part of the ‘anti-vax’ movement.

The intention of these actors was to nudge teachers to either get vaccinated (in the case of the media) or to support teachers who did not wish to (in the case of Red Union). The intentions behind these approaches were ordinary within a healthy democracy that is both concerned about the physical and political health of the nation. Forced vaccination should be a matter for debate because it is an extraordinary measure in a liberal democracy. However, the positioning of teachers as political tropes to force political decision making, and the measures that these political actors took to promote their issue, should be of concern to anyone interested in how central education is to political communication, mediatisation of education and power games. The manufacturing of a crisis concerned with the vaccination of teachers at a time of cascading material crisis was exploitative on both sides.

In order to advance this argument, this paper will briefly describe the interactions of teachers and teacher unions on social media before turning to a discussion of social media as a place where crises are born. Then we narrow to a focus on Wieambilla and the anti-vaccination crisis. The nature of online organising and astroturfing will be outlined, before a closer analysis of the posts made by TPAA on Facebook is discussed. The manner in which TPAA used the vaccine mandates as a crisis to leverage influence will be explored. Finally, the way that this represents a broader ‘uberfication’ of union action will be outlined. We use the term ‘uberfication’ after G. Hall (2016) to describe the process in universities whereby individuals, through the adoption of neoliberal reforms to labour, become entrepreneurs of the self and the attendant departure from collectivity.

Teachers, teacher unions and social media

Before continuing it is important to describe the current political communication and lobbying landscape in which teachers find themselves, whether they are avid users of social media or simply use it to consume news. The political actors we analysed below commonly encountered a complex policy environment involving the termination of employment contracts. During the pandemic in Australia, unvaccinated teachers and education employees were warned they would be fired and when they did not comply had their employment terminated (Carey, 2022). These were extraordinary measures by governments operating within a very real crisis, but they were also measures that should have involved more stakeholder engagement than they did. As we show below, Red Union very quickly picked up on concerns of the public about these unprecedented powers deployed by governments. However, we argue that despite these extraordinary measures needing debate, Red Union manufactured a crisis for their own gain via digital astro-turfing and the click-drunk media responded to that crisis by emphasising the vaccination status of those responsible for an act of terror. What we argue is that both Red Union and the media exploited the vaccination status of teachers for their own gain, whether they were chasing clicks or misrepresenting their grassroots.

Social media is a significant player in this landscape and media actors and lobby groups have been quick to master the inner workings and influential nature of social media including the challenges facing those who wish to participate in that landscape (Carpenter & Harvey, 2019). Regardless of how someone uses the Internet, education issues are highly clickable (Mockler, 2022). Twitter (now X, but we will refer to it as Twitter as that name is still in common usage), at the time of our data collection, was one of the least popular social media sites (see here: https://backlinko.com/social-media-users). However, it was arguably more powerful than its subscriber base would suggest because it was the social media platform of choice for the media (Pew Research Center, 2022). This is because it was the platform of choice for politicians (for a discussion of this in the Australian context, see Kousser, 2019). In the last decade journalists have steadily moved to reporting not just what was in the news but also what is said about it on Twitter by politicians, political commentators and the general Twitter public (Molyneux & McGregor, 2022).

Social media provides many opportunities for educators and for education to attract teachers from all over the world to discuss teaching and being a teacher. Teachers have engaged in community building on social media since the beginning of its usage. There is much extant research into the ways that teachers have made use of social media as a pedagogical tool in their classrooms (Krutka & Carpenter, 2016) and also for their own ongoing professional development (Staudt Willet, 2023). It has also been used effectively by teachers as they seek to formulate their identity (Fox & Bird, 2017), and by teachers to engage in broader discussions around the use and value of educational research for their practice. Teachers have been quick to recognise that social media communities also offer additional sources of income, too, giving rise to the phenomenon of the edupreneur (Hartung et al., 2023). Teacher political activity is also a core part of the online community with bloggers, think tanks, teachers’ unions, journalists and policy experts sharing their perspectives on issues which affect teachers (Carpenter et al., 2023). The teacher unions present in Australia (The Australian Education Union [AEU] and the Independent Education Union of Australia [IEUA] and their various state-based branches) have a social media presence, too, especially on Facebook. These are reasonably well-subscribed too. However, the way that teacher unions have made use of these social media platforms is to support the face to face organising actions of the union; that is, they advertise events and meetings that members need to know about. This is what Earl and Kimport (2011) might describe as old social movement organising, where online tools such as social media have relevance only as far as they support offline activism. However, as Earl and Kimport (2011) and others (Barnes & English, 2022) point out, this ignores a newer brand of online activism, where online platforms and tools are used in systematically different ways.

Lobby groups actively make use of social media, and especially its algorithmic architecture designed to favour divisive topics that can amplify concerns of a minority. This ability is social media’s blessing and curse, what Foucault and others might call its dangerousness (Foucault et al., 2017). Originally heralded as a way to democratise hidden and intersectional voices not usually considered in policy making, social media has presented a complicated ethical conundrum (for a discussion of this as it pertains to the promise of technology and democracy, see Morozov, 2011). Users and those who celebrate the flattening of access to power via social media have had to decide whether the platforms are for the common good when hidden voices also include neo-Nazis and groups supportive of attempted coups like that in Washington DC on 6 January 2020. This raises the question: how do we decide whether a group, claiming to speak broadly for the disadvantaged and the underserved, is acting in good faith as digital citizens? We argue that the ability to identify whether an organisation engages in crisis exploitation is a core element in identifying such a political red flag.

Social media as a site where crisis in education is framed

The construction of crises as they pertain to education has been explored extensively and a key component of education policy tenets of crisis, reform and policy settlement cycles (Baron et al., 1981). In this paper, we draw on theorisations of crisis by Zembylas and colleagues who posit that crisis is becoming a normal aspect of capitalist society that has been transposed into education; however, ‘there has been little sustained analysis of education crisis in the academic literature’ (2022, p 1). Political scientists have spent more time with the word. For example, McConnell (2020) explains that there is no universal definition of crisis but that social media users are a key aspect of the development of the concept because users tend to see the definition as self-evident, using the term when ‘epitomizing the scandals and failings of leaders and policies, as well as the seeming (in)ability to successfully manage extreme events’ (online). While political scientists debate the academic meaning of the word, organisations have increasingly seen the potential of the word to influence power. For example, through the lens of ‘disaster didactics’, Schweisfurth (2023) explains the way that international organisations (including those like the World Bank that have traditionally been disinterested in education) have sought to capitalise on concerns about learning during COVID-19 in order to promote a narrative of ‘crisis’. Schweisfurth notes that the classification of this ‘crisis’ is swiftly followed by a promised solution – often linked to the deployment of educational technology. Boin et al. (2016, p.p. 71) defines the exploitation of crisis as ‘the purposeful utilisation of crisis-type rhetoric to significantly alter levels of political support’. Then, according to Maor et al. (2020), once an issue is established as a crisis a political actor can work strategically in three ways. Firstly, a threat can be used to destabilise the government or for the government to call people to action. Secondly, a threat can be used to justify extraordinary measures with limited evidence of the crisis existing in the first place. The third strategic use of crisis for political gain is to ‘convince the public that a severe crisis is underway, one that will have potentially catastrophic consequences in the absence of immediate action’ (Maor et al., 2020, p. 523). Social media was a key tool in the pandemic for developing these framings.

Through this paper we extend this theoretical work by noting how the manufactured crisis of unvaccinated teachers on social media was used by the news media and the TPAA to double down on the very material crisis schools were experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We note that this is also an extension of the field of mediatisation of education that Rawolle (2010) has described as having two theoretical positions: ‘1. processes in which intermediaries (such as journalists, noble families or political parties) gain relative power; and 2. How the involvement of the intermediary changes and shapes the power relations between people within different fields’ (p 22). In this article the Wieambilla shootings presents a dark turn in the processes by which the media (aka journalists) gain relative power through click bait and we discuss how that then shapes the power relations between education and the public. The contribution to this field we make is through the addition of teacher’s representative associations as intermediaries engaged in the mediatisation of education. As such we spend more time with TPAA.

In the following sections we describe the actors at the centre of this crisis exploitation and their approaches to manufacturing a crisis in education.

Clicking on a crisis: Wieambilla and the media

While now considered a fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack, the Wieambilla shootings were originally reported as instigated by teachers who were conspiracy theorists (Basford Canales, 2022). We do not wish to dwell too long on the details of the attack except to illustrate how the reporting on the issue fed the narrative that teacher vaccination status was an education crisis. For example, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a government funded media organisation, almost a year later and despite the Australian security services determining they were terrorists, headlined their reporting that the perpetrators were teachers and linked the event to COVID-19: ‘Gun-toting teacher’s COVID border breach a focus of coroner’s probe into fatal Queensland police shootings at Wieambilla’ (Callinan, 2023). After the tragedy, multiple news outlets consistently reported the terrorists as ‘vehemently opposed to vaccination’ (Bucci, 2023), including consistently reporting hearsay that one of the terrorists, Stacey Train, had recently resigned her position as Head of Curriculum from the local school over her refusal to get vaccinated. The Guardian ran a story (Bucci & Smee, 2022), drawing on experts in conspiracy theory to explain why the terrorists had avoided the notice of authorities when all the signs were there, in hindsight. This article traces the terrorists’ difficult relationship with schools and education authorities, stating the Stacey Train’s resignation over vaccines as a sign of her ability to commit the act of terror, lending the authority of academia to the comment: ‘Dr Mario Peucker, a senior research fellow at Victoria University, says the fact Stacey quit her job as a teacher because of the vaccination mandate suggests a potential willingness to act on her beliefs’.

The way such an approach to reporting on terrorist activities ‘shapes power relations between schools and the public’ (Rawolle, 2010, p. 22) saw schools caught up in a broader politicisation of the pandemic – mandatory vaccinations. The news reporting about ASIO’s decision to declare the attack an act of terror (see for example Parnell, 2023) did not reference their status as teachers opposed to vaccines; however, as mentioned previously, education is highly clickable and the terrorist’s previous life as teachers was timely to attract the clicks. News about the terrorists repeatedly constructed images of the terrorists as monstrous teachers. The public’s desire for more information about the shooting was a gift to those trying to encourage vaccination because it outlined an existential but banal threat to the nation: what an anti-vaxxer looked like. They could be teachers, the people we trust our children with, and conspiracy theorists that opposed vaccination.

Constructing a crisis: the TPAA

The news furore and resulting clicks on stories and posts about teachers who did not want to be vaccinated did not begin with the events in Wieambilla. Indeed, the tragedy was most likely taken advantage of to shut down the increasing influence of those who questioned the vaccine mandate. One such group was Red Union. Red Union claims to be Australia’s fastest growing industrial organisation, with more than 17 000 paying members (Red Union, 2020). The more established trade unions have been quick to point out that groups associated with Red Union are not registered trade unions and thus have limited capacity, or protections, for industrial action (Independent Education Union of Australia, NSW/ACT Branch, 2021). The organisations concerned with teachers under the umbrella of Red Union are the Teacher’s Professional Association of Australia (TPAA) and the Teachers’ Professional Association of Queensland (TPAQ). They are both new actors within the field of education in Australia that significantly increased their subscriber base during the pandemic. The organisations have positioned themselves as direct challengers to existing teacher unions, seeking to disrupt the historical connection between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the union movement by arguing that teachers who do not vote for the ALP have the right to industrial representation without ALP signifiers. We found through our analysis that the pandemic was fertile ground for such disruption and TPAA/Q took advantage of the opportunity. Below we show how TPAA amplified the concerns of a minority of unvaccinated teachers to frame the school system as being in a deeper crisis than just the pandemic, climate catastrophe and teacher shortages through digital astroturfing, another strategy that the mediatisation of education should be concerned with.

Online organising and digital astroturfing

Astroturfing is a political strategy designed to make an issue appear grassroots while it is orchestrated by significant organisational backing (Keller et al., 2020; Kovic et al., 2018; Leiser, 2016). Digital astroturfing is the use of the social media environment to demonstrate the grassroots character of the strategy. The key to recognising whether the concern is grassroots (that is, emerging from genuine popular concern) or not is to investigate whether the popular support is actual or simply fake; hence the name astroturfing (Mackie, 2009). Such strategies should be of concern to researchers interested in the mediatisation of education because its identification is evidence of how ‘the mass media influence[s] the representation of problems taken up by educational policy’ (Rawolle, 2010, p. 25). Digital astroturfing has some differences from normal astroturfing yet its purpose remains the same. It purports to represent the voices of common people and thus use that information to influence politicians who are concerned more with the opinions of their voter base over rigorous policy making for the common good (we expand on this idea elsewhere in Barnes & Hames, 2023). According to Kovic et al. (2018) the key features of digital astro-turfing are as follows: it takes place on the internet, it is crafted by political actors, and it is manufactured, deceptive and strategic. There are two key aspects worth noting with regards to digital astroturfing: the first is that those behind these campaigns often make claims to be speaking for the common person or representing the opinions of the person in the street and the second is that the social media platforms that are used for digital astroturfing can be manipulated in such a way as to appear to have a greater influence than is warranted.

There have been some preliminary studies into astroturfing (Mackie, 2009) and also into the use of social media for campaigning both in Australia and overseas (Graham & Schwanholz, 2020). A related field of research examines ‘grasstops’ organising (Fokas, 2016) which is the process of activist groups seeking to influence agendas, often through the mechanism of the legal system; however, this article is more interested in the ‘fake’ nature of astro-turfing, and the ways in which covert groups or individuals seek to sway public opinion. More recent research (Heggart et al., 2023) has identified some of the mechanisms by which groups are seeking to influence policy debates in Australia. Examining the interaction of various media groups, politicians and right-wing think tanks, researchers used Peck and Theodore’s (2010) metpahors of policy mutation and mobility to identify examples of policy borrowing (where policies are adopted wholesale from other jurisdictions), policy laundering (where more extreme policies are ‘washed’ through the media until they are palatable) and ideological vacancy (where policy-makers pivot to whatever position appears to be gaining the most traction). However, the research presented below is novel as it examines the presence of digital astro-turfing in the Australian educational ecosystem and the role of a social media campaign (led by the TPAA) in seeking to exert political influence in Australia.

Methodological and ethical considerations

This study examines the way the TPAA sought to use debates about vaccination as a mechanism to engender discord and disagreement, two essential ingredients to clickability, in order to advance their political interests. This approach in some way reflects the computational turn that much social media research has adopted, where there is a focus on making use of big data analytics to interpret the data that is available via social media (Beer, 2012; Kirkwood et al., 2018). This approach to research requires large data sets which are often scraped from social media sites and are then analysed quantitatively (Latzko-Toth et al., 2016). However, as has rightly been pointed out, such a method lacks the capacity to formulate understandings about the intentions of the users of social media (N. A. Hall, 2022). Understanding the reason for posting is a central concern of the current research. Therefore, we have instead adopted a form of critical media studies, as first proposed by Langlois and Elmer (2013) and, in particular, the approach advanced by N. A. Hall (2022). Hall examined the motivations of Brexit supporters for sharing content by manually gathering posts they shared over a period of time, and analysing each post – a process described as a kind of participant observation. Crucially, this prolonged approach allowed Hall to develop an understanding of the intentionality behind the posting pattern. A similar approach, although only focused on one Facebook account, and an organisation, rather than an individual, was adopted for this research project.

It is important to make a note of some of the methodological and ethical challenges related to this kind of research. One of these challenges (Heath et al., 2009) is determining where the study of a network should end. This is especially the case with social media, where people and organisations are linked in limitless chains. It is easy as a researcher to ‘disappear down a rabbit hole’ and this can make analysis challenging. In an attempt to address this, we decided to deliberately bound our research by examining only one small aspect of a social media network: the posts by a single organisation.

There is another reason for keeping the sites of research bounded in this fashion; if the researchers had undertaken automated data scraping of Facebook for example, in order to gather the names and details of those who liked or shared these posts, they would have been in breach of Facebook’s Terms of Service (Mancosu & Vegetti, 2020). This would have been unethical. It would also have proved challenging to gain consent from all of the individuals in this case. Thus, the decision was made to solely gather the posts manually, in a similar fashion to that described by N. A. Hall (2022) (which was possible as there were not a significant number of them) and only to examine the content of the posts and the aggregate metadata associated with them (i.e. the number of likes and shares). This ensured that there was no risk for any member of the public who had commented on the posts or shared them (N. A. Hall, 2022). The TPAA, however, is an organisation with a public profile and hence their public social media posts and content are able to be examined at no risk to individuals (Fuchs, 2018). This is in keeping with other studies, although these have mostly been on Twitter/X, which has a different user agreement (Froio & Ganesh, 2019). This constrains the nature of this research, but is sufficient for the purposes of this research.

Finally, it is important to note the positionality of the researchers. All members of the research team have been actively involved in the work of unions in Australia, either as members, office bearers or employees. We are all supportive of the union movement within Australia. While this paper is not about the validity or not of Red Union, per se, nevertheless it does have Red Union and the TPAA as its primary focus. It should also be noted that parts of this research were funded by the Independent Education Union of Australia, who were motivated by concerns about the existential threat of the new model of unionism proposed by Red Union.

Framing teacher vaccinations as a crisis

The TPAA is a relatively new organisation. Indeed, the whole Red Union group, of which the TPAA is a part, appears to have been around for less than a decade. The TPAA started posting on Facebook in September 2021, (although their Queensland branch [TPAQ] became active online in 2019) and as yet, they have failed to garner much interest from legacy media. A preliminary Google News search generates only two results: an article entitled ‘“fake unions”: new associations ride jab mandate fears to get members’ (Bonyhady, 2021) and another: ‘no wonder Labor is scrambling to discredit the Red Union’ (Lang, 2021). An analysis of the TPAA’s social media presence, especially on Facebook, suggests that they remain a small organisation; indeed, they appear to be little more than a front for the Red Union umbrella organisation. TPAA does not release their membership figures (nor are they transparent about executive members or office holders within the organisation). However, they currently (as of 2022) have only 1,896 people who like their Facebook page. In contrast, the Australian Education Union has almost 20,000 likes. The TPAA appears to be committed to using social media in an attempt to increase their membership and followers, in order to increase their influence.

Between 10 September 2021 and 12 December 2021, TPAA made 51 posts on their Facebook page. Almost 50% (49%) of these had some content related to vaccinations or the mandate that required teachers to be vaccinated (Figure 1). The posts included events discussing the vaccine mandate, workshops on how to speak to principals regarding the mandate, Zoom meetings about the mandate, videos showing the TPAA at various face to face events protesting the mandate and links to articles about the vaccine mandate. They have also shared disinformation about the dangers of COVID-19 vaccinations. This is far in excess of the percentage of posts by other teaching unions, and certainly indicates an almost single-minded focus on this one aspect, which is even more curious when one considers the raft of challenges teachers and other staff were facing during the last two years (including online learning, enterprise bargaining and so on).

Figure 1. Comparison of interaction between vax and non-vax posts by TPAA. This figure shows the posts over 3 months in 2021 by the TPAA. The height of the circles indicates the number of comments. The size of the circles indicates the number of likes. The colour of the circles indicates the content of the circles (vax or non-vax). Many of the biggest, highest circles are about vaccinations.

The pattern of interaction between the two different kinds of posts is illuminating, too. As shown in Table 1, while the number of shares and likes were similar between Vax and Non vax posts, there were almost three times as many comments, on average, for each of the vaccination posts when compared to the No Vax posts, which suggests a higher level of interaction related to the posts about vaccination.

Table 1. Average interaction on posts.

	Vaccination posts	Non-vaccination posts
Average number of likes	33.2	29
Average number of shares	3.2	2.6
Average number of comments	18.9	6.7

Another aspect of TPAA’s work perhaps demonstrates their efforts to increase their influence even more starkly. Red Union has released a number of videos on YouTube. The videos of their general meetings (such as ‘QLD Teachers need your help’) have very limited views (usually less than 1,000). Meetings specifically focused on Vaccines and Vaccine Mandates, are much more watched: 4,100 views for ‘Victoria Mandatory Vaccine Update’ on 14 October 2021, and approximately 4,350 for NSSQ – Q&A Vaccine Mandate on 8 October 2021. Clearly, the issue of vaccine mandates was a key trigger for engagement.

Leveraging the Anti-Vax movement for influence

While vaccination rates in Australia were very high (84.25% of eligible Australians had had at least two doses of the vaccine as of Sep 2023, according to COVIDBASE 2023), there still existed a vocal minority who protested the imposition of vaccine mandates. These groups conducted protests and marches in Sydney and Melbourne, and, not surprisingly, garnered a great deal of media attention (Lal, 2022). In addition, numerous politicians rushed to be part of these so-called freedom marches, including most notably former conservative politician Craig Kelly (Basford Canales, 2022). Politicians recognized that there was potential to build a profile and increase their influence by associating with these groups, under the guise of ‘freedom’. The analysis described above suggests that the TPAA also sought to build their own profile within this ecosystem. This may well fit the definition of digital astro-turfing (Table 2).

Table 2. Evidence of the TPAA as an example of digital astroturfing.

Characteristic of digital astroturfing (from Kovic et al., 2018)	Evidence
Takes place on the internet	The TPAA/TPAQ make use of Facebook as a site to communicate and advance its agenda.
Is crafted by political actors	The Red Union movement (and more narrowly, the TPAA/Q) have both targeted Labor governments about their policies (but not other parties). See, for example, their post on 24 August 2023: NSW Government and legacy unions theatrics continue as Labor Premier begs for a return to negotiations with an offer of a 10k pay uplift after negotiation breakdown results in mass strikes. They’ve also targeted other unions about their involvement with political actions, such as the recent campaign for an Indigenous Voice in Australia’s Federal Government (‘The Voice’) whcih was supported by most unions in Australia: Should unions spend member’s money promoting political causes that half of the membership may or may not agree with? (20 July, 2023)
Is manufactured	The speed with which the TPAA/TPAQ pivoted to the strategy of supporting anti-vaccination advocates – and then away from it once it was no longer a crisis to be exploited – signifies the manufactured nature of the campaigning.
Is deceptive	The TPAA has previously been associated with former parliamentarian, Craig Kelly, who was banned from Facebook for his misleading comments about COVID vaccines (Taylor & Karp, 2021). The TPAA is also opaque in terms of its membership numbers, its position as a union, and the electoral process for office holders.
Is strategic	The TPAA has carefully used its growing social media profile to canvas possible topics that will stimulate membership growth. Their targeted campaigning around vaccination status is an example of a successful identification and implementation of a crisis to exploit in order to increase their influence and fulfill their political goals.

As Kovic et al. (2018) note, one of the key characteristics of digital astro-turfing is the willingness to make use of topical issues in order to promote the underlying agendas of the political actors; in other words, while TPAA might be appearing to be supportive of anti-vax teachers at the current time, this may well be a mechanism by which they are seeking to prosecute an unknown, hitherto unrevealed agenda. The adoption of the anti-vax approach is merely the first step in building influence and power; the next steps may be entirely unrelated to vaccine mandates. There is some evidence for this: as of August 2023, the TPAA has shifted towards attacking the public service.

There is further evidence that TPAA exploited the concerns of teachers about vaccine mandates. The increased clicks and subsequent concentration of content on vaccinations and anti-vaccination materials suggests that TPAA are aware of the divisiveness of this issue and tailored their content accordingly. It is possible that they did not set out to create that content but responded to the traffic on their Facebook and YouTube posts. By advancing themselves as the spokespeople against vaccine mandates, they were able to promote a point of difference between them and other teaching unions, all of which did not oppose the vaccine mandates in place in different jurisdictions. However, there is little evidence that TPAA’s opposition to vaccine mandates is anything more than an opportunistic seizing of a divisive issue to siphon membership from the traditional unions. TPAA capitalised on those already frustrated with the teachers’ unions. Admittedly, the unions should have at least questioned the vaccine mandates as their core job was to protect the working conditions of their members. We drew this conclusion because the TPAA appears to have little to no interest in other educational issues related to COVID-19 (which did not receive the same media attention) and appear to have only started pursuing the matter at the same time that freedom marches started to take place – and it appeared to be an issue that was ripe for leveraging into influence. Not surprisingly, other extremist political groups, such as the United Australia Party, have attempted to do the same (Wilson, 2021).

The uberfication of education unions

The TPAA provides an interesting example of what we are calling ‘the uberfication’ of unions. Whilst the ‘uberfication of universities’ has been an emerging idea (G. Hall, 2016), the broader base of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016) has seen a ‘ghost kitchen’ approach to Union membership practice by the TPAA. What this means in a Union setting is a union movement without defined offices, and without being clearly tied to a workplace or site – with only online, not face-to-face outreach. As such, even during a period of lockdown, these unions can function, because they do not require the traditional, face-to-face activism and community buildings that have typified the union movement since their inception. As we note here, the idea of a ‘ghost kitchen’, ‘uberfied’ Union is antithetical to the principles and practices of Unionism and Union membership traditionally, built as it is, upon collective struggle, and most of all camaraderie and comradeship between workers typically within the same work location.

This then raises the question: ‘why would teachers join a union of questionable legitimacy?’ We fear the answer to this question is due to the lack of teacher voice and agency within their work, with many not feeling they have influence even over the curriculum within their own classroom (Kolber, 2022). It is this lack of agency and voice that has typically been served by the union movement, but, with the existing unions supporting government mandated vaccines, this is an opportunity to highlight a point of difference.

This suggests that uberfication has come to the union movement. The ‘uberfication’ of education has most closely been explored through universities (Le Grange, 2020), but it can be seen in elements such as apps to support student cheating (Borgaonkar et al., 2020) and Casual Relief Teachers being available via a recruitment app (Classcover, 2022). In many of these examples, this uberfication is promoted by a third party organisation that promises increased services, with reduced costs. The TPAA fits this definition well: it is a an opaque organisation that is beholden to no-one (despite its claims to be member led, there is no evidence of this), which promises to provide a service that is of benefit to members, at a reduced cost. It should be noted that, as yet, there is no evidence of any benefit being provided to members or the education profession as a whole. Indeed, members of the TPAA must be questioning what they pay their money for – at the same time as the TPAA seeks to generate popular support for the anti-vax movement.

However, the actions of the TPAA also are a significant threat to the unions, and its members, in a number of ways. By being so closely aligned to openly taboo and challenging issues, they divert from the Union stance that looks to support mandates to keep their workers safe and bring into question this stance. In other words, they might even claim to be protecting workers – something that unions have always held as their own remit. In addition, the organisation’s existence is openly divisive, as membership to TPAA assumes, at the very least, a vaccine hesitancy, which in turn could be leveraged to tar traditional union members with this ideological brush. In this case, the industrial unions must differentiate themselves from these new political actors, drawing a line in the sand between themselves and TPAA’s position. The use of the word ‘union’ by TPAA could muddy the water about whose view is being presented. In short, by using the word union, they weaken the education union’s collective strength, and the collective strength of the union movement in Australia as a whole.

Internationally, the rise of associations such as the TPAA could be seen as the beginning of an attempt (or experiment) to de-centralise and marketise union movements by using divisive topics to create factions within the teaching profession. The likely outcome of this will be unions having less power to influence policy and further division within the teaching profession (West, 2022).

Conclusion

Education is a site where there appears to be constant, ongoing crises. At the time of writing, there is a current ‘teacher shortage crisis’ facing Australian teachers (again) as well as globally (Mitchell et al., 2022). Crisis has become a core part of the mediatisation of education and political actors are swift to leverage such crises for their own ends. We have discussed the anti-vaccination crisis within the context of education in Australia and analysed the way that various actors sought to make use of that crisis in order to promote their own political ideology. In the case of the media, the Wiembilla shootings were used in order to craft a narrative of the terrorists as anti-vaxxers and use that to drive education policy supporting the mandated vaccinations for all teachers. The main focus of this article, the TPAA, however, used the public interest in the vaccination mandates to create a crisis via digital astro-turfing, in order to weaken the union movement through uberfication. This is a small-scale study and further work is needed to better understand crisis as a process by which intermediaries gain relative power and how their use of crisis shapes power relations between education and education policymakers (Rawolle, 2010).

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith Heggart

Keith Heggart is an early career researcher with a focus on learning and instructional design, educational technology and civics and citizenship education. He is currently exploring the way that online learning platforms can assist in the formation of active citizenship amongst Australian youth. Keith is a former high school teacher, having worked as a school leader in Australia and overseas, in government and non-government sectors. In addition, he has worked as an Organiser for the Independent Education Union of Australia, and as an independent Learning Designer for a range of organisations.

Naomi Barnes

Naomi Barnes is a Senior Lecturer interested in how crisis influences education politics. With a specific focus on moral panics, she has demonstrated how online communication has influenced education politics in Australia, the US and the UK. She has analysed and developed network models to show the effect of moral panics on the Australian curriculum and how it is taught. Naomi is also regularly asked to comment on how Australian teachers should respond to perceived threats to Australian nationalism, identity, and democracy. Naomi lectures future teachers in Modern History, Civics and Citizenship and Writing Studies. She has worked for Education Queensland as a Senior Writer and has worked as a Secondary Humanities and Social Science teacher in the government, Catholic and Independent schooling sectors.

Steven Kolber

Steven Kolber is a Curriculum Writer at the Faculty of Education, within the University of Melbourne. He was a proud public school teacher for 12 years, being named a top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize. His most recent publication, ‘Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schooling: Perspectives from Australia’, co-edited with Keith Heggart explores these topics further. Steven has represented teachers globally for Education International, at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the OECDs Global Teaching Insights, and UNESCOs Teacher Task Force 2030.

Thomas Mahoney

Thomas Mahoney is a teacher and educator of secondary VCE Mathematics and Psychology students, currently completing a PhD in Educational Philosophy part time through Deakin University. His research currently revolves around the influence of dominant educational ideologies on teacher subjectivity. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which ideologies of neoliberalism and social efficiency contribute to limiting teacher agency and the teacher’s ability to engage educationally in schools.

Cameron Malcher

Cameron Malcher teaches English, Drama and EAL/D in NSW public high schoos. He has a Master’s in Educational Psychology from the University of Sydney and is currently undertaking a Master’s in TESOL at the University of Wollongong. Cameron has produced the Teachers’ Education Review Podcast since 2013, and his brief attempt at a PhD was on teachers’ engagement with podcasts and social media as professional learning activities, which he hopes to return to in the near future.