The lecture, titled “Reclaiming Humanity: Placing People at the Centre of a Fractured Rights and Economic Architecture,” ranged across war, extreme economic inequality, the erosion of democratic norms, and the accelerating deployment of artificial intelligence. Foster’s central thesis was deceptively simple but profound in its implications: the founding promise of the human rights movement, established in the aftermath of the Second World War, was that every person carries an inherent dignity that no state, market, or machine can take away. Yet that promise, he argued, is not fading through neglect or accident. It is being dismantled deliberately, system by system, with the human being replaced at the centre of each system by something else — a data point, a market, a weapon, an exception.

For an audience gathered in the Elizabeth Jolley Lecture Theatre on Curtin’s Perth campus, joined by thousands more streaming the event online, the setting was fitting. The Annual Human Rights Lecture has spent a decade drawing global figures and national leaders to Western Australia to interrogate the most pressing ethical questions of the era. This year’s iteration carried particular weight, marking both ten years of the lecture series and ten years of the Honourable Michael D. Kirby AC CMG, the former High Court justice and one of Australia’s most celebrated judicial figures, serving as Patron of Curtin’s Centre for Human Rights Education. Kirby’s decade of patronage has coincided with a period in which the global human rights framework, built through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international covenants, has faced mounting pressure from authoritarian resurgence, geopolitical fragmentation, and technological disruption.

Foster’s own trajectory gives his argument unusual moral force. As a footballer, he represented Australia at international level, and as a broadcaster he became one of the most recognizable voices in Australian sport. But it was his advocacy — most famously his campaign that helped secure the release of Bahraini refugee footballer Hakeem al-Araibi from detention in Thailand in 2019 — that transformed him into a figure respected far beyond sport. The al-Araibi case became a global campaign spanning governments, sporting bodies, and grassroots movements, and it demonstrated something Foster has never stopped arguing: that sport, precisely because of its enormous cultural reach and emotional power, can be one of the most effective vehicles for advancing human rights in the modern world.

In his lecture, Foster turned that lens toward the emerging frontiers of rights in the digital age. Artificial intelligence, he told the audience, has raised the stakes of an old question to urgent new heights. AI systems are being trained on the collective output of humanity — art, journalism, scholarship, conversation — extracted without consent or compensation from the very people whose creative labor makes the technology possible. At the same time, algorithmic systems are increasingly making decisions that determine human fates: who receives credit, who is granted bail, who is flagged for surveillance, who gets hired or dismissed. These decisions, Foster argued, are stripped of judgment and mercy, the distinctly human qualities that legal and ethical systems were designed to embed in consequential choices. The risk is not merely that machines will err, but that the moral vocabulary required to contest those errors will disappear from the decision-making process entirely.

The lecture situated these technological concerns within a broader diagnosis of global fracture. Wars continue to be prosecuted with devastating consequences for civilians, humanitarian law is routinely flouted, and extreme inequality has concentrated wealth and power at levels that hollow out the democratic institutions meant to hold economic power accountable. Foster’s argument was that these are not separate crises to be addressed by separate disciplines — security experts on war, economists on inequality, technologists on AI — but interconnected symptoms of a single underlying shift: the displacement of the human person from the centre of the systems that organize collective life. When markets are treated as ends rather than instruments, when data becomes a commodity detached from its human origins, and when machines are granted de facto authority over human outcomes, the person ceases to be the subject of the system and becomes merely its raw material.

Yet the lecture was not a counsel of despair. “Everything I describe has been built by human choices and can therefore be rebuilt,” Foster told the audience, a line that functioned as the hinge of his entire address. The systems producing injustice are artifacts of design, not laws of nature, and the same human agency that constructed them retains the power to reconstruct them differently. That reframing carries a practical implication for the human rights movement: advocacy must extend beyond naming violations to interrogating the design of the systems themselves — the economic incentives, the technical architectures, the legal exceptions — that make violations possible in the first place. It also implies that the defenders of human dignity must be present in the rooms where those systems are designed, from AI laboratories to trade negotiations to the governance structures of global sport.

Sport, fittingly, occupied a significant place in the address. Foster has long argued that football, as the world’s most popular game, operates on a scale that few institutions can match, touching billions of people across every continent and every level of society. That reach brings responsibilities: the sport’s governing bodies face persistent scrutiny over labor conditions, particularly around mega-events; over discrimination and abuse faced by players; over the rights of migrant workers; and over the growing entanglement of elite competition with state actors whose human rights records are deeply contested. The future of human rights in sport, Foster suggested, will depend on whether the game’s institutions choose to treat rights as a public-relations concern or as a structural obligation woven into how competitions are awarded, venues are built, and athletes are protected.

The response from Curtin’s academic leadership underscored the lecture’s significance. Associate Professor Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Director of the Centre for Human Rights Education, said it was an honour to have Foster deliver this year’s lecture, noting that as conflict, economic uncertainty, and the ethical challenges of AI test human rights, the address highlighted the need to keep people, dignity, and justice at the centre of decision making. Curtin’s Centre for Human Rights Education has built a national reputation for scholarship and teaching that connects human rights theory to lived experience, and the annual lecture series has become one of its flagship public engagements, deliberately placing academic expertise in conversation with advocates, activists, and the wider community.

Curtin Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne framed the tenth anniversary as a milestone reflecting the university’s longstanding commitment to promoting informed discussion, critical thinking, and action on human rights issues. In an era when universities worldwide face pressure over their role in public debate, Curtin’s decade-long investment in a dedicated human rights lecture series — and its retention of a standing centre for human rights education under the decade-long patronage of Michael Kirby — signals an institutional judgment that these questions deserve sustained, rigorous, and public treatment rather than occasional attention.

The timing of the lecture could hardly be more consequential. The negotiation of international frameworks governing artificial intelligence is accelerating, with governments, industry, and civil society contending over questions of data ownership, algorithmic accountability, and the compensation of creators whose work trains commercial systems. Meanwhile, armed conflicts across multiple regions have strained international humanitarian law to breaking points, and the widening gap between extreme wealth and mass precarity continues to fuel political instability in established democracies. Into this landscape, Foster’s lecture offered both a diagnosis and a challenge: the tools of the human rights tradition, forged in the mid-twentieth century, remain the most comprehensive framework for protecting dignity — but only if advocates are willing to renovate that framework for the systems of the twenty-first.

What emerged from the evening at the Elizabeth Jolley Lecture Theatre was ultimately a call to agency. A former athlete who once measured his contribution in goals and caps has become a voice arguing for something larger: that humanity is not an optional consideration in the design of economies, technologies, and institutions, but the very standard by which they must be judged. Ten years of Curtin’s lecture series have provided a platform for such arguments; the next ten, on the evidence of this year’s address, will test whether societies choose to act on them.

Populist parties, known for their anti-establishment rhetoric and simplistic messaging, stand out in this digital ecosystem by emphasizing contentious and polarizing topics. The study distinctly shows that these parties do not randomly engage with controversial issues; rather, they strategically foreground wedge issues that maximize emotional response and fissures within the electorate. Wedge issues—such as immigration, national identity, and climate policy—serve as critical vectors for messaging designed to stir conflict and distrust. By harnessing these topics, populists push public debate away from pragmatic policy solutions toward existential questions about societal values and governance.

Central to the populist playbook identified by the research is the use of anti-liberal language that frames political contests not as debates among equals, but as a binary struggle of “us versus them.” This antagonistic narrative framework is more than mere rhetoric; it structurally simplifies complex policy matters into stark value clashes, mobilizing followers around perceived in-group loyalty and demonizing outsiders or political elites. The “Them Against Us” paradigm resonates deeply on digital platforms, where rapid message dissemination and algorithmic amplification fuel echo chambers and ideological silos.

In dissecting the social media content, the researchers found that apart from frequency, populist parties’ framing of wedge issues typically strips away nuance, portraying adversaries as threats not only to specific policies but to the very fabric of liberal democracy itself. This process of “weaponizing” divisive subjects turns electoral communication into a battleground that challenges foundational democratic principles, such as tolerance, inclusivity, and institutional legitimacy. Consequently, the digital discourse around these issues often escalates beyond political disagreement to delegitimization of opposing voices and institutions.

The methodological rigor of the study lies in its comprehensive content analysis approach, involving the coding of thematic elements, linguistic styles, and tonal registers across thousands of Facebook posts. This quantitative text analysis allows the researchers to systematically observe patterns of communication, deciphering not only what topics are broached but how they are framed to achieve maximal psychological and social impact. This empirical foundation strengthens the claims about populist strategies transcending national contexts to present a cohesive digital communication style.

Moreover, the timing of the study during the 2024 elections adds critical contextual dimensions. War in Ukraine intensified geopolitical anxieties, which populist actors adeptly exploited by linking broader international conflicts with immigration debates and national sovereignty concerns. At the same time, the persistent prominence of climate change as a contentious issue provided fertile ground for messages that cast environmental policies as threats to economic security or identity, thereby deepening societal fault lines. This interplay of crises underscores how populist parties adapt their messaging to multifaceted and evolving political landscapes.

The digital platforms themselves play a pivotal role in shaping the visibility and traction of such messages. Algorithms prioritize engagement, often amplifying content that provokes outrage or controversy, phenomena that populist parties strategically capitalize on. Simultaneously, the format constraints of social media—favoring brevity and emotional appeals—favor the oversimplification and polarization inherent in the populist communication style. This dynamic creates an ecosystem where nuanced discussions on complex topics are marginalized, and divisive narratives dominate.

Professor Magin and her colleagues underscore the broader implications of these findings for democratic societies. By steering the public conversation away from evidence-based problem-solving toward identity-driven conflicts and institutional skepticism, populist digital communication erodes the deliberative capacities essential for healthy political processes. This “illiberal” style not only polarizes electorate groups but also threatens the resilience of liberal democratic governance, as it encourages the rejection of core democratic norms and openness.

Another striking insight from the research is the metaphorical use of migration policy as a “Trojan horse,” wherein seemingly policy-oriented discussions mask deeper assaults on the liberal democratic order. By framing immigrants and minorities as existential threats, populist actors compel societies to question the inclusiveness and openness that underpin democratic pluralism. Such strategic narrative conflation reveals the sophisticated and deliberate nature of digital populist messaging, calibrated to provoke anxiety and defensiveness.

The research thus provides a cautionary lens through which to view the digital transformations of electoral politics. The findings highlight the urgent need for democratic societies to better understand and counteract the mechanisms by which social media facilitates the spread of illiberal populist discourse. This may include fostering media literacy, enhancing algorithmic transparency, and developing platform policies that mitigate the amplification of divisive and misleading content.

In sum, the study “Weaponizing Wedge Issues: Strategies of Populism and Illiberalism in European Election Campaigning on Facebook” delivers comprehensive evidence that populist parties across Europe systematically amplify controversial issues using antagonistic and anti-liberal rhetoric to influence voter perceptions and behavior. These digital strategies, embedded in the structural logic of social media, play a profound role in shaping electoral dynamics and challenge the future integrity of democratic debate. As populism continues to evolve alongside technology, understanding its digital manifestations becomes a critical frontier of political communication scholarship.

As electoral campaigns increasingly unfold in the online sphere, the importance of scrutinizing how political actors manipulate digital platforms cannot be overstated. The nuanced content analysis conducted by Magin et al. serves as a vital resource for academics, policymakers, and the public, illuminating the urgent challenges facing democracies striving to maintain open, inclusive, and constructive political discourse in the digital age.

Subject of Research: People

Article Title: Weaponizing Wedge Issues: Strategies of Populism and Illiberalism in European Election Campaigning on Facebook

News Publication Date: 26-Aug-2025

Web References:
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/10718
http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.10718

References:
Haßler, J., Magin, M., Russmann, U., Wurst, A., Balaban, D., Baranowski, P., Jensen, J., Kruschinski, S., Lappas, G., Machado, S., Novotná, M., Marcos-García, S., Petridis, I., Rožukalne, A., Sebestyén, A., & von Nostitz, F. (2025). Weaponizing Wedge Issues: Strategies of Populism and Illiberalism in European Election Campaigning on Facebook. Media and Communication, 13, Article 10718.

Keywords:
Populism, social media, Facebook, wedge issues, political communication, European Parliament elections, digital campaigning, anti-liberal rhetoric, political polarization, democratic erosion, migration policy, content analysis