The Voice campaign was infected with disinformation. Who's in charge of inoculating Australians against lies? After it was resoundingly rejected in Saturday's referendum, the Voice will never be heard by white Australia. For the great many First Nations people who voted for it, theirs is an unhappy burden: How will they explain to their children and grandchildren why the rest of Australia took the decision that it did?

This set-back to reconciliation, however, is all of ours to share. It will be picked at and picked at, and fester long after the confections of the campaign are forgotten. Only with the passage of time will scholars and historians give the plebiscite its true context.

Of the many lessons of Saturday's outcome, there is one which must be more urgently addressed. And that is our appetite for mistruths: Postal votes are a way for the Australian Electoral Commission to "rig the referendum". Pencils are distributed at polling stations so votes can be changed. Since 1973, the Constitution has been invalid, so the referendum is invalid too ...

The task is overwhelming. In the lead-up to the referendum, the AEC was being tagged in more than 100,000 social media posts a week.

It rebuffed claims the AEC was coercing Yes votes from dementia sufferers. When one bloke claimed "the fix is in" because his elderly mum (not on the roll) received a notice she had successfully voted, the AEC asked to see it: "We obviously don't send every voter a letter to simply confirm they've voted."

Elsewhere, you could only imagine the sigh emitted from the poor soul in Ekin-Smyth's team assigned to respond to a claim ballot papers carried a secret "Rothchild & Freemasons" imprint. "It's called the official mark," they wrote, dryly. "It's a requirement in the legislation." ... read on

Brexit's sludge of disinformation. First, the departure from the European Union cost the UK as much as 6 per cent of its overall economic value.

Second, we know that the 2016 Brexit referendum was polluted by a sludge of disinformation, much of which urged the UK to split from the continent.

It will never be known how many people were swayed by the lies. But bearing in mind the wafer-thin pro-Brexit majority — a margin of 1,269,501 in a country of 65 million people — it seems likely enough they made a material difference.    (read on)