The official social media pages of the Liberal Party were briefly hacked with pornographic content on Wednesday, just hours after leader Sussan Ley gave a speech about the role of women in the party.
According to the Australian Financial Review, the hack took place at around midnight, and resulted in multiple images of nearly naked women being shared on the Liberal Party’s Facebook and Instagram Stories.
The images, which appear to be AI-generated, were shared to the pages’ combined 360,000 followers, with reports that the content doubled as advertisements for breast enlargement surgery.
Others, per AFR, included captions about where to find “viral and weird photos online” per AFR.
All of the posts were swiftly scrubbed from the pages soon after being shared.
A spokesperson for the Liberal Party said the images were the result of a “hack”, but it is not yet known who managed to infiltrate the official social media pages (or how).
“Overnight, the social media account of a contractor used by the Party was hacked leading to the posting of unauthorised material on the Liberal Party’s Meta accounts at around midnight,” the spokesperson said per Daily Mail.
“All material was removed within 10 minutes of it being posted and the matter was urgently raised with the Australian Cyber Security Centre and with Meta overnight.”
The spokesperson went on to apologise “for any offence caused” by the hack.
Ironically, it came just hours after Ley, in a speech to the National Press Club, spoke of increasing the representation of women in the Liberal Party.
It was Ley’s first major attempt to realign the party in the wake of its crushing election loss last month, which she said forced a “deeper look at the existential issues we face”.
One aspect of the party’s campaign that was “comprehensively rejected” by voters, Ley said, was its failure to appeal to women, which she said she will address by increasing the number of female candidates in the party.
“As the first woman leader of our Federal Party, let me send the clearest possible message: we need to do better, recruit better, retain better and support better,” Ley said.
“That is why I will work with every Division, as will my Parliamentary team, to ensure we preselect more women for the 2028 election.”
Ley said she was “agnostic” about how to achieve these goals — be it through quotas or other mechanisms — but said she was a “zealot” in making sure they are seen to.
Another goal no-doubt added to Ley’s Liberal Party to-do list? Stronger social media passwords.
Lead image: Sam Mooy/Getty Images
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