All my bestest bestest friends are invisible.

Within 24 hours of Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party winning national government in 2013, new anti-Abbott pages were sprouting all over Facebook – complete with thousands of followers. There were so many of these Abbott detesters fuming and spitting in Club Zuckerberg that it raised the question of how, with such vehement supporters, Labor still managed to achieve its worst electoral result in a century.

The AEC has not been flooded with protests over suspicious electoral results. Okay, one result did look fishy. But in that instance the Liberal candidate was the target of the rort and not the perpetrator. The answer to the mystery of the huge Facebook Anti Abbott Alliance is that it doesn’t exist. Or is at best a mere fraction of its supposed size, the rest of the numbers being made up by bought likes. It’s quite an industry.

Any casualty nurse will tell you that a sizeable number of gentlemen keep the local deli’s best salami packed in their trousers. Ladies have been known to exaggerate their assets too. Pretending to have more friends online than you really possess is just a variation on an old theme. But you have to know when to call time on the con.

The first weekend of Fairfax Media’s major new events division project, the Spectrum Now festival, has seen a disastrously low public turnout. The free Spectrum Playground event in Sydney’s Domain saw just a few hundred people attend at any point over over the weekend at a venue which has a capacity of tens of thousands.

Fairfax, rather than admit defeat, claimed that 9000 people had attended the event. As the article points out, they declined to reveal the arithmetic behind that figure.

Looking at the photos on the link, with vast spaces of human-free lawn, I could deduce only one explanation.

Everyone who works for Fairfax is related to this guy.

Thanks to Tim Blair for the original story. Mr Blair has another story of Fairfax and its incorporeal readership today.

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