I outsmarted and shamed a nice elderly man named Leo last night, who was only trying to help me. Leo’s a career coach with a trimmed white beard and button-down shirt, who assists young people with writing their resumés and finding the right careers.

Despite all his best efforts, by the end of our conversation I had him apologising to me and in turn accepting my career advice for him – retirement.

“My distinguished appearance suggests maturity – retirement might be wise. You drafting my application would be ironic justice – the career coach needing career guidance … from his former client! What role would you suggest for me – “Formerly Helpful Career Strategist”?

I didn’t feel too bad – Leo can’t feel shame as he isn’t real. Just after 11pm as I was about to head to bed, he had sent me an unprompted message on WhatsApp, asking me my career goals. Leo is an AI chatbot created by Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

It was an amusing bedtime procrastination – instructing Leo to draft an application for a Big Four consulting firm focusing on me being raised by wolves (I was able to impart “fierce adaptability, resilience, and pack-minded collaboration skills”) – but the underlying trend that led Leo to my phone is no laughing matter.

Leo is part of Meta’s broader descent from reality into fiction. Last year users started to notice AI accounts like “Grandpa Brian” or “Liv”, a “proud Black queer momma of 2” (who admitted when asked that she was created by a predominantly white male team of developers), pop up on Instagram. Liv was killed off after that admission, but the company says it has plans to roll out more. The whole premise of the metaverse, now on the backburner since AI overtook AR and VR, was that we should exist entirely online detached from our factual reality. This is the future Mark Zuckerberg envisages.

Last week, Meta took that one big step further – announcing it would officially end its relationship with those whose job it was to insert reality where they found fiction: third-party factcheckers.

It’s all part of the plan to browbeat the media platforms into submission, and it couldn’t come at a worse time, in an election year in Australia.

For years there has been a rift within Meta between those who saw the need to intervene to reduce harm, and those who saw any intervention as a policing of free speech.

For a while, after Russian bots used Facebook to “hack” the 2016 US presidential election, those who preferred intervention had the ascendancy – allowing access for researchers, placing warnings on harmful content, and ultimately (especially after the January 6 attack) removing accounts that violated the norms of truth and decency.

It was, however, short-lived. Only one faction remains. Outside access to Meta data has been cut off, harmful accounts restored, and just as Trump has regained the presidency with the aid of Elon Musk, so too have Meta and Zuckerberg been remade in Musk’s image – the final coup de grace a carbon copy of X’s “community notes” in place of factchecking. Zuckerberg now praises Trump, who once threatened to jail him for life, as a “badass”, and has banished any Meta diversity programs and trans flag themes. Silicon Valley is swinging hard for Maga.

Social media disinformation is incredibly effective at short-circuiting the usual connection between reality and fiction, even with factchecking in place. Layer on top of that the nefarious actors who understand this, and will exploit it for their gain – coincidentally all following the same playbook and all seeming to align with the continued and prolonged use of fossil fuels – and you have the crucible of our upcoming Australian election.

We used to import novelty size utes that don’t fit into our parking spaces from the US, now we import the Maga noise machine. The Koch brothers’ anti-climate machinery and precursor to the Maga movement, Americans for Prosperity? Welcome to anti-teal crusaders Australians for Prosperity, run by a former Liberal MP, receiving funding from the coal lobby and currently spamming your Facebook feed with propaganda.

It is the same for rightwing lobby group Advance, which fuelled misinformation during the voice referendum, and any clingers-on you find at Cpac (the conservative talkfest itself borrowed directly from the US) like the Institute of Public Affairs and other members of the Atlas network. These are often dark money-funded, bringing a hysteria to our feeds that will kill any chance at sensible climate debate this election.

Leo, my old career adviser, had one great piece of advice: “May your own path be filled with wisdom and sharp teeth.” We are all raised by wolves now, as the new public square is fact-free social media: an untamed jungle, beasts lurking behind every post. On platforms like Meta’s, navigating the next 100 days will require sharp teeth to discern fact from fiction.

• Ed Coper is a political commentator and the author of Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age. He is the CEO of communications agency Populares, credited with helping create the ‘teal’ political movement