What on earth is a "softcot"? Google's no help.

portmanteau of left-CoT (which is pretty much all of the CoT crowd it seems :) and softcock (which is pretty much a synonym for them)

But all of the replies were informative so thank you to everyone for those

If any of you are looking for more sites to avoid, here are a couple. They are suffering trumphurt pretty badly. In fact just now they're not as bad as they were this morning (say 9-10 hours ago). Yesterday was really bad, very cringey.
https://www.smh.com.au/
https://www.abc.net.au/news