If there is one hard lesson we in New Zealand know all too well, it’s that when hate spreads online, it doesn’t stay there.
There’s an information war going on in the world right now. And we are losing.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump, supported by an army of bots, grifters, liars, and complicit and compromised politicians on both sides of the aisle, have managed to aim true and strike a blow to the heart of liberal democracy and the rules-based international order.
Right now on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), its owner Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance are signaling intent to defy increasingly strident court orders. Their weapons of choice in this war are data, the widespread manipulation of public opinion, and the use of internet mobs to attack critics.
Liberal democracies like our own here in New Zealand – and like the one that the United States was until very recently – are extremely vulnerable to information warfare. I know because I have been running a programme that educates people to apply skills that have been proven effective in countering disinformation. These aren’t regulatory approaches, but rather techniques that everyone needs in order to “do their own research” –and that all institutions need to manage a complex information environment.
In doing this, I’ve been fortunate to work with a variety of funders, from pre-Musk Twitter to the New Zealand government – and most recently the US Embassy in New Zealand. Following the inauguration of Donald Trump and his chaos-inducing executive orders, we mutually agreed to terminate the grant funding our A Bit Sus Pacific Media programme. The independence of our education programme and our commitment to the privacy of our students made the arrangement unviable for us. And the Embassy’s obligation to follow the orders of Donald Trump made it unviable for them.
New Zealand’s laudable commitment to freedom of expression, of the press, and of association leave us reasonably reluctant to fight back in ways that protect our political and social cohesion. This reluctance is present even when we know that the attack is coming from nation states whose interests don’t align with ours or from oligarchs intent on steamrolling our democratic processes and institutions.
At this moment, New Zealand is in a place of extreme vulnerability. Even now we can see online the drumming up of support for our own version of DOGE (the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, which in reality is a billionaire-led impoundment of tax dollars and money Congressionally allocated to ensure the public good) which on our shores would also represent a Treaty violation that would resonate through our social fabric in ways hard to imagine.
Led by Musk, but devolving to his online swarm, any person or organisation who happens to meet their glance is at risk. The University of Auckland has been the most recent target of this kind of attack, but they aren’t the only victim, and they will not be the last.
These are the tactics of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
We are a small country whose economic prosperity and security relies on a stable rules-based international order. Without that, we are vulnerable. Facing the elephant in the room – the sudden collapse of the United States out of liberal democracy – compels us to reassess what we are doing to prepare our people and our institutions in this war of information.
The attacks from people like Musk are not based on truth. They often contain a kernel of fact, but the big lie is embedded in the framing – that is, the lens through which we see the world and understand it. Disinformation actors work to build frames as narratives through which they can channel their stories and manipulate public opinion.
As someone who has spent the past few years teaching the kinds of skills that internet users can deploy to avoid falling prey to disinformation, I frequently get asked why these tactics cannot be used for good, to protect people’s freedoms and build support for pro-social issues like the protection of the environment.
The answer is that false frames can be built in ways that are simply more compelling than real life. Conspiracy, hate, and constant drama are the hallmarks of how disinformation actors pull people in and keep them engaged. They leave those enmeshed in these narratives riled up and energised for the next part of the story and not inclined to engage in the often routine and plodding work of creating change through the institutions and structures of a democracy – or a Treaty partnership, for that matter.
You can see the result in the so-called “Blue MAGA” movement, a Democratic Party mirror-image of the movement Trump built. While the target of the narrative is different – usually Republicans and the familiar red-hatted MAGA adherents – the shape and impact of the hate is the same. Hate is hate and it cannot be twisted to good purpose.
And that’s the key to countering disinformation while respecting the vital freedoms we hope to continue to enjoy. The evidence is quite compelling that what works to rein in these attacks and support resilience to them across the population has nothing to do with censorship, restricting freedom of expression, or even regulating online platforms. Those solutions are not viable and are rapidly failing even in Europe.
Rather, investment and energy placed into a programme of warning people about false narratives, teaching people how to fact check themselves, and supporting high standards of discourse and behavior – especially from political leaders – is what works.
Those who lived through the great conflagrations of the 20th century are almost all gone now. New Zealand suffered terribly through those, when all hell broke loose in the world.
Today, Donald Trump’s unhinged threats against Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza are not idle, and it would be irresponsible of us and our leaders to assume they are – or to assume that the consequences of an expansionary America would not come to rest at least in part on our shores.
We cannot allow ourselves to lose the information war. Maintaining the legitimacy and health of our democracy is the most important issue we face. All others rest upon it.
The world is at war again now and it is unlikely to remain online. If there is one hard lesson we in New Zealand know all too well, it’s that when hate spreads online, it doesn’t stay there.
Refusal to secure our information sphere is a refusal to secure our country. It’s time that all of our political parties face up to that and act. We don’t have much time left before it really is too late.
