Hayden Donnell
Wellington, August 16, 2020
The announcement (on Tuesday night of August 11, 2020) that Auckland was going into lockdown for a second time was met with a deluge of conspiracy theories and misinformation, including from several prominent political figures.
That infodemic is forcing journalists to confront the question of how they should report on the rapid rise of social media-fuelled conspiracy movements.
In the hours after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that Auckland would be moving back into lockdown (from midday on Wednesday, August 12, 2020), Billy Te Kahika Jr did something that he had done many times before, and switched on Facebook Live.
False proclaim
The New Zealand Public Party leader launched into a familiar refrain.
“We have been saying for over a month now this lockdown was coming. We did say it would be the second week of August,” he said.
Te Kahika’s insinuation that this week’s lockdown was planned in advance was false.
Ms Ardern and Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield have said that they found out about the new Covid-19 outbreak roughly five hours before the lockdown announcement.
There is no evidence that they are lying, and plenty they’re telling the truth.
In the past, theories like that of Te Kahika might have been more easily sidelined. But the blues musician from Whangarei has built up a substantial following on social media since he started posting screeds of misinformation and conspiracy theories during the last lockdown in March.
Growing audience
Thanks to what he calls his research, his Facebook audience has grown from a few hundred to more than 20,000. His New Zealand Public Party meetings have been met with packed halls.
On Tuesday, Te Kahika’s theory spread rapidly online.
It was echoed by celebrities, including the Australian chef Pete Evans, who said the lockdown was a “scam”, in a post that linked back to the New Zealand Public Party.
Popular Instagram influencer Zoe Fuimaono, who goes by the handle @blessedindoubles, implied that the new health measures were helping usher in military rule.
Gerry Brownlee accused
Even National Party Deputy Leader Gerry Brownlee was accused of engaging in conspiratorial thinking, after hinting that the government had known more about the resurgence of Covid-19 than it was letting on in a press conference on Wednesday.
These sorts of ideas became so prevalent that Ms Ardern had to address them multiple times at press conferences on Wednesday.
“I have heard a suggestion that we may have had this information earlier than we had said. There is no reason why we would ever do that. I do worry that those kinds of theories do nothing to support what needs to be collective action from all of us,” she said.
‘Nonsense allegations’
That afternoon, Mr Ardern characterised Mr Brownlee’s implied allegations as “nonsense.”
The media was also quick to cast a sceptical eye over the outbreak of conspiratorial thinking, with RNZ’s Kim Hill repeatedly bringing up Brownlee’s claims during a withering interview with National Party leader Judith Collins on Thursday’s Morning Report.
A group of 50 health experts signed an open letter urging politicians to stop undermining public health messages on Covid-19.
But even if it was strongly condemned by the government, medical professionals and the media, the boil-up of misinformation highlights a problem facing authorities as they try to stamp out Covid-19 for a second time.
They are now essentially dealing with two parallel crises: the virus and the maelstrom of misinformation surrounding it, which the WHO has termed an infodemic.
Recent news reports have hinted at the sheer scale of ill-informed, and often conspiratorial belief driving that infodemic.
The QAnon Theory
An internal Facebook report leaked to NBC showed that the social media platform hosts thousands of pages linked to the conspiracy theory QAnon, with millions of followers between them. Even a recently-elected Republican member of the US House of Representatives is associated with QAnon.
Widespread conspiratorial thinking has fed into that country’s disastrous Covid response, helping to undermine public health messages.
In an article on Thursday (August 13, 2020), Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva argued that comments like Mr Brownlee’s risk moving New Zealand in the same direction.
“Making ominous references to ‘interesting facts’… runs the risk of undermining public buy-in for a longer lockdown, should one be required. As the US has torn itself apart over a politicised Covid response as deaths shoot upwards, we have patted ourselves on the back. Such complacency on the health front has proved to be a mirage – we can only hope the quality of our political discourse does not similarly evaporate,” he said in his article.
Mr Brownlee has since backtracked on his comments, saying it was not his intention to play into the hands of conspiracy theorists.
Even if Brownlee did not mean to aid those groups, modelling from Te Pūnaha Matatini shows that the latest lockdown has been met with a spike in online disinformation.
Online misinformation
Despite the increasing real-world harm caused by conspiracy theories, many media outlets devote few resources to covering online misinformation, and those that do are often guilty of delivering uncritical coverage.
Nelson’s Mainland TV has been criticised for airing the discredited documentary Plandemic in full, despite it containing an abundance of falsehoods and misinformation about Covid-19.
A Gisborne Herald report on one of Te Kahika’s meetings from July 8 was simply headlined ‘Global plandemic.’ It lead with the startling header: “Labour ‘communists’ Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield are complicit in a global agenda of state control that involves construction of the coronavirus plandemic.”
“New Zealand Public Party founder and lay minister Billy Te Kahika made that claim to a packed room at Waikanae Surf Life Saving Club on Saturday night.”
Outlandish, without context
The Raglan Chronicle struck a similar tone in its coverage of one of those meetings, spelling out that many of his more outlandish beliefs without surrounding context, under the headline ‘Post-lockdown Billy Te Kahika event attracts many‘.
Stuff’s Charlie Mitchell, who recently wrote a lengthy feature on Te Kahika’s rise, said that he had to wrestle with some ethical questions before embarking on the story.
He had to weigh two competing ideals: his desire not to give a platform to information that is false or misleading, and his imperative to cover matters of public interest in a way that is fair, and gives people a right of reply.
“In this case, those two ideas are in conflict with each other. You cannot really have both. To accurately characterise what Billy Te Kahika believes, you have to by definition have to repeat information that is false or at best unsubstantiated.”
Mr Mitchell decided not to take an adversarial approach with his feature, opting instead to put Te Kahika’s beliefs in proper context.
“We did not go in all guns blazing, prosecuting a case against conspiracy theories or Te Kahika specifically. We just wanted to recognise that these conspiracy theories exist and if you want to understand why you have to listen to these people and talk to them in a way that is not judgemental, which is a very fine line to walk.”
David Farrier’s approach
Documentary maker and journalist David Farrier advocates a similar approach to dealing with conspiracy theorists.
“I think being kind and open to these people is important and also just showing there are shades of grey. You can talk to your friend that’s into that stuff say, ‘Yeah, I do not always trust institutions and the government either, I do not always think that they have my best interests at heart, but where I start to become a bit sceptical is that I am confident that 5G towers are not being installed to spread Covid-19. Chip away, slowly,” he said.
Farrier keeps tabs on the rise of movements like QAnon in New Zealand through his blog Webworm. He regularly features interviews with conspiracy theory experts on how to debunk misinformation, and deter people from falling into online rabbit holes in the first place.
But that is not enough, he said. He wanted more media attention to be devoted to conspiracy movements, as they make a social media-enabled move from the fringes into the mainstream.
“I would love to see this stuff that we are talking about going out to a much wider audience. I think that we need to be talking about this stuff on a much grander scale, and contextualising it, because you cannot just report, ‘Hey, a bunch of people out there believe that 5G is giving us cancer or it’s actually going to give us Covid-19’. We have to explain why this stuff is happening, why we are hearing all this dialogue. We have to critically pull it apart so hopefully we can stop it from spreading further,” he said.
Hayden Donnell is Producer of Mediawatch for Radio New Zealand. The above Report and Pictures have been published under a Special Arrangement with www.rnz.co.nz
