Act leader David Seymour suggested ‘bots’ drove ‘fake submissions’ against his Regulatory Standards Bill

By Ella Stewart of RNZ

Act leader David Seymour has claimed 99.5% of the submissions received on the Regulatory Standards Bill were created using “bots”.

The Ministry for Regulation received approximately 23,000 submissions regarding a discussion document about the bill in January.

In summarising the feedback, it found 88% of submitters opposed the proposed regulations, and 0.33% supported or partially supported them.

But in an interview on this week’s episode of 30 with Guyon Espiner, the newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister claimed most of the opposing submissions weren’t valid.

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“You’re smart enough to know that those 23,000 submissions, 99.5% of them, were because somebody figured out how to make a bot make fake submissions that inflated the numbers,” Seymour said.

The figures quoted were “meaningless” and represented nothing more than somebody “running a smart campaign with a bot”.

David Seymour claims 99.5% of submissions were created using bots. Photo / Mark Mitchell

When asked what evidence Seymour had that the submissions were fake, he said it’s because “we’ve looked at them. Because we know what the contents of them is.”

In a subsequent written statement to RNZ, Seymour said he was referring to “online campaigns” that generate “non-representative samples” that don’t reflect public opinion.

How the submissions worked

In a statement, Ministry for Regulation deputy chief executive policy Andrew Royle would not address Seymour’s claims about bots directly.

Royle said the ministry undertook a “robust process” to analyse all of the submissions received.

“Our approach was carefully designed to reflect all submissions in the final analysis, noting there were many similar points made across most of the submissions,” he said.

The ministry’s summary shows its process included a “qualitative” analysis of about 1000 individual submissions. Group submissions and submissions over 10,000 words were read separately. The rest were summarised using AI.

There was nothing in the report about bots or other interference in the submissions process.

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Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago Andrew Geddis said the use of the word “bots” was disparaging.

“I think he’s using bots in that kind of colloquial sense, which is an incredibly dismissive way to refer to individual New Zealanders taking the time to actually engage with his proposal.

“If he means some sort of artificial intelligence, computer-generated filling out of the forms without any human intervention, that would have been reported to him by his officials. There was no such report.”

ActionStation director Kassie Hartendorp said Seymour was trying to discredit any opposition to his views.

“If he presents some evidence that there were bots involved, and there’s probably ways to be able to do that, if he presents evidence, then fine. But otherwise, it just seems like an outlandish claim that isn’t matching up with reality.”

ActionStation and other campaigning organisations from across the political spectrum have previously created templates to help people write submissions.

Hartendorp said those tools were not bots and they were meant to make the submissions process more accessible.

“The purpose of those submission tools is to be able to make it as clear and simple as possible, so that people, who might not ever have submitted before, or who don’t have much time, can be involved with the democratic process.”

Clerk of the House of Representatives Dr David Wilson said he wasn’t able to respond to Seymour’s claims as the consultation in January was run by the Ministry for Regulation, but said there are protections in place against “bots” during a select committee process.

Similar claims about the impact of automated software were made during the submissions process on the Treaty Principles Bill in January, which attracted more than 300,000 submissions, but no evidence was found to support any such interference.

“Our cybersecurity people were not aware that any of the submissions were made that way, and they do have security in place to alert them to if that was happening,” Wilson said.

-RNZ