ANALYSIS:
There is an unfortunate neatness to the online abuse faced by Jacinda Ardern.
She tried to fix social media and it ate her alive.
Ardern was the instigator of the Christchurch Call, the multi-national effort to try and establish basic standards by which social media companies will operate.
The Call stemmed from the livestreaming of the attack in Christchurch in 2019 - the same event that supercharged the baseline abuse of Ardern that began when she took office.
Images of Ardern in a hijab and the banning of assault rifles propelled her into the consciousness of the angry “don’t take my guns” keyboard warriors, predominantly in the United States but around the world.
The indignant fury was fertile ground when the pandemic arrived. Isolation and lockdowns coupled with distress and plain fear - social media use surged and the emotions that flowed across it were painful and raw.
For some it brought rise to the question of whether lockdowns were necessary, or if the virus was real, or if the vaccines were poison, or the many other things we asked ourselves and each other.
Our society has many people in many small pockets who have fought fruitless battles with the state, be it Family Court or 1080 or gender issues or race or colonisation or coercive government control or any other of the myriad disappointments that create a festering resentment.
Those small pockets include those oft-described as alt-right who pursue similar or connected issues but operate at the edge of the envelope.
In the rumble-tumble uncertain times of the pandemic those issues coalesced and the lines blurred as people stayed home and reached out online. Social media algorithms played matchmaker, linking the extreme to the mainstream and poisoning our discourse.
What people stood for gave way to what they stood against and Ardern became the figurehead on which that anger, fear and resentment could be focused.
That’s not to say there weren’t issues with Ardern’s government. There are issues with every government - that’s why they all eventually get voted out.
But the issues which arose became intermingled with that figurehead to the point where they were the same.
“Jabcinda”, the anti-vaxxers called Ardern, along with less polite variations on that theme.
Almost all of the abuse can’t be printed by the media - we are governed by professional bodies and standards that prohibit what social media does as a matter of course.
During the course of this arose conspiracy theories which are divorced from reality. And yet people believe.
They believe there are tiny machines in the Pfizer vaccine (there are not) or that the government lies about vaccination injuries (doing so would require an extraordinary conspiracy of which no evidence exists) or that there are hidden vaccination deaths or that politicians take backhanders from drug companies to push the pandemic or that this is all being manipulated by some controlling elite.
They believe many, many things which are not true and look at you as if you’re mad for not believing too.
Among those conspiracy theories are fragments of ugly intent and these are trafficked along those pathways that increasingly connect the extreme to the mainstream.
There are those who believe Ardern became or was a man while in office.
They circulate photographs - one in particular - they believe proves this.
This ties in with transphobic rhetoric which now flows freely to a mainstream audience. There are those who say the media is not to be believed or trusted who then provide alternate forms of information, warped to suit their purposes.
The idea that government has been bought off degrades trust in politicians. That serves the purposes of those who would tear those institutions down.
Sanjana Hattotuwa of The Disinformation Project quoted Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa who spoke of how technology had brought extremism to politics and damaged “facts, truth, trust”.
She described those as necessary for a “shared reality”, without which “we cannot have democracy”.
We have been on this path for some time. The abuse faced by Ardern went well beyond that aimed at Sir John Key but he, too, was also attacked in awful ways.
If you search Twitter now you’ll find Key targeted with anti-Semitic tropes back in the days before Elon Musk downgraded content moderation.
We know Isis used social media to recruit followers it turned to weapons.
The New Lynn attacker was one of those. We know the Christchurch attacker interacted online with those who shared his hatred and then livestreamed his assaults.
We know Cambridge Analytica hijacked and exploited social media data to manipulate public voting patterns.
We know Russian disinformation campaigns, almost as far back as a decade ago, exploited the openness of the internet to sow seeds of discontent among those distrustful of vaccination.
What a gift that intelligence operation became when the pandemic hit.
In an address to the United Nations last year Ardern said: “We are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly”.
It’s a challenge, she said, but “we cannot ignore it”. “To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value”.
She asked how wars end if those fighting believe they are legally and morally right to do so?
How do you tackle climate change if people don’t believe it exists? How do you uphold human rights in the face of “dangerous rhetoric and ideology”?
This continuum on which we sit impacts on our way of life. It has a corrosive effect on our ability to function as a society. It is rust to the machinery of democracy. Whoever wins this year’s election will be dealing with the same problem.
It also serves to isolate our leaders. One factor in New Zealand that forged a bond between the ruled and the rulers was accessibility. Everybody knew where Sir Rob Muldoon went when he wasn’t at Parliament and some weren’t averse to dropping by.
A journalist at the British newspaper, the Sunday Times, was astounded during Helen Clark’s time in power when he discovered that the Prime Minister’s home phone number - and address - was in the White Pages.
In the recent, excellent, Both Sides Nows political interview podcast (by university students Finn Ross and Eve McCallum), Ross spoke of interviewing former Prime Minister Jim Bolger.
“It speaks to the access we have to politicians. We were able to just go around, he was offering us tea, to stay for lunch. We could have just been any joker that walked off the street.”
Ardern will require police protection for some time. It is likely she will need to head overseas for a period. Plans for Waitangi Day changed to accommodate security concerns and shopping mall walkarounds this election looked unlikely.
And it impacts on who our future leaders will be. There will be those young people - of whatever political persuasion - who saw in Ardern someone to emulate, and who have now seen that comes with a cost.
Broadly, New Zealand has been well-served by those who lead us.
If the venom and vitriol is enough to dissuade just one future Prime Minister - Labour, National, Te Paati Maori or whichever party - from entering politics, that’s a terrible toll.
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