WELCOME TO THE GREY ZONE
New Zealanders have a reputation for being very trusting. With our generally moderate political discourse and openness, we could easily be used as a test bed for the kind of disinformation campaigns that have been so successful overseas, a concerned senior New Zealand government official told me before the last election.
He had in mind an operation such as Cambridge Analytica, which harvested personal data on Facebook and used it for targeted but distorted political advertising. The company worked for the Vote Leave campaign in the UK, which influenced the Brexit vote with racist claims that the vote could lead to millions of Turks moving to Britain. (Turkey is not in the European Union, and the chances of it ever being a member have plummeted.)
His anxiety was based on the assumption that the stories we tell ourselves about sane and sensible Aotearoa are at least partly true. We have our extremists – I constantly hear from Kiwi followers of the crazed QAnon cult – but on the other hand, when David Hood, a data analyst at the University of Otago, examined political tweets in five countries – New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Sri Lanka and the US – he noted our tendency towards
