Politicians and online abuse

A post by PaulL, regular commenter and sometime poster.

I see a lot of noise about the attacks on our outgoing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and whether they contributed to or were the cause of her resigning. Despite the Prime Minister explicitly saying that’s not the reason, we have many journalists deciding to ignore her statements and declare it to be the reason.

I’ve been mulling on the nature and volume of online abuse. I suspect that overall our Prime Minister has found the job very hard over the past few years (and legitimately so – a pandemic is a difficult time, and the whole government worked very very hard). It surely is harder if, after all that work, you see your popularity sliding, and you go from a position where most appearances involved congratulations to one where you cannot pre-announce where you’ll be for fear of noisy protests. The online abuse I’d expect is part of that overall picture, even if not a standalone reason.

The question I’m considering today is whether the online abuse that the Prime Minister has suffered is unique, is misogynistic, and is worse than others have suffered in the past. I’ll note that I’m not sure it necessarily matters whether it’s worse – all abuse is bad, although it is also to some extent part of the territory of politics. I’m not sure calculating degrees of abuse is useful other than in some abstract sense.

My take on this has a few elements.

Firstly, I think all Prime Ministers have come in for abuse, as have many other senior politicians. It has been a constant, going back to Rob Muldoon and the Springbok tours, the water front strikes, or Ruth Richardson and the mother of all budgets. There have been any number of periods in which politicians are introducing change, or championing particular policies that some people don’t like, and that resulted in abuse. It is definitely not new that politicians are abused.

Secondly, I think the volume and nature of this abuse is increasing over time. So it’s likely to be true for any Prime Minister that you could say they’ve suffered more abuse than any Prime Minister before them that pursued similar policies. Social media and the online world gives people far more reach than ever before – something you might have said in private or down the pub you can now shout to the world. You can also find like minded individuals you can club together with, and believe that what you’re doing and saying is normal (even when it’s actually quite mean spirited and impolite).

Next, the nature of COVID and the response to it has impacted a set of people in quite severe ways. That response was a policy choice by the government – I believe it was possible to get the policy outcomes without quite so much targeted impact on individuals. Impacting upon people’s jobs through vaccine mandates, on their ability to participate in society through the vaccine passport, on important events in people’s lives through lockdowns (with significant impacts on those with unwell or dying relatives), and on NZers ability to return home, were all the types of things that are likely to heavily polarise a small subset of people.

I believe events like the Springbok tours or the waterfront strikes polarised NZers, but those were in a different time without the same media and social media attention. I also think the Springbok tours raised tempers enormously, but didn’t personally impact people in the same way as losing your job due to your choice not to get vaccinated did. The waterfront strikes were perhaps a closer parallel in terms of personal impacts, but I wasn’t around for those.

(The usual disclaimer here. I’m vaccinated because I thought that was the right choice for me. That doesn’t mean I agree that the government should have pushed quite so hard for people to get vaccinated. In other countries if you were unvaccinated you could still work if you both a) wore a mask, and b) tested regularly. That could have worked here, but doesn’t appear to have been seriously considered as an option. There are cases where mandating vaccines may be justified – an example could be polio. But I’m pretty sure we never mandated that vaccine, despite it clearly being very effective – exactly because it was very clearly effective)

There are other policies that the government is pursuing that also hugely polarise people, in particular around co-governance (and therefore 3 waters). I meet a lot of people who are incredibly angry about what they perceive as a change in NZ’s governance arrangements that is being done by stealth rather than via a clear statement of policy that was followed by an election or other endorsement for that policy.

Then there’s the belief by some that the government is pursuing a one world government, world economic forum, great replacement agenda. None of this is particularly coherent to me, in particular when most of those same people would argue that you wouldn’t trust this Labour government to run a bath let alone run the country. At the same time they believe the government has the skills to run a massive conspiracy on behalf of some shadowy secret group. Even so, this is a common theme in many online comments, including on this blog – and many of those comments are quite abusive.

Next, there are a group of people who make genuinely misogynistic comments. Any argument that there aren’t misogynistic comments simply fails – there are, and people can point to plenty of examples. I don’t personally think that the bulk of those opposed to Jacinda Ardern and/or Labour are doing it for misogynistic reasons, but some clearly are. Some of those who may not oppose for misogynistic reasons will still use gendered abuse when talking about the Prime Minister – phrases like “silly little girl” really have no place when talking about our Prime Minister, even if you legitimately disagree with her policies. I note that the moderators on Kiwiblog generally don’t let most of that trash through, and rightly so.

Add all that together, and I’d say that yes, our Prime Minister is suffering far more abuse than any previous Prime Minister. Abuse is increasing, so absent anything else it’d be true. But also because of policies the government has pursued (some willingly, some because of the pandemic), because of policies that people imagine the government is pursuing, and yes, because of misogyny.

Having said that, I’d also predict that if the government changes and we have a Prime Minister Luxon, it’s quite likely that he’ll endure a further high water mark of abuse. If he reverses the co-governance agenda he’ll be abused from those focused on Māori rights, I already see people saying some pretty awful things about his views on abortion and claiming he wants to usher in some sort of Republic of Gilead. Many on the left genuinely believe the National Party exists only to serve the 1% and screw the rest of NZ, and they’ll be out saying that. They also say some pretty unkind things about Nicola Willis, and no doubt that’ll increase too if they get elected.

In short, whilst the current Prime Minister represents a new high (low), no doubt it’ll be worse still in a few years time. The only options I have to offer to change this are censorship (something I generally oppose on principle), repercussions for those making the comments (which sort of smacks of cancel culture), or some vain hope that people online will rediscover the benefits of politeness and rational argument. In other words, I’ve got nothing.