Don’t let election be a race to shady theories
Like many Aucklanders I know, I found the second lockdown tougher than the first. It seemed to bring home that the Covid-19 crisis is not over – not here, nor anywhere else.
I also found myself wishing the election was already over because a political campaign relying more than ever on social media is a daunting prospect. If parties cannot hold public meetings or doorknock, we are heading into a Facebook-driven campaign.
The nature of Facebook encourages populism as a strategy. Take a look at things from the point of view of a political spin doctor.
People on Facebook are organised across very different interests – gay rights, gardening, religion or parenting. Your job is to reach out to these different groups and tie the voting behaviour you want to what they care about.
What is the best way to do that when people have little in common?
The easiest way is to create the campaign around some kind of feeling, which is vague enough that people can project pretty much whatever they want onto it. A feeling like you have been ripped off. Facts become secondary in this logic – after all, you are not trying to win an evidence-driven debate, you are trying to get your audience behind a wall of words and keep them there.
To do that, you need an enemy – the establishment, the swamp, the elite. Best to keep the idea of this vague too, so that again people can project whatever they want onto it.
The result is campaigning that is the opposite of what we traditionally imagine, where parties need to build big coalitions and smooth out differences. On social media, the different groups do not even need to meet each other – and it is easier if they do not. After all, if they knew about each other, they may not want to be on the same team.
One example cited in Peter Pomerantsev’s book This Is Not Propaganda was how the most successful ad on Facebook for Brexit was based – of all things – on animal rights. The ad claimed the EU supported cruel practices like bull fighting and was successful because it generated high engagement and was shared widely among a constituency that were otherwise leaning in favour of Remain.
In this game, the winner is the most supple campaign that can generate an identity that will hold for long enough to get the election outcome they want, before it quickly falls apart. The campaign for Brexit is a clear example of this – while the Leave vote triumphed, to this day no-one can agree on what should happen next.
In a pandemic, this kind of approach is fraught with risk. Conspiracy theories provide highly engaging online content. It can be politically useful to get them behind your cause because they will relentlessly push your key messages out again and again. Yet they are leading people all over the world to ignore the necessary public health measures in place to protect their lives.
In a crisis this severe, humans are hard-wired to be drawn towards conspiracy theories – we like big problems to have equally big causes, a term psychologists call proportionality bias. Surely something as catastrophic as Covid-19 must have an equally large, dark and complex origin story? Can it really just be a bat that likely caused all of this?
Well, yes, that’s it. There is no sinister world government involving Bill Gates and the United Nations getting together with governments to invent a pandemic. I worked in government long enough to say with certainty no Government could ever pull this off. Even in the ‘‘before times’’, it took months of planning for the prime minister to simply leave the country for a day and go to a rugby match.
Let’s not go down the conspiracy path ourselves, here in New Zealand. Recent comments from Gerry Brownlee suggesting the Government had concealed information on the Auckland outbreak were rightly criticised for their connection to online conspiracy theories. He now acknowledges that he got himself into a ‘‘bad spot’’. I commend him for his honesty. Given that we are heading in to an election during a public health crisis, let’s keep our campaigning from turning into a race to the bottom of the internet.
The nature of Facebook encourages populism ... Your job is to reach out to these different groups and tie the voting behaviour you want to what they care about.
Shouting Zeros and Ones, Digital Technology, Ethics and Policy in New Zealand, a book edited by Andrew Chen to which Kathy Errington contributed a chapter about online harm is available now from Bridget Williams Books.