A danger for democracy

Last night, TVNZ’s Q+A programme posted the above report on how the New Zealand National Party has suddenly changed its online advertising to something much more aggressive, and highly targeted. Much of it is also very misleading. This same problem is happening in democracies throughout the developed world, and it poses a serious threat to democracy itself.

We all know how the Russian government used propaganda and deliberately deceptive messaging to help elected their chosen candidate, who went on to become the current occupant of the White House. While the 2018 Midterm Elections saw less of that, we can expect to see it return in force in 2020, especially if it looks like the Republican candidate is heading for defeat.

As it happens, the next New Zealand general election is also in later 2020, most likely a few days after the US election. Because New Zealand elections are every three years, this will be the first time the two countries’ elections have happened in the same month/week since 2008 (the US election was November 4, and the NZ election was held the following Saturday, November 8). Both countries' fair and free elections are at risk.

The problem is that ordinary people will have a hard time telling if some political messaging that they see on social media is true or not, especially if the message is steered to them because the person has been targeted. In a fast-paced campaign, deliberate disinformation can take hold—and sway elections.

We’ve seen in the past how this worked in New Zealand, because the NZ National Party has used deceptive techniques before. Investigative journalist Nicky Hager detailed the party’s deeds in the 2005 NZ elections in his book Hollow Men, and he wrote about the secret tactics (allegedly coordinated with the party) used as far back as the 2011 election. That book, Dirty Politics was released on August 13, 2014, about five weeks before that year’s general election. National won re-election in 2014 despite the book, though then Prime Minister John Key’s integrity was called into question, and he never really recovered from that. [Full disclosure: I bought and read both books when they were released.]

This time, it looks like National intends to be more open about its deception. Its ads so far have copied successful ads used by Australia’s rightwing Liberal Party, among others, which wouldn’t be of much interest if so much of their messaging wasn’t deliberately deceptive.

And that’s the bottom line: The issue isn’t that rightwing political parties (or leftwing ones, for that matter) might copy ads used by counterparts in other parts of the world. Instead, the issue is that they’re cynically using messaging—propaganda—to deceive and mislead voters without them having much hope of knowing it’s happening. Just like the USA in 2016.

It seems that much of electoral politics in Western Democracies, especially the marketing tactics used by the Right, has now become about deception and manipulation. That can’t be a good thing for a healthy, functioning democracy, but is there anything we can do about it? With the public having so much distrust of the newsmedia, deliberately curated by those who stand to gain the most from that distrust, who will be able to expose deceptive messaging and tactics? And if there is no one, what hope do we have of countering it?

Right now, we have only one option: To learn to recognise attempts at manipulation. The video above is part of that effort here in New Zealand. We need more of that everywhere, and often. It may be our only hope.