Usually their hot topics are bitching about housing and simping for TOP but these days I’ve noticed a lot more posts to the extent of “labour sucks and now I have no choice but to vote for national >:(”. Unsure if this reflects a general change in sentiment or if certain parties are spending their excess donations on buying out accounts. Worth mentioning I’ve noticed inflammatory topics posted by accounts that have been dead for years.
I noticed this too, and had no interest continuing in there when the apps got cut off.
I didn’t think it was a particularly sensible thing to say but holy crap, the level of hate that brought up was insane. Like a whole bunch of dudes got the slightest taste of what it might feel like to be on the other end of legit discrimination and lost their fucking minds. No sense of irony though given the horrible shit you’d see there about Maori.
Completely lost of course was the fact that it was in response to ‘counterspin media’ sticking a camera in her face shouting nonsense about trans people being pedophiles.
Yes and I think part of what gets me is that it’s still going. It’s really common to see people exclaim something like “I quite like the Greens (for some reason) but there’s no way I’ll vote for them while Marama Davidson’s there…” but frequently they can’t articulate why they dislike her so much. It’s just become normalised to express dislike of her, or worse, and then expect to be rewarded for it, or something like that. In a forum where we reward each other for what we say via rating buttons, our brains are being trained that expressing hate for Marama Davidson will be rewarded with a dopamine hit.
Recently I’ve been following RNZ’s Undercurrent podcast. Episode 5 (Muddying the water) covers what’s happening for politicians. Much of it is sadly what we’ve come to expect regarding the amount of toxicity, hate and threats that politicians get from certain sectors of the public.
As well as referencing the two UK MPs who’ve been quite brutally murdered in public in recent years, they interviewed James Shaw about being physically attacked and beaten while he walked to work. Golriz Ghahraman, who seems to be another favourite target for hating in social media, talks about all the threats and hate and lies about her that she has to cope with. It notes that in March when Posie Parker visited, Marama Davidson was the target of intense online attacks that spiked to a level of abusive content, particularly from the far right and neo-nazis, higher than anyone else in NZ has ever faced except for Jacinda Ardern. This was all at about the time that r/nz was going insane, which to me suggests that r/nz’s normalised dislike of Marama Davidson, by people who are probably otherwise relatively normal - sometimes adolescents, has been guided by neo-nazis. If that’s the case, what should we then be reading into all the other topics that draw so much controversy or predictable dislike, whether it’s Three Waters, Te Pāti Māori, and so on?
What really struck me with the episode, though, is that Brooke van Velden acknowledged that “some people” get some forms of abuse and threats, but she herself doesn’t believe it’s that large and nor does she feel threatened. Nicola Willis also said that while she accepts this happens to other people and is concerned about it, she doesn’t get a lot of it herself.
I think this is likely more complex than strictly being a partisan thing, but to me that sort of comparison really shows up how, at least right now, one side of politics is really attracting this abuse whereas the other side seems to be passively benefitting from it, just kind of cruising and happy to see that big negative cloud surround their opponents without really wanting to acknowledge where it’s coming from. There’s a lot of “sure it’s not very nice what that person over there is saying, who supports the same thing I do, but don’t blame me because I’m not saying it.” A few years ago, maybe it was the other way around with people like Simon Bridges or Judith Collins on the receiving end, or not, but whatever the case right now that’s not what’s happening.
I don’t know how we deal with this effectively, but I can’t see how we can unless people like Brooke van Velden, Seymour, etc, who are passively benefitting, get up and own it, and unambiguously tell people outright who support them that what they’re doing to those on the other side is absolutely not acceptable.
Jesus dude, did you really try and blame nazis for being the reason so many people dislike Marama?
No, it’s because she singled out and attacked a chunk of NZ’s population, obviously we took it personally.
Good grief.
Okay ‘guided’ might’ve been the wrong word, but more just that they’re involved in the discussions more than most people are likely to encounter offline, and that’s going to affect the tone. We shouldn’t ignore it because these days a lot of us spend a lot of time hanging around r/nz and other places like it and forming opinions.
We don’t (and can’t) assess people who contribute online in the same way as people we interact with in person. When a trigger topic comes up, and everyone who’s attracted to it converges on each other, we’ll get more exposed to those views and dopamine kicks from interactions with people we’d never have encountered the same way elsewhere. For anything resembling murky common ground, they encourage us and we encourage them, and there’s none of that inconvenient stigma to deal with from knowing who the other person really is or what they’ll take from it.
There’s a few things that happened after the fact to make the Marama thing blow up a lot more, the first was her “apology” was more of a “what I really meant to say was”. She never directly acknowledged a lot of what was in that statement.
The second one was, whether by incompetence or malice, the mods deleted a number of posts on the topic before it finally gained traction, meaning that by then, people were pissed
I think it’s also why it gets brought up so often as well, it has definitely become a running joke.