Tēnā koutou katoa, welcome to this Alan and Clark webinar, Dealing with Disinformation. My name is Sasha Sevenentham and it's a pleasure to welcome you to our kōrero. We have over 550 people joining us today and we want to give a warm welcome to those of you who are joining for our first time.
It's great to have you with us. For this 32% of you who may not be familiar with Alan and Clark, we are an Australasian based consultancy dedicated to making a positive impact for communities throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific region. Our areas of speciality include strategy, change, management, programme delivery, policy and research and evaluation, just to name a few.
As an organisation, we give a damn about empowering you to overcome society's most significant challenges, which is why we regularly run these free webinars, create desk guides and provide expert advice where we can. In today's discussion, we're joined by Kate Hanna and Nicole Skews-Poole from the Disinformation Project to get a clear understanding of what disinformation is, key events that have impacted Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally society, as well as strategies on how to overcome disinformation. So Kate and Nicole, would you like to introduce yourselves to our audience? Kia ora koutou, I'm Kate Hanna.
I'm the director and founder of the Disinformation Project. I'm a cultural historian of science and technology. Kia ora, I'm Nicole Skews-Poole.
I'm the communications director for the Disinformation Project and I'm a long-time crisis communications person. Great. Thanks both.
So the Disinformation Project is New Zealand's only independent disinformation research group. Can you both tell me a little bit more about what you do? Yeah, so at the Disinformation Project, we're interested in what disinformation does to communities, to individuals, to families and whānau in Aotearoa New Zealand. We're really interested in the global patterns as well, but we're mainly concerned, like Ellen and Clark, with what communities experience and how we can help communities understand disinformation and deal with it as the phenomenon it's now become.
I mainly focus on research and strategic advice and I'll hand over to Nicole to talk about what she does. In the communications space, we work with a lot of people who are struggling with receiving disinformation and being targeted using disinformation. We work with clients to build really robust processes and systems to deal with that.
I also love taking Kate and our colleague Sanjana's research and turning it into publicly accessible reports. Incredible. So today's topic is a big one.
We have one and a half hours to explore it and our discussion will be split into two sections. Firstly, understanding disinformation and secondly, considering how to deal with it. So for our audience, feel free to pop any questions in the chat, some of which we'll answer as we go along through the discussion and others of which we'll discuss during our Q&A at the end of each section.
I'll now pass over to Kate, who's going to kick us off with understanding disinformation. Kia ora, thanks Sasha. So basically what I'm going to talk about today is quickly talk about what disinformation is and how it differs from misinformation, which is another term lots of people will have heard.
I'm going to talk about it as a local and global phenomenon. I'm going to go through some key events and impacts in Aotearoa and then give a brief overview of some social, technical and regulatory considerations. And then I'll pass to Nicole, who will be talking more about strategic communications and what you can do about it.
So really, what is disinformation? And I want to first of all just really point out that this is a term that a lot of people might not have heard before, but that it has critical social, cultural and political implications for New Zealand, but for social democracy more broadly and the idea of the international rules based order. Those are kind of political concepts, but it's really important for social connectedness and cohesion. I thought it would be useful to start by remembering what the then Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern said at the end of the parliamentary protest, where she described what it is that we need to do going forward.
One day it will be our job to try and understand how a group of people could succumb to such wild and dangerous myths and disinformation. And she talked about how many of us had seen that disinformation and dismissed it as conspiracy, but that what we had seen in front of us with the parliamentary protest was that a small portion of our society had not only believed it, but had actually enacted on it in what became a very extreme and violent way. And that we have a journey that we need to go on now to try and understand that.
So when we think about what disinformation is in the disinformation project, we find that this definition is the most helpful because it focusses in on context and intent and impact. So disinformation is best understood as something that is both either false or misleading, or both. And it's been created and or shared with an intent to cause harm.
And that harm could be directed towards an individual. For example, this week we've seen the publication of research showing that MPs have been increasingly targeted, specifically female MPs. Or this might be targeting a group.
For example, at the moment, we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around public servants. And all this false and misleading information could target a community. And a really egregious example this week would be the speculative and false information about the ethnic identity of the Bondi Junction assailant.
And that included in the first instance, widely circulated disinformation that he was Muslim. And when that was debunked, another set of disinformation that claimed he was Jewish and actually identified an individual. So these examples enable me to really show you how disinformation themes often respond to and integrate themselves into current events.
And they follow patterns that we often call narratives of existing prejudices or stereotypes. And so these features, they really reinforce the power of the message because the story appears timely. It appears to respond to current events.
And it connects to old stories and ideas, which are in many cases culturally ingrained. So I imagine that many people in the audience will have had first-hand experiences of these features of how disinformation operates at speed. It operates within an information gap or a vacuum.
And it links to existing sets of ideas about individuals, groups and communities. So there's a couple of key disinformation themes and narratives that are present in Aotearoa at the moment. And I wanted to talk about them really briefly to explain how they show how we share the global community of disinformation narratives, but they can become localised.
So at the moment, there's widespread false and misleading information about the LGBTQTIA plus community. And we see that that is heavily influenced by and shares resource, language and framing with the anti-trans movement in the United States and Great Britain. Whereas false and misleading information about Te Tiriti and Te Ao Māori is locally developed.
But it's reinforced through language, which focusses on ideas about critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. This is the so-called culture wars that's been talked about a lot. But it's been deliberately and with intent shared into Aotearoa.
And it's actually undermining our ability to have really important community and social conversations about things that matter. The other thing that's really important to note about disinformation, it's different from just malicious gossip, because the resources, framing and language of disinformation is algorithmically escalated by and across social media platforms. They make money from that, false and misleading information.
A lot of money. To increase engagement, sadly. And what we have definitely seen specifically in Aotearoa and internationally is that ways of talking about people or ideas that are very, very vulgar, very rude, very filled with disinformation, very false and misleading, are normalised on sub-platforms.
So platforms that don't have a lot of rules and regulations themselves. And then those norms are migrated across to places that probably the audience actually use themselves or for their organisation, such as Facebook, Instagram or threads. And so that language shift and content shift means that we're getting this new normal.
And so this really makes it more accessible and allows it to grow in tenor and tone. So why disinformation and why now, Kate? I think that's a really good question. And we try and understand this in a kind of segmented way for our mahi.
So something like specific disinformation narratives about an issue like, say, climate change. They speak to community fears about loss, about change and about their future. A lot of economic base and social base in New Zealand is connected to those fears.
Individuals and groups then in Aotearoa who promote these narratives may feel like they're representing communities and that they have really genuine political or economic reasons to promote climate change denialism. But the ways in which we see them talking about the climate crisis, the 20-minute city, electrification, these frames, the resources that are cited, the international experts that are linked to, they're very universal, global and highly interlinked. So there's a pattern there, there's a structure there.
Every major set of false and misleading ideas about significant issues that we see in Aotearoa at present shows clear features of foreign influence campaigns in terms of either language, tactics or increasingly financial support. So why we increasingly think that disruption is the point and that our social connection in Aotearoa New Zealand is the target? Fascinating. So there are influences and impacts from disinformation at individual, community, national and international levels.
This leads us nicely into our first audience poll. So our first question over for the audience is how much is disinformation impacting your work? And there's four options here. Every day, sometimes, not often, or it is not.
Kate and Hannah, what are your thoughts on what might come through? Look, I'm really interested to see how much it's impacting people's everyday work. I'm assuming that we're going to see something in the sometimes, but it'll be interesting to see what it actually is. It really will, yeah.
All right, it looks like things are changing through the poll of these live results coming through, but the highest response we've had is in the sometimes response. Yeah, that checks out, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that's something that, increasingly because we're talking about it more, people are probably also noticing it more. There is a little bit of a reinforcement effect there, but it's great that people have experienced it and are here today to learn about it more. Yeah, knowing what it is.
And often, Kate and I, when we talk about these things, people will be like, oh gosh, now I'm seeing it everywhere. And it's because we're all aware that it is happening, but we perhaps don't have the framework or the language to talk about it. So once we do.
Yeah, so now I'm going to really briefly talk about this as a kind of an emerging phenomenon locally and globally. So the renowned public health expert, Michael Marmot, has talked about the idea of a socially cohesive society and how that will have concern for the common good and it will be the healthiest society. And so social cohesion is a word that's been bandied around quite a lot.
People will have heard it, particularly if they work in the public sector. But actually, what is social cohesion? Well, we know that relationships are really important for physical and psychosocial wellbeing. And in Marmot's field, these relationships have been conceptualised through a bunch of different terms, such as social cohesion, an idea called social capital, and then also social networks and social support.
So social capital is the shared community or group resources and how individuals access this through their social networks, which we might understand as an ecosystem or a web of social relationships. So a really critical part of that idea of a network or a web is that there is a thing called collective efficacy, which is a word which describes how a community can create change and exercise ideas of informal and formal social control by influencing behaviour and norms through social means. So family, whānau, community, faith and other organised and non-organised groups are where we all experience social networks, social capital and social control.
So that's kind of the basis of social network theory. And here in New Zealand, we're all really familiar with Tamei Sturridge's groundbreaking work, Te Whare Tapa Whā, where we have a wharenui with four walls, taha wairua, taha hīninārau, taha tīnana and taha whānau, and the wharenui has strong foundations on the whenua in which it sits. So these two sets of ideas help us understand that people who are grounded, situated, enabled to flourish and contribute and connected to others are far less likely to experience negative outcomes, be they negative health outcomes or in terms of our conversation today, be less likely to experience disconnection, information disorders, social exclusion and then participate in fragmented realities.
I want to really briefly talk about the report of the Royal Commission into the Aoteatahi mosque attacks because that report outlines some really important recommendations for social cohesion, and it says that public conversations about embracing diversity and encouraging social cohesion need to be led by political leaders in the government, that there need to be transparent conversations where information is available to everybody, that these conversations need to include all communities, and that enduring change will take time and investment, so conversations need to be ongoing. Now, sadly, we know that that report was released at the end of 2020 and with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to get together to have those really important conversations and now we reach 2024 and we're more disconnected than we were in 2019 when the mosque attacks occurred. And so what we see is that there's been an erosion of connection and we need to try and understand how that erosion has taken place.
So it's really important to talk in Aotearoa about the effects and impacts of colonisation. These are myriad but we can talk specifically about physical alienation of land. So for the first 20 years post signing of Te Tiriti, Māori maintained a land agency over most of their land holdings, and they were the economic driver for the developing nation trading with the Australian colonies.
But the war which began with the invasion of the Waikato region in 1863, which is an event that Vincent O'Malley, the historian, argues is the origin of New Zealand, far more than any 20th century conflict. This then resulted in land alienation and confiscations which followed, and in the course of less than a century, land possessions shifted wholly from iwi Māori to settlers in the colonial state. And it's really important to also note that racism was and remains central to colonisation.
The rationale for the denial of ownership of Aotearoa was thinking that indigenous peoples were materially, culturally, economically and politically inferior. So what you see in front of you is my beautiful diagram of a social network. And what you can see is a normal social network which is made up of nodes and clusters and links and people.
So people, places, things. Social networks have a range of features that influence the ways in which information is shared across and within a community. And work that explores innovation inside firms and across sectors, and also looks at radicalisation has looked at how social networks operated.
Social networks have clusters or nodes of people and places which are interconnected with other peoples and places. And from this research, which we know that it's loosely connected ties which are critical for innovation which sadly includes radicalisation. So that's the conventional wisdom, that those loose ties not your whānau and family not the people you don't know, but the people you know, who you're not the same as, but you're similar to.
They're the people with whom you can create new ideas. But how social networks operate has been changed by technology in the pandemic. And what you can see, what I've tried to achieve here in the drawing is how the network is now layered on top of each other.
Tightly linked and exclusive. There's no room there for those loose ties where innovation or creativity take place. Fascinating.
So I imagine this understanding is ever evolving given rapid changes in society with technology and events like pandemics. So what do these network changes mean? What they mean is that there are a range of different themes which have become central to the identity of groups that have been built around first of all their denial of COVID-19 or their rejection of the vaccine or their rejection of mandates as we saw at the parliamentary protest. These themes have spoken into people's existing grievances or fears.
I'm going to briefly mention a couple of them. Some of these themes that people may have come across are ideas around how honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi takes away the rights of Māori and that it's a conspiracy between the government and a perceived group of elites. So that's a really common centralising theme.
Another theme is one around that transgender and non-binary people are a danger to children. We have other themes around immigration or women's role in society and themes around environmentally changes to environmental consciousness and redesigning of infrastructure which is seen as a way to take away people's private property rights. What this drawing illustrates is how the impact of technology speed, platforms, algorithms and the pandemic have created an effect called community bridging.
So what community bridging is, is that an idea that centrally held some people together back in 2021, 2022 around denial of COVID-19 has had another idea bridged into the centre of it and those ideas have got equal weight and equal value and are holding those communities together in the same way that we saw back in the early 2022. We see a range of different norms and narratives around a range of different conspiratorial talking points but they tend to focus on immigration, reproductive rights, particularly trans rights, globalisation, loss of hegemony or power and then we see some localised frames around co-governance or environmental interventions like 1080. So these are called community bridging or community bonding and bridging social capital is a way that plunges a group together and makes them feel glued together really, really strongly and it also means that people who are outside that group are actually viewed as the other or excluded from that group and that's that kind of tight image of the tight network that I've drawn.
So we've observed a number of incidents over the last two years which we see as kind of real-time community bridging where existing ideologies and their supporters are bridged into the disinformation communities and there's no barrier or pushback so we've seen white supremacist individuals and ideas swept up and included into communities developed around denial of COVID-19. The tool that enables this is imagery, language and framing and so what we now see is that communities built around denial and minimisation of COVID-19 are now organised and motivated around a set of other powerful disinformation narratives and they're providing real and genuine social glue and community for people so it's not what people are experiencing inside that community is real but what it means for the broader New Zealand communities and society is the sense of more division and more tension. So now I'm going to really quickly talk through this lovely timeline.
I'm so excited to see a timeline, it's really great. What happens in New Zealand as you'll understand and know is always affected by what takes place globally. So prior to August 2020 which was when the date of the general election was changed, COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation in Aotearoa was largely repackaged for local audiences so it was not directly from the US or other jurisdictions.
At the time of the change of the election date, our 2020 election coincided more closely with the presidential election in the United States and that's when we started seeing content and material from the United States being shared wholesale into Aotearoa and New Zealand and not just about COVID-19 but about a range of other different conspiratorial and disinformation fuelled narratives. That was a real flood break event for New Zealand and then similarly in late 2021 and then in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. As that war heated up we again saw an increase in what we would understand as Russian disinformation tactics in play in New Zealand's disinformation circles.
That's a really important thing for us to talk about because a lot of the content that gets shared from that point onwards, from 2022 is increasingly violent. So within the communities that we study which are online, open source communities, pro-Russian misinformation and pro-Russian sentiment has been the norm since December 2021 and those same places that we've seen Russian disinformation increase, we've also seen a propensity to share increasingly violent content from footage of war repeated and targeted use and reuse of the livestream and manifesto of the Christchurch terrorist and any footage of any mass killing or mass shooting event or violent extremist action across the world gets shared onto that space. So in the last few days obviously we've seen footage shared in from the two tragic events in Australia.
And on that topic about social media we've had a question come through from Jack. So thank you Jack for sharing a comment and a question and Nicole you may also want to answer this. So Jack says the recent AUT survey on media bias showed that 87% believed the news was biassed and unbalanced.
How do you combat this based on the disinformation that is planted all over social media? Such a good question. Such a good question which means there's not a simple answer. But I think we've seen that trust is a really really critical aspect to what's been going on The Ipsos poll that came out this morning which is the first time that New Zealand has been included in the Ipsos trust and integrity understandings shows that we have increased distrust in government, increased distrust in the media as the AUT survey showed which is great because it's a longitudinal survey.
All of these data points are so useful. We have a crisis with the media also in New Zealand taking place at the moment and really interestingly we'll reflect on how perhaps a platform like X formerly known as Twitter tagged organisations like the BBC, the ABC and actually Television New Zealand as state-owned media organisations on the platform equating them to propagandists in authoritarian nation states. It's kind of a crisis of the rules based order it's a crisis of the ways in which we can try and understand the role of the media in a democracy at a time where advertising has completely moved to social media and therefore that main revenue stream is no longer there.
We need to have a rethink entirely about the design of media in a social democracy. Also I think we have an increase in access as an opportunity with technology where you can share information live on the ground with your audiences and obviously that can be a really important thing but it can also be misused and lots of people as independent journalists aren't beholden to traditional broadcasting standards and so there's less of a safety net around them being trusted and authoritative sources of good information that is fact based so that's also something that we think about a lot. Critical.
On social media going to Jack's point New Zealanders have been exposed to unmitigated violence and this is often decontextualised so that the goodies and the baddies are promoted in different ways or it's kind of turned into video game style content and sometimes it's actually turned into literally turned into video game content and we have to try and understand what's going on there so I think the violence is out there trying to drive a wedge between groups in our Aotearoa New Zealand society and we've really seen that since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israeli citizens and then the subsequent and prolonged horrific genocide in Gaza footage from the hot war, war crimes and content which targets people as Jewish as Israeli, Palestinian or Muslim is absolutely normatively shared across social media platforms by people in Aotearoa to an extent that we've never really seen before and then the local content context that I just want to highlight here on the timeline is that we saw the circadian rhythms of people's posting change people became more obsessed with being online audiences are engaging for longer periods they continue to engage for longer periods some of those habits formed under lockdowns have stayed there's quite a lot of doom scrolling going on and also doom posting in disinformation spaces and in ordinary spaces and we probably all need to go outside a little bit more and touch a bit more grass but the connection there between information disorders landscapes and physical health and wellbeing is really critical and we need to think about the wellbeing aspects of disinformation as a really central aspect particularly for organisations and then and again this speaks to Jack's question about social media platforms in late 2021 New Zealand's disinformation communities migrated as one to the app called Telegram where they found a ripe space to pull audiences from more mainstream platforms where they had been removed from because of a range of different measures that had been instituted by Twitter and Meta after January 6 they were able to post much more extreme content people were members of lots and lots of different channels and that's where we saw that real explosion in mis and disinformation particularly the language and tone of that mis and disinformation became incredibly violent misogynistic and racist then we saw that migrate across back into more mainstream places as a norm and so that targeting of vulnerable communities with mis and disinformation is a real key feature I wanted to just really briefly talk about the parliamentary protest itself and this brings us to the sense of isolation and fear international research on conspiratorialism shows that people who have an increased sense of fear for the future and a decreased sense of their own control for their self and their families futures are much more likely to entertain conspiratorial ideas this diagram is a network diagram a proper one not just a drawing of the Aotearoa New Zealand information ecosystem on a single day which was the last day of the parliamentary protest and what we can see here the big orange cluster and the big blue cluster is almost completely separated or bifurcated information sources and sentiments so what we've done is looked at where people were getting their information from, were they getting it from mainstream media or were they getting it from online narrators online producers of disinformation and how did they feel about what they were watching so those people who were getting their information from online narrators who were perhaps present at the parliamentary protest, they're the ones who supported the violence and then the orange and pink nodes, clusters and links are those who are watching mainstream media coverage and were expressing sentiments of horror, dislike or other negative emotions, so it shows how completely separated those groups of feelings were and where people were getting their information from we've seen this take place in real time over the 23 day occupation but this to us was a real critical tipping point for an idea of splintering realities that we were no longer talking about the same thing when we witnessed the same event thanks Kate a really relevant example in our context here in Aotearoa New Zealand and a significant event in this country which I remember taking place very nearby our office alright so it's time for some more audience interaction and another poll and here we encourage you to think of experiences both in online and in real life settings and the question for the audience here is where have you noticed the impact of disinformation with options being at schools at work, in the community and in politics I think four will be the highest that's just my guess, I could be wrong I'm interested placing bets on four and it seems like the experts are on track although there's a bit of movement in the community and in politics are kind of neck and neck with work following closely behind yeah one of the things that I thought when we were talking about this poll was just also just getting to people to think when they go away from attending this webinar where might they see the impacts of disinformation so it's really great to see that people are noticing these things because when we notice things we can start doing things about them absolutely yeah so this is the slide where I'm going to really quickly wind up and talk about some social, technical and regulatory considerations we have a sort of way of thinking through how we might mitigate the effects of disinformation that involve the ideas of mediation, moderation regulation and restriction which you've got on this slide in front of you small content warning for this slide I'm going to talk about some specific research and some specific content to talk about how we need to engage with holding platforms to account on their existing regulations so we use a category called dangerous speech to categorise material observed and analysed by our project that's taken from Susan Benicia's dangerous speech project and it's a description that says dangerous speech is a form of expression so speech, text or image that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group really important to note that dangerous speech is not banned speech or speech that should be censored, it's just speech that is likely risky and harmful to groups so we're just putting that out there most of the speech is what I would call grey zone, so it's lawful but awful and it will always remain so however that's law platforms have managing regulations and community guidelines which are separate from government set laws and for example Meta, Facebook has a set of tier one content which is content that should not be posted and that includes content targeting a personal group of people on the basis of their protected characteristics with dehumanising speech or imagery in the form of comparisons, generalisations or unqualified behavioural statements in written or in visual form which likens them to insects animals that are culturally perceived as intellectually or physically inferior filth, bacteria, disease and faeces sexual predators, subhumans violent and sexual criminals or other criminals and also statements which deny their existence We did a set of work over the period of 2020 to the beginning of 2023 which collated language used about the then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern the most commonly used word in our location of study on mainstream social media and social media sub-platforms was the C word The C word is specifically banned by Facebook in those tier one classifications It should meet those do not post categories So content that proliferates today in 2024 is shared by New Zealand based groups, channels and social media platforms across Meta, Tik Tok, X Telegram, gaming platforms and comments on YouTube etc etc regularly meets or exceeds those Meta do not post criteria which are the criteria for hate speech When we studied that large corpus of words about the then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern 14 of the 29 terms we regularly studied were terms related to murder or execution and it was text based analysis only so none of our analysis in that categorisation took into account the visual images of execution, the nooses or any videos, gifs, stickers memes, photos Visual content related to murder and execution is actually the content we saw the most over the period of 2022 on Telegram violence and death threats towards individuals, groups and communities have become commonplace So as we thought might happen those norms that were established on Telegram have now become normal across the rest of social media in Aotearoa and they're really impacting social and cultural norms people's health and wellbeing and our ability to have good civic conversations about issues that matter I wrote this last note prior to the release of the report this week around MPs security and threats but I just want to note that it's really important that we take this into account These dangerous speech and disinformation ideas and the vocabulary that we see inside the spaces that we study are really similar to content produced and signalled and consumed prior to offline violence internationally, such as the murder of MP Joe Cox and also really terrifyingly in the events that took place in Australia this week This includes other far-right and incel-based violence that we've seen since 2019 The level of violence and the amount of sharing for example of the mosque attack footage is worse now in 2024 than it was actually in 2019 immediately after the mosque attack So we have dangerous speech going on, we have a growing and accepting audience, a context within which racism and misogyny are now normalised and entrenched and a multi-platform ecosystem which is providing refuge for hyper-toxic masculinity hyper-toxic white supremacism mixed with anti-Māori racism Islamophobia and anti-Semitism It's a really concerning mix, it is a small part of our community but they're very renowned and they are coming at organisations individuals and people Well thank you Kate, you've painted a truly comprehensive picture of the current state as well as some of the recent history around the disinformation landscape particularly its intent and impact So what can be done in this space? Yeah, fix it That was your job Well, now that I've terrified you all, I do think we have resources and tools that exist now and we can make new ones So in the mediation space, to me that actually looks like leadership, like I really want to see business leaders, government leaders, community leaders come out and say this kind of language and this kind of targeting for example of women MPs or women journalists is unacceptable I want to see organisations lean into continuing to use te reo Māori and not get put off In terms of moderation policies, connections and communities across sectors and within targeted organisations, we need to share information folks They're all sharing a lot of information So when you have a good system for running a webinar, like Alan and Clark do, share your processes with colleagues because people don't know and that's often the first point that we have to come in and do an intervention is to say, well have you thought through these things around how you're going to take questions and how you're going to make sure it's a safe space to run this webinar or to run this event So share build community We need to think about an idea called social cyber security, which is an idea that we actually need to think really carefully about what it is that we value as a society Now I don't want to live in a world where we just tell teenage girls that there will be deep fake nude porn stuff of them shared and that they have to live with it, so we need to actually draw lines in the sand and not say, well it's creeping technology it's creeping AI, we need to have a conversation about what it is that we value and we need to think about how we can set the tone as large organisations, as small organisations as leaders, as managers as community members So the regulation bit let's see what it looks like to actually institute those existing policies and guidelines People need to work within those existing regulatory bodies for upskilling people and organisations need to report stuff, I know that that's quite a scary thing for particularly private organisations to report a cyber security or a disinformation based risk to an external body because it might be seen as a bit of a failure but we need the data we need, government needs to know DIA, Search and Z police actually need to know how often this is happening and we need to use social networks and industry organisations to lobby for clarity regarding expectations and support for staff wellbeing and then restriction Well that's the job of things like the Christchurch call Tech Against Terrorism and an organisation I'm part of called GP So you know, let's look at using some tools, and Nicole will talk much more about that in the next half Alright so that concludes section one, thank you so much Kate, it's truly helped me to deepen my understanding of disinformation, particularly your insights and sentiments around its disruptiveness as well as its drive to target a fundamental core human need related to social connection and we'll take a moment here to pause for a few questions which have been coming through the live chat so the first one is from Lynette who asks is there a benefit to councils in actively recruiting people who are within conspiracy groups That's a really good question I think that one of the things that we know is that the more that people get exposed to the reality of other people's lived experience and the ways in which they have shared values and shared insights helps pull people out of those really closed networks, so yeah I mean there quite possibly could be a benefit to think about how to safely do so and have people get more exposed for example to the ways in which co-governance operates at a community level and the reality of it and the benefits that it brings and the way in which communities across farming and environmental and iwi work together and have been doing for a long time, with a shared value around protecting the environment while also reaping some economic benefit And Kay has asked a question around the news media situation at the moment and whether there are any recommendations on where you might encourage or guide people to look in terms of reliable news sources Yeah I think this is such a really critical question I think people need to be looking at a plethora of different varieties of news reading the international big news it's really important particularly with things like the conflict in the Middle East to be looking not just at Fox or CNN but to be looking at Al Jazeera to have a sense of critical thinking when you approach these things when something is news it shouldn't be trying to make you feel a certain way, it should be reporting the facts it's different when it's an opinion piece but if something is trying to hit you up and make you feel certain things then you should have a little bit of a step back and think about it Remarkably, and this is very different from what we might have said 20 years ago Wikipedia is totally your friend if you're like I don't know what's going on in this situation go to the Wikipedia page have a good read of that, that's a really good pricey of well moderated well regulated social media where people actually do a really great job at doing their own research so start there and then have a look at perhaps at what references have been used in Wikipedia talk to other people about where they've got their information from like genuinely and that's one of the ways you can actually have a conversation with people you can just, if somebody says something and you're like gosh that fool okay so like oh that's interesting where did you hear that and then you I heard such and such just have that open mind to multiple sources of information Great, and another question that's come through which is also at this interpersonal level around conversations you have with colleagues or whānau Joy is wondering how to address disinformation without crushing legitimate or authentic discussions around many of these complex issues some of which you've touched on that aren't quite black and white Yeah well I think that's where I think that piece that I was saying before about leadership about tone because when people are using invective slurs phrases that come directly from the United States that are not the way we talk about things here in Aotearoa those are signals that it's not kind of like maybe it's not a genuine, well the person might be having a genuine question but they're framing it in a way that is not a way in which it's helpful to have the conversation, so if we can have that conversation about tone and say well let's, it sounds like you're asking a question about the role of Te Tiriti in 21st century, can we explore that and like try and turn the tone away from racism or generalisations or stereotypes Yeah I think also a really good principle is to discuss and debate ideas not people it sounds overly simple but it's a really good anchoring point I'm sure that's a helpful message for our audience to keep in mind and do keep firing through the questions, it's great to have the live interaction and responses on the go so that concludes our first section with Kate and we're now moving over to Nicole So we're going to roll up our sleeves a little bit together now and talk about the impacts that we're seeing of disinformation on organisations so I'm going to talk through some examples of targeting both locally and globally and then just run through some kind of brief strategies and processes that can help protect organisations and that includes things like realistic approaches to content being really clear about who your audiences are and having more grounded measures of success shall we say and also really leaning into values based approaches So disinformation impacts all sectors and as one of the poll responses was creeping up in that work area people are starting to see it there it is increasingly felt in all organisations in lots of different ways and that can range from internal workplace culture issues right through to privacy and security implications and staff wellbeing and also brand reputation and brand management I'm a communications person so I'm biassed unapologetically so so I'm going to kind of hone in a little bit on that external comms and stakeholder engagement piece so just to talk about the different sectors, the way in which government sectors get targeted by disinformation I think can broadly be grouped as a desire to make people disconnect distrust and completely disengage in the government sector and I think it's important to say as Kate's been mentioning throughout that there are lots of groups in New Zealand who historically have every reason to distrust the government where we see this becoming a massive social cohesion issue is when people are therefore disconnecting from really important services and sources of information and so Kate mentioned that one of the big themes is the idea of some kind of cover up that ranges from your local GP right through to the UN and that stuff can be really hard in terms of communities passing what's real and what's not increasingly government departments are receiving OIA requests, so Official Information Act requests, which I actually love the OIA, I think it's a fantastic piece it's a great piece of legislation and the purpose of that is to make people have a really great way to access transparency on how their taxpayer money is being spent but sometimes we're seeing it being used to target these hot topic areas like how much money has your organisation spent on diversity and inclusion as if that's a bad thing and sometimes really personal attacks through those requests for information the area that I personally see being impacted by disinformation the most is that local government space, so we have seen last year an instance in Hamilton that was really upsetting where the 20 minute city conversation in a kind of community like a town hall setting where some councillors from Hamilton showed up to discuss transport and infrastructure issues were issued a writ of execution and a request for their immediate arrest while they were in a room of a few hundred people who then cheered and got really excited at that having just happened and those councillors had to immediately leave. That is obviously a real risk to people engaging in the democratic process and if you look at the comments on the social media posts of any and all councils informing someone about anything ranging from the pipes getting fixed in your street right through to here's a beautiful mural featuring Maori art, the comments underneath it will be really reflective of those things that Kate was talking about and then if you're kind of your average everyday person and you're looking at that quite reasonably you could make a decision to just kind of not get involved at that process and that's a silencing or a chilling effect in action, so that's when people decline to do things, decline to say things just because it's too hard basket and often that is the design of disinformation so we have to push against it. In the charity and social services and NGO sector the way in which disinformation targets those groups obviously varies on what their what the charity is there for and who they're there to serve.
We see a lot of people using charities as punching bags and kind of representational bad guys of whatever the disinformation theme is of the day so if you are a rainbow charity you are getting comments all day every day about how you support groomers and paedophiles and that can be an incredibly hard thing for the social media people on those accounts to have to deal with being told that every day. If you're a small iwi led reforestation group who's decided to use 1080 as an approach to their whenua then death threats are now commonplace. In the business sector it can be quite kind of a bit of a mixed bag.
Businesses using te reo Maori even just really casually in their advertising or on their social media are getting absolutely slammed. My favourite comment is I don't speak Maori on the Kiwi. Yeah.
Any pride posts like hey we're celebrating Pride Month this month opens people up to a whole lot of targeting. International Women's Day. When is International Men's Day Kate? It's in November.
And you know what we're seeing in the social space is also often pulled through into any front facing resource for your organisation. So if you're getting slammed on social media your call centre is too. Often we don't see organisations sharing their tactics even internally which is really interesting.
And I think a really powerful and kind of a bit of a wake up call of an example is the imported culture war that we've had in New Zealand from the United States that we saw with Bud Light and Spark. So I'm going to dig into a kind of a strange example. In the United States Light Beer brand Bud Light decided for Pride Week that they would send some influencers free beer.
Literally as simple as that they sent some people some free beer. And one of the influencers was a trans woman and the world just exploded. And Target which is kind of like the American warehouse would that be fair to say? Had pride displays where they would have rainbow clothes and stuff like that.
And that got absolutely targeted to the point where staff were reporting people just coming into the store and threatening them and pulling their displays down and stuff like that. All because they had rainbows up and all because some influencers were given some light beer. What's really interesting about this example is that it was a planned and pretty publicly discussed operation.
So some of the far right kind of conservative influencers in the States have talked about wanting to make pride toxic for brands. And that it doesn't really matter what organisation gets slammed, just pick one that's doing something about pride and make it so they never want to say anything about it ever again. That's that silencing chilling effect in action.
In New Zealand a social media post was made by Spark that was just affirming trans rights and talking about how social media platforms in the past like Twitter had been kind of a scary and hard place for trans people. And that since everyone was leaving Twitter because it got so gross, maybe on those new platforms they could do a better job of making people feel safe there. Our disinformation communities picked that up and decided to start the Boycott Spark campaign.
Word for word the Boycott Bud Light campaign. That hashtag Boycott Spark is still up on Twitter. It is an awful thing to go and look at if you want to ruin your day.
Don't do it. And that is something that I think if you had asked your average New Zealand business if they were prepared to experience a couple of years ago, they wouldn't have thought that that was something that would happen here. So that is really a good example of, as Kate says, those global influences on the New Zealand disinfo space.
And then on organisations. Exactly. And on this topic of discrimination against certain groups or community groups, we've had a question come through from Sarah, who has asked what measures are currently being put in place to minimise these forms of othering and pushing.
And they're speaking to data recently released by the DPNC about trivialising believers of disinformation and painting them as a lost cause. Yeah, that's really interesting. I can't actually specifically comment on the research for some reasons, but it's really important that we understand that there are global influences, as Nicole's talked about, and then there are people who are benefiting from their participation in influence campaigns in New Zealand.
So we tend to talk about them as narrators. So they're the key figures in the diagrams. The people who are the audiences for it are ordinary New Zealanders who we all know and love.
And they are victims of disinformation as well as sometimes perpetrators. Yeah. And so we really need to not minimise their experience or dismiss them as stupid or reject them from society because actually that doesn't solve any problems.
Isolation is the problem, right? The more we connect and see each other as human, the better. So we really encourage in the disinformation project having that whānau connection based approach to reconciliation around how we move on from this. Thinking about where the big influence comes from and where the narrators are benefiting and working with audiences, the people who are victims.
Good question, though. Great. Thank you, Sarah.
And Kay, a question. Should there be any difference in responding to coordinated pylons on social media by groups to any spontaneous individual reactions? This is a good way to describe the difference between mis- and disinformation. As Kate said, disinformation is that deliberate spreading of false information with ill intent.
Misinformation is when people are spreading false information because they genuinely believe it. Misinformation allows disinformation to thrive. It does its work for it.
I think when you can tell in social media moderators and external comms roles tend to be really good at this, you can tell when someone's asking a genuine question out of a place of curiosity and openness, and when someone's just being bad faith. I would really encourage people to trust their gut around that. I think when it is an individual that's asking something that could plausibly be a question that is in your lane to answer, then you should always, if you can.
When it is a targeted pylon that's clearly quite coordinated, then that is when you really need to lean into those systems and processes, which I will expand on if you want. Perfect. Thank you, Kate.
Nice segue into our next section. Nicole, what are some strategies and processes that can protect organisations? We see a really key hurdle for organisations to first actually spend a bit of time on is acceptance. I know that probably sounds a bit fluffy, but actually we were all promised a really different internet, actually.
The internet was meant to be for cat memes and finding your community of like-minded weirdos in a good way, and I think what we're seeing now is that people are still operating in a space that is expecting the internet to act in the same way that it did five or ten years ago, and it's just not that space anymore. I think it's really normal to be angry and grumpy about that, actually. It takes a whole lot of resource to put into dealing with disinformation that is very, very quick and doesn't take a whole lot of resource to spread.
And so once you've kind of made peace with the fact that particularly in the social media space, any content on certain topics is probably going to open you up to some disinfo targeting. It actually means that you can plan and be a lot more cool-headed about your way through. And so a really key point is thinking about who in your organisation is responsible for disinformation.
So when it happens, particularly on those external channels, whose job is it to respond to that, and how is that person supported? Something that I experience heaps when we're working with clients and just in the social sector full stop, that social media sector full stop, is that people often get into a content moderator role without knowing that every single day they're going to have to deal with quite harmful disinformation. It's often not in job descriptions, it's not in the HR process or the hiring process. People don't say in the interview, hey, you know, you might have to deal with some pretty critical stuff here, and they just trust their resilience base.
Staff are really resilient. It's that boiling frog thing writ large with a lot of people in these roles. By the time they've gone through the White Island eruption, the Parliament occupation, the mosque attacks, a global pandemic, if you've been doing social media through that, you're good at your job, and you're probably pretty resilient.
What I often find is that I'll say to people, do you reckon you're doing an all right job? They'll be like, yeah, yeah, I think so. I'm like, okay, you're going to go on leave, and a junior, like a recent grad, is going to come in and they're going to cover your post for a week. If they just arrive tomorrow, how would you feel about handing this over to them? They just blanch, you know, because often it takes depersonalising it for a sense of duty of care to go, ooh.
Yeah. We encourage organisations to work with the people that are already doing this job to figure out what they're doing and what's working, and really build that in as an explicit process so that they know that they always have that behind them and that it's agreed on and understood. The systems can be big picture things like content planning and resourcing.
If you know that you're going to do some stuff that you think might get a little bit spicy, put some extra resource behind it, please, so that the people on the front line can throw up an oar if they just need to touch grass. Things like risk mapping and triaging. What does risky content look like to your organisation? What is a content map that means that you know you can respond really easily at this point, and if it gets here, let's go get some help.
Measuring and reporting when things are getting worse is something that a lot of people don't do, and it makes it harder to ask for resource. So if stuff is getting worse, how? Let's be really clear about what that looks like for each organisation, how you measure it, and how you report up and ask for support if you need it. I think all of those strategies and processes, that's obviously only a couple of them, they just feed in this idea that actually this is the new normal, unfortunately.
We're walking into it with our eyes open, and we know that we can figure out good ways to respond. Thank you, Nicole. That was a helpful overview of some potential steps that organisations can take to address disinformation.
And now I'll let the audience share their experience with this through our next poll. And the question that we're posing at this stage is, have you changed your external communications because of disinformation? With options being yes, avoiding tricky topics completely, or yes, more picky about topics. And the following two options of not yet, but considering, and no, we won't.
I hope it's no, we won't change our content in the face of this, but I completely understand that it probably isn't, and that's just the world we're living in. Alright, we've had, interestingly, zero responses for option one. Good.
And a kind of even mix across the other three. What's your take on this? Yeah, I think that's reflective of what we're seeing, which is that people are starting to be a little bit picky about the things, particularly in the social media space that they're posting, and maybe starting to consider what they will and won't post, but we would really encourage them to only do that in the sense of how they resource things, not what they say or how they say it. And I imagine after listening into today's webinar, there might be a few reflections from those joining us around what to do in this space.
So, that actually leads me really nicely into that kind of values-based approach to external messaging and getting really realistic about what our content looks like when it's successful and who our audiences are. So, it sounds overly simple, but we really encourage people to be super clear about what their explicit organisation values are. Often we might see organisations that have in their mission statement or their kaupapa a really explicit support of Te Tiriti or a specific outreach in a culturally appropriate way to Māori communities, and then on social media, they've had really racist comments and they're not sure whether to moderate it or not, because they want to give people the opportunity to kind of express themselves.
And that's actually counter to those organisations stated values, right? We find that sometimes people aren't clear on who their audience is, in the sense that they have this idea that by putting out a piece of social media into the ether, everybody will love it, and it will appeal to everybody. And, you know, great content is everybody just being like, thumbs up, loved that, and if anybody says anything negative, then automatically that content didn't go well, and maybe we shouldn't do it again. And that's just not reflective of that new normal that we were talking about.
So we encourage clients to be really clear about why you're putting out content, and who it's for, and who it's not for. If you are a queer rights organisation, or if you're an organisation that has like an LGBT network, and you've done a post saying we had a pride morning tea today, and a whole bunch of homophobes hate that, that's okay. That's alright, actually.
Make sure that that goes into the bin of comments, so that your staff and your communities don't have to see that, but that doesn't mean that you don't post that content again, right? In fact, you probably post it more if you can. And that kind of brings us to that chilling effect thing that we've been talking about, which is that if your organisation has benefited from using, say, inclusive advertising, or reo Maori in your branding, or whatever, it is on you to uphold those values when they get pushed on from bad actors. It sort of gives you a really nice opportunity to quite loudly and proudly respond in a way that reaffirms what your values are, and who you're there for, and what your lines in the sand are, actually.
And that goes back to that acceptance of the new normal. We know that there are networks out there that have calcified around some of these issues, but also that they're not representative of what New Zealanders feel and want and value. Technology allows them to make themselves seem louder and seem bigger than they actually are, and because we haven't accepted that that's kind of what the internet looks like now, we're like, oh my god, 300 people said something really awful to us, and half of them are bots, and perhaps that isn't the way in which you measure success.
And so we really encourage people to basically just use every opportunity to reaffirm their values and stand strong. The interesting thing with resilience building work is that it feels really huge. There's this principle that, let's say bullcrap, asymmetry principle, which is that, you know, the ease with which you can put misinformation out into the world is pretty light touch, and then the response that's needed for that is huge, and it can feel really draining, but as Kate actually pointed out to me the other day when we were talking about this, once you've put that work in, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
So if you spend some time really building robust resources, then every single time this happens, you can roll that out, and it becomes something that you can really trust and lean in on. I also think it's really important because WIP had a lot of lovely questions about that information space, you know, how do you trust the news that you're getting and the information that you're receiving, and I actually think that that kind of pushes it back on organisations to be trusted sources of what they do best. Every organisation has a purpose, you know, they have a value add, and so it's really important to kind of keep being a good source of your area of expertise, and don't let kind of 2024 make you frightened of showcasing the good work that you're doing and celebrating your people and sharing what you do best, because disinformation thrives when we stop talking about what's real and what's human and what matters.
I do find the chilling effect, as well as its term, but its meaning particularly interesting, and we've had a comment come through from Jonathan about this who's asked, what is the end goal of the chilling effect tactic? We all boycott Spark or Bud Light, they go bust, then dot dot dot, or has it not quite been thought out that far ahead? It's to make pride toxic in that instance, so fantastic question, and it is basically to make it so that if you are an organisation perhaps that has less resource, maybe you're smaller and you're thinking, should we do this? Your answer is nah, and so the impact of that means that less people are talking about really important things, and the people who are talking about those issues with things that are based on disinformation and with dangerous speech and stuff like that become the dominant voices in those spaces, so that's the end goal. More broadly, stepping away from the corporate Bud Light, Spark context, the chilling effect, the idea of it, is also demonstrating when that happens in public, which it does, it demonstrates for example in that case to queer young people that their voices are not valuable and that they don't have a public role, and so the ultimate expression of the chilling effect is a less diverse political system, a less diverse workplace, a less diverse media, all of the things that we've been striving for and have been achieving, where we have that more representation, they go away, and that's the end goal, is to have the disruption, the divisiveness, and a more limited public space. Great.
And so we've also received a few comments and questions from the audience when you were all joining and registering for this webinar about challenges you face with dealing with disinformation, so we've got time for a few more of these, the first of which, Nicole and Kate, is how can you demonstrate confidence and conviction but also be polite and respectful to shut down or kindly close certain conversations? I love the one and done principle, I know that sounds overly simple but it's effective for a reason, so if someone is kind of asking something that could be potentially respectful and it is in your lane to answer, then do it, give them as much information as you can, as politely and as respectfully as you can, and with a bit of generosity and almost the hope that actually that will create a really nice conversation, and if it doesn't, you know that you've done your duty, and actually you've given that person the information that you had available, and perhaps unless your purpose is to really kind of have those drawn out conversations, which often, especially in the org social media space, that's not what you're there to do, you can actually kind of confidently know that you've answered the question that was asked and then move on. Yeah, and in a more, less online way but in an interpersonal way, one of the things that's really, really helpful is to just ask people to repeat what they said. Works for sexist jokes, works for a bit of racism, works for lots of things, I didn't quite get that, could you please repeat it? And often they will then actually really reframe it in a much more useful way, and you can then go on to go there.
I am a big fan of the not in my whare approach to lots of things, so there are some things that family members know and not going to get talked about, not in my whare, just like you can say shoes off or on, shoes on in your whare, and remember that your workplace and your online spaces, they're all part of our homes, our lived experiences, so you can have rules and you can say why. And that doesn't mean that you can't talk about ideas, but as we say, when it moves into talking about people, particularly as good or bad, that's when I think it's really important to point out that that's gone into a zone that isn't actually constructive for anyone. I think that's a helpful principle to keep in mind, the one you mentioned earlier around ideas compared to people.
And another question that came through from someone when registering was how can you improve your ability to identify and understand trusted sources of information to distinguish between what is true and what is not? That's a good question, and I think one of the critical things that's happened in the last few years is that we have had this loss of trust in institutions, and that's because the institutions haven't been particularly trustworthy. We really need to acknowledge that globally, the institutions haven't been particularly trustworthy. From the media, through to governments, through to, for example, Big Pharma.
So there are real and genuine reasons why people have questions and had questions around COVID-19 and the vaccine. Those are really important. People need to be able to explore and ask questions.
But we've also got to a point, and Nicole mentioned it earlier around this idea of do your own research. Look, I'm a researcher. That's my job.
You're like, all I do is my own research. And I have to rely on other people's expertise for a whole lot of things without me doing my own research about them. Because I don't have the brain capacity or the time to do my own research about everything.
So we do need to have the space in between yes, self-research and finding out things, negotiating the bull crap, as Nicole so beautifully put it. Because a lot of disinformation mimics scientific authority at the moment, so there's a lot of disinformation out there that has the appearance of scientific reportage in papers, and some of it is actually scientific reportage in papers. I mean, the impact of a certain paper in the anti-vaccination movement worldwide is still incredibly important, even though it's been retracted.
And debunked several times. A million times. So it's really critical that we do have this ability to go think through, in my community, where I come from, who do I trust? Who are the trusted sources for my community? And then the role of government and of organisations and consultancies and people on this kind of core is to make sure those people who are trusted within a community have access to the best information.
Because people are going to go to the person they trust, and those people need to have access to the best information. I remember talking to a kaumātua a few years ago about the plan to have a million speakers of te reo Māori by 2030, I think it was, and he said does every Māori child need to be completely fluent? Or does every Māori child have the absolute right under the rangatiratanga to have access to someone who is completely fluent? And it's thinking about that kind of transition and the bridging, making sure people have access to experts they trust and that those experts have access to information. We're also a really huge fan of not reinventing the wheel.
There are things like Citizens Advice Bureau, probably my favourite organisation in New Zealand, mostly volunteer run, often retiree run, and they get to do fantastic things like just be an authoritative source of really good information on literally everything for people who might struggle to otherwise find those sources of information. They're in the communities. If you're the sort of person that needs to show up face to face or would prefer to do that, go and ask.
They do such a great job of what they do. Go into your library. We love libraries.
We're big fans of libraries and librarians in the disinformation project. Those places where knowledge sits and is trusted, they exist and we can continue to utilise them. And then also just kick in that bullcrap emotion stuff.
If something has designs upon you, is trying to make you feel or think a certain thing... Angry, fearful, distrustful of people that are in your community, then it's probably a bit got some malicious or misleading intent. And on that topic of access, do you have a sense of how much poverty is a factor in terms of access or choices about news, information, service, sources? The CAB services sound like a great example, but in terms of the New Zealand context? I think it's really, really important to state outright here that everybody, no matter how educated or wealthy or poor or ill-educated they are, is equally susceptible to disinformation. In fact, quite a lot of international research suggests that the smarter you think you are, the more likely you are to get sucked into a conspiratorial narrative because it's a self... You've got that sense of self-efficacy.
I think this, therefore it's true. Therefore it's right because I'm right. Because I'm correct.
However, colonisation effects like poverty definitely make it harder for people to access good information. And it also makes them, renders them vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation that ties into something real. Because remember, it's false or misleading.
Sometimes it's actually based on, quite often it's based on accurate things like the government doesn't have your best interests at heart. Now that's a really easy thing for a lot of members of our community to believe because the government hasn't in the past shown that they have, the state hasn't acted in ways that have supported them. And so yeah, there definitely are effects of colonisation, of socioeconomic deprivation and also of cultural tension, of placing all of our expertise in Pākehā.
Where are the experts who are more diverse, who reflect a community? And they're there. We're just not uplifting them. Alright, thank you both.
I'm conscious that there's a few minutes left before our webinar closes and I would like to give you both the opportunity to share some quick takeaways. But just before that, we're happy to catch up with you at any time to answer any other questions you might have and discuss potential ideas that could support you further. So there should be a button on the screen appearing now and one of the Allan and Clark team will be in touch with you.
So as we mentioned at the start of the webinar, we regularly run similar such webinars. Our next one is focused on protecting people's privacy, debunking common privacy myths on Thursday 23rd of May. So feel free to register now via the button on your screen.
And now before we close for today, Kate and Nicole, was there one thing that you would like to reinforce or just leave our audience with? I think it's really important to leave this webinar with hope. There's a beautiful phrase from the author Rebecca Solnit about how we are the monument when there is a crisis, when there is a terrible disaster or event or a war, we, the people are the monument because we rebuild the things that we value and we rebuild society. And so we have got it in us.
We know that we turned up for each other during COVID-19. We know that we are New Zealanders who turn up for each other in crisis. We saw that during the devastating effects of Cyclone Gabriel and the anniversary weekend floods.
We turn up for each other and let's do that and think about how we can turn up for each other in this new context, inside this new normal. I love that. I think mine's a build on from that which is we often get asked what organisations can do to guard against or to respond to disinformation and I think it's really important to remember that people are the organisations.
You make up your organisation and you decide how you respond. Beautiful reflections. Thank you.
Well, that's us for today. Ngā mihi. Thank you for joining us.
We'll see you at the next one.
