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Sanjana Hattotuwa and scenes from the parliament riot (Design: Tina Tiller)
Sanjana Hattotuwa and scenes from the parliament riot (Design: Tina Tiller)

MediaMarch 7, 2022

The protest lost at parliament – but it unequivocally won the social media war

Sanjana Hattotuwa and scenes from the parliament riot (Design: Tina Tiller)
Sanjana Hattotuwa and scenes from the parliament riot (Design: Tina Tiller)

A University of Otago researcher watched in awe as misinformation overwhelmed the mainstream truth-based channels on social media.

Sanjana Hattotuwa tells a story about growing up in a country at war, near an airport in Sri Lanka which was a key conduit between the capital of Colombo and the front in the north. Each day government-controlled press delivered good news about how well the war was progressing; each night he was kept awake by the sound of turbo-prop planes transporting casualties back to hospitals in the city.

This dissonance between reality and the official narrative shaped around it became an abiding obsession and then a life’s work. His background makes him perfectly placed to examine what we now call information disorder – the growing breach between objective reality and a growing group engaged in increasingly extreme conspiratorial thinking.

Hattotuwa set up Groundviews, a civic media site for Sri Lanka, and has worked alongside giants of this era’s battle for truth including Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who last year won the Nobel peace prize. He recently completed doctoral studies on the “intersection of social media, political communication and violence generation” at the University of Otago and now works as part of Te Punaha Matatini scrutinising the same territory.

We live in an era characterised by a phenomenal volume of public and private communication happening all at once, with a tiny number of platforms hosting and monetising an enormous proportion of it. It is at once accessible to almost anyone, but also maddeningly opaque, with private groups and algorithms which surface content for different audiences meaning that no one can ever have a true sense of what anyone else’s media consumption is like.

A rioter throws a desk on to a fire by the parliamentary playground, March 2, 2022. (Photo: Marty Melville / AFP via Getty Images)

Aotearoa for a long time had a very highly regulated mass media, and that controlled and licensed era is within living memory for half our population. Which is in part what makes it so jarring to witness thousands of people who have crossed over from a shared reality into a the mess of conspiracy theories which culminated in the extraordinary scenes at parliament last week. As Toby Manhire put it, we saw a “reel of scenes that seemed to come from some faraway place, beamed against the backdrop of our parliament.”

Yet while it was a confronting rupture to many, for Hattotuwa it was – while still shocking – also essentially predictable. He had been following the rising tumult of the occupation on social media for weeks, and experienced the events of last Wednesday through a barrage of social media communications.

“I had multiple tabs open, multiple live streams, multiple sources of real time information coming, in multiple sources of commentary around those channels and vectors. So it was, I suppose, for many, an information overload,” he says. “It’s not easy.”

Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.


I spoke to Hattotuwa on Thursday for my podcast The Fold, which takes a broad view of Aotearoa’s media landscape on a weekly basis. He was impassioned and thrillingly articulate in cataloguing what he had seen, and the dramatic escalation in reach and impact which led directly to the growth of the occupation. For so long there has been a sense from politicians and institutions that what happens online is somehow lesser and abstracted, with only a very limited real world impact. Setting aside the idea that things which happen online are any less real for many, we saw very viscerally last week that online radicalisation leads directly to real world behaviours.

The prime minister seemed to acknowledge that the period of allowing a largely libertarian social media was over in her press conference that day, when she suggested that the time was coming when we would have to understand how so many could “succumb to such wild and dangerous mis- and disinformation.” The thing is, it’s not a mystery: Hattotuwa has shown that live videos from the occupation grew at an unprecedented rate, overtaking the reach of the entire mainstream media multiple times and for long periods.

He gives data to back up what many of us in the media had seen through social analytics in recent weeks – any content about the occupation attracted incredible engagement. And posts which expressed support for it or disdain for politicians and journalists exploded. For example, a February 22 post by former Act party leader Rodney Hide under the headline ‘the protestors have won’, run on Sean Plunket’s new website The Platform, attracted over 5,000 Facebook interactions, despite the company not having officially launched. To put it in context, that’s more interactions than all of the more than 200 posts to Facebook by Newsroom – which has largely covered the disinformation complex of the protest superbly – during that week, combined.

All that still pales by comparison to the two core communication vehicles of the protest: Telegram and Facebook live, which Hattotuwa scrutinised most closely. He says “there was a greater volume, there was a greater velocity, which is a speed and there was more diversity in the vectors, which is the platforms. That’s volume, vector and velocity. Then there’s also another way of looking at which is in terms of speed, scope and scale. So that was an accelerated production of violative harmful material, and they have a greater audiences to which it was reaching.”

While engaging with content is not the same as endorsing it or believing it, the events of Wednesday show just how powerful it was for some, and how ineffective any attempts to rein it in have been. Hattotuwa has engaged with Facebook at a corporate level for years, and believes that while there are many genuine and talented people working to try and solve this fiendishly complex problem, they are unable to effect change – the growth and revenue generating parts of the business are simply too powerful.

Which is to say that change seems extremely unlikely to come from within. There is a rising political movement worldwide which is intent upon meeting this pernicious challenge with regulation. The events of last week, and a new tone from the prime minister in response, have created a sense that there might finally be progress on that front here. For Hattotuwa the attention and emphasis are overdue, but welcome.

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Putin
Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine was one of many distressing headlines this week. Image: Getty / Treatment: Archi Banal

MediaMarch 5, 2022

Protests, plague and Putin: With headlines this bleak, how do newsreaders keep cool?

Putin
Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine was one of many distressing headlines this week. Image: Getty / Treatment: Archi Banal

News headlines across the past week have been brutal. If it’s distressing to hear them, what’s it like for those having to read them?

In Wellington, parliamentary protesters have attacked police with punches, pitchforks and picnic table legs. In Ukraine, five are dead after Russian forces demolished a Kiev TV tower with missiles. Meanwhile, 43 arrests have been made in Aotearoa after an investigation into a global child porn ring that includes “violence, assault and degradation” towards infants and children.

It’s just after 10am and RNZ’s headlines for this chaotic Wednesday morning make for bleak listening. With omicron case numbers rising, a lengthy anti-mandate protest being disbanded, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine well underway, and a child porn case, it’s potentially one of the busiest news days of the year. Even the weather’s bad: heavy rainfall is set to hit the West Coast.

On air, veteran broadcaster Nicola Wright has sounded measured and composed through all of it. She’s been fronting Morning Report’s half-hour bulletins since 6am, a job she’s been doing for the past 22 years. Despite the worrying headlines, her professionalism that earned her the title of best newsreader at the 2021 Radio Awards is on full display. “We’re ready for anything to happen,” she says.

Yet, picking up The Spinoff’s call a few minutes after her 10am bulletin ends, she admits today’s been especially hectic. “It’s a relentless onslaught every day, but today’s particularly bad,” Wright says. Making things worse is the amount of reporters working remotely to evade omicron.  “It takes a little more time to get things done,” she says.”It all adds to the pressure of producing the bulletin.”

News presenters Samantha Hayes and Nicola Wright

As a listener, all of those headlines heard one after the other has a compounding affect. It’s depressing, like end times could be nigh. How does Wright feel about it? She’s too busy doing her job to think about it, trying to present those shocking headlines in a way that doesn’t overwhelm listeners. She describes her job as providing “an oral arm around the shoulder,” like a friend sidling up and saying: “Listen, I’ve got something bad to tell you.”

In other words, Wright’s trying to make everything sound okay, even if it’s not. That means getting names right, and make sure her pace and tone isn’t out of step with the information she’s presenting. She points out she’s just one person in a 15-strong team. “It’s important that all the work that reporters, bulletin editors and supervisors have put together doesn’t get ruined by a substandard presentation,” she says. “It’s a responsibility, so you’ve got to be ready to do it right.”

Sometimes, though, it does get a bit much. This morning’s story about pedophilia got to her. “You don’t want to think too much about that,” she says. “It’s important that the news is out there and that it’s going on and stuff is going on to stop it [but] you can’t let your mind keep thinking about that story after you’ve read it.” Other stories stay with her too: the day Christchurch mosque shooting and earthquakes are moments she struggled to shake.

When the news is this grim, it’s no surprise. Others have found their emotions seeping into bulletins this week. Newshub at 6 presenter Samantha Hayes took to Instagram Stories to warn there might be tears during Tuesday’s show. “I’m not sure if I’m going to make it through the bulletin tonight without crying,” she told her followers. “The stories are horrendous.” That night, Hayes did seem emotional, but made it through a horrific broadcast about a six year-old Ukraine war victim intact.

For one young newsreader, this was the week it all became too much. James Tapp has been volunteering as a morning newsreader at Auckland student radio station bFM for the past two and a half years. His second shift, at the age of 18, was covering the Christchurch mosque attacks. He doesn’t remember much from that day. “Everyone was in shock,” he says. “I imagine it was a lot to process afterwards.”

He’s been presenting headlines and bulletins for two years since then, but has just quit his job, partly because of his studies, but also because he was finding the constant churn of news all too much. “I felt like I was getting too burnt out by it all, even though I really love it,” says Tapp. “It’s a never-ending cycle when it comes to the news. There’s so much desensitisation to all of it. ‘Oh, there’s a war starting,’ or, ‘Here’s another awful Covid statistic’. That’s what you end up dealing with every day. It can be quite hard to step back and say, ‘People’s lives are on the line here.'”

bFM
James Tapp, right, with his bFM news team. Photo: Supplied

Tapp is already missing it, and the friends he made at bFM, but he’s looking forward to news being just the news and not “this huge big thing you have to keep track of all day every day”. He’s already pared back his habits. “There’s a lot of burnout that comes from being around news 24/7 and having to constantly keep track of what’s going on in the world,” he says. “People are relying on you to write your stories well and read those stories well so they know what’s going on in the world.”

With her years of experience, Wright, from RNZ, has some tips for Tapp, other young broadcasters, and the rest of us doomscrolling our way into oblivion. Her advice? Learn coping measures, find the off switch, do something to cleanse the timeline. For her, it’s playing co-op card games with her sister. “It’s very absorbing,” she says. “You find after two or three hours you haven’t thought about anything else. It’s a circuit breaker.”

As Wright well knows, once the protests are over, Russia’s finished dropping bombs on Ukraine, and omicron’s spread as far as it can, there’s going to be more news to deal with. “You come into the job knowing that news is full of people being horrible to other people and bad things happening all around the world,” she says. “There’ll be more bad news tomorrow.” With that, Wright’s got to go. It’s nearly 10.30am, she’s got more headlines to read, and those protesters seem to be picking a fight with the police.

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