A scary look inside the inboxes of two recent politicians.

Damon has worked as a social media content creator for the Green Party and helps create content for Wellington mayor Tory Whanau. This piece is written in his own capacity as a private citizen. Opinions do not represent the Wellington City Council, or the mayor’s office.

I still remember the day I was granted access to Golriz Ghahraman’s social media accounts. 

It was 2018 and I was a content creator for the Green Party in parliament. Not long before, my edit of her maiden speech had gone viral. Like many New Zealanders, I was moved by her story, and was incredibly proud that our country boasted one of the first refugee MPs in the world.

However, I understood that she had been getting some unkind messages on social media, which had been causing her some strain, and I offered to manage her social media accounts for the day, just to help take a load off.  

For context, I’m a white guy, and I’ve seen the unpleasant side of social media both personally and professionally. On my personal accounts, I’ve experienced some less-than-polite messages and nasty comments. Working for the Greens, I’d seen obnoxious trolling and plenty of ignorance, so I understood why Ghahraman might need a break. 

But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. 

I began scrolling through the comments on her posts, filtering through her DMs and following the links that were sent to her. I quickly discovered a stream of vitriol I never imagined possible, her social media a relentless cycle of attacks and harassment. People telling her to “go back to her own country,” calling her a “stupid retard,” and a “fucking waste of taxpayers’ money”. 

This wasn’t just a few bad apples, this was a whole different world I had waded into. A world where alt-right bloggers draped her in photoshopped swastikas, and were applauded for doing so. A world where her everyday appearance online provoked bile-filled rants of hate and disgust. Comments like “Shut the fuck up, don’t cause trouble, and people won’t wanna kill you,” were fairly typical. Threats of violence, rape and assault were sprinkled throughout. 

I began to feel physically ill: shaken by what I was reading, wrung out by the threats of violence I was seeing. And I was just a spectator, not the recipient. 

I deleted and blocked the worst of it, reporting what I found to parliamentary security, and after a couple of days I handed Ghahraman’s social media channels back to her.

To be honest I assumed that parliamentary security and the police were taking care of the issue and got back to my job. It was something I simply didn’t want to process. It was too unsettling. 

Try to imagine living with that kind of sustained attack. What does it do to your sense of identity and your sense of what is normal? How does it affect what you write when you compose a post, or make a speech? 

Then there’s the helplessness. The police claiming there was nothing they could do, and the foot dragging inaction of the social media platforms themselves. Things did not improve in the years that followed.

Sadly, Ghahraman’s experience is not unique.We saw this with the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in how former prime minister Jacinda Ardern was targeted. There can be little doubt that this is part of what made her role as PM ultimately untenable. 

And now, a report released this morning shows that of 11 female MPs serving in parliament in 2023 who spoke to researchers, every single one had experienced gender-based harassment and abuse and several had received death threats. The MPs were from across the political spectrum and demographics yet shared the same online experience. 

None of this surprised me. I see it in my job today, monitoring the social media accounts of the mayor of Wellington.

Online I see crowds of trolls piling onto the mayor’s posts, and into her DMs. Often, they’re spouting lines they’ve seen in media commentary or reacting angrily to a clickbait headline.

All political figures experience online abuse and harassment, but it is so much worse for women, who are simply expected to just deal with it. Attempts to engage in this conversation are often met with dismissive comments. Women are told to “harden up” get a “thicker skin” and to ignore threats of intimidation and violence. Told that it isn’t “that bad”. 

But what happens when this does all get too much?

Well, they leave.

This is the crux of the issue. Because it means social media has become weaponised, designed to drive a certain kind of person out of politics. Something which directly impacts the kind of people who are left to represent us – and ultimately changes the way our democracy looks.

A recent social media report by Bloomberg makes clear that women leaders, particularly women of colour who have experienced this abuse, are unlikely to encourage others from their community to follow in their footsteps. One of the MPs in today’s report said: “On the one hand, I want to see more brown women and young women in this space. And on the other hand, I’m like, stay away, stay away, don’t do it. It’s a real contradiction. Now, I don’t think I would have still chosen to do it …”

Certain commenters will claim that any attempt to limit abuse, or hate speech, is an attack on freedom of speech, and in a purely binary sense they have a point. But the fact is, that by not controlling hate speech, freedom of speech is already being limited: the freedom for women and minorities to speak up, bullied or frightened into not speaking, because of the constant threats and abuse directed at them.

As we all know too well, social media is largely driven by engagement, which feeds particularly well on negativity and controversy. Meta has known this for some time, as is well-documented. For years now they have fought tooth and nail against anything they think may stand in the way of the profit those algorithms deliver to them.

In the past months, the owners of our most prominent social media platforms have openly declared their allegiances. Whether through Musk’s occupation of the White House, Zuckerberg’s embarrassing appeasement of Trump, or TikTok’s new-found debasement, it is now brutally clear where these corporations and their leaders sit on the political spectrum.

So, why aren’t we dealing with this issue? There are a number of immediate steps our government could easily take, such as updating the harmful digital communications act and regulating social media companies for more transparency and accountability, and with meaningful enforcement measures.

Personally I would go much further. The failure of social media has been too spectacular. 

What’s happening now is too big to be ignored any longer. We can’t just pretend this isn’t happening, as I tried to in 2018. The costs are simply too high.

As disturbing as it is, it has been a privilege to go behind the scenes of these women’s channels. It’s been a humbling, weirdly intimate experience, and has woken me up to the digital challenges facing our society. I’ve seen a side of the internet that not many people, particularly white men, will ever have to see.