Māori are still prominent victims of online bullying according to the latest research by Action Station discussing impacts and usefulness of the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) a powerful piece of legislation that was enacted to address the issue of online abuse. However it is not sufficient to address every issue of online hate, harassment and abuse.
This article is largely a copy and paste of Māori specific content with my comments in italics.
The survey asked about social media usage, experiences of online harassment and the impact of that harassment. Of those people who had an experience of harassment most had faced racist abusive comments, messages or images directed at them.
The role of NetSafe
Netsafe are effective but their work is reliant on the platforms’ community standards and enforcement policies to remove content if the abusers themselves won’t. Netsafe are not an “enforcement agency.” That role is left to the courts. Unfortunately little support is available for those making HDCA complaints if mediation is unsatisfactory. Netsafe are legally bound to act as impartial mediators, and so are restrained from filling the role of victim support if they recommend a case proceed to court.
There is a concerning rate of drop off between cases that Netsafe recommends proceed to court and those that actually do. This points to a lack of victim support during this process. As well as harming individuals, this contributes to a shortage of case law which would benefit Netsafe.
My experience of NetSafe is that they are a great organisation with many constraints. One being that they are not equipped for Māori online victims. Considering research proves Māori are over rated as victims, there needs to be more done to represent Māori.
Online bullying and abuse for Māori can in addition to traditional abuse be cultural and racist abuse. Some subtle that non Māori do not understand. Then there are the issues of the generations of Māori children who were brought up in Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa who speak Māori as a first language. Their values are different and need to be considered.
At the NetSafe conference in 2018, we heard from Lani Wendt Young (see below) who had some horrible stories of online abuse. Her difficulty was that the abuse was in Samoan not English. Again, NetSafe and other agencies including FaceBook did not have the resources to deal with this.
Cultural norms and values must be considered when dealing with minority online harassment and abuse.
Indigenous/Māori rights
One of the most significant themes to emerge in this research was the need to attend not just to individualised concerns (e.g. individual rights and privacy) but also to collective dynamics and wellbeing. Therefore any policies that are developed to protect people online and ensure their ability to participate freely and safely online need to have at their centre indigenous and collectivist thinking, especially as Māori have historically (and presently) been among those who are most targeted by hateful speech.
Constitutional lawyer and justice researcher Moana Jackson points out:
“The right to free speech [in New Zealand]… has too often meant the freedom to hurt, despise, and belittle Māori. Cartoons published a few years ago depicting fat and lazy Māori taking advantage of free school lunches were found by the court to be objectively offensive but protected by free speech and the fact that they weren’t offensive enough to incite a “reasonable person” to hatred or violence against our people.”
In response to national debate about free speech vs hate speech, Doctoral student in Theology and Religion at Otago University, Graham Cameron writes about the idea of whakawhanaungatanga instead of censorship.
Whakawhanaungatanga means to build familial connections with others, the relationships that bind us together, our social contract. He argues that defending the rights of racist or sexist people to say whatever they want is implicitly defending their ‘right’ to damage our communities and relationships. Therefore, limiting people’s ability to be sexist and racist is less about censorship and more about upholding whanaungatanga.
To illustrate the difference in the Māori and Western/Pākehā worldviews when it comes to the power of speech, we point to two different whakataukī or proverbs. The first in English: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The idea that speech cannot hurt a person. The second in Māori: “He tao rākau, e taea te karo; he tao kōrero, e kore e taea te karo” or “The taiaha can be parried aside but words go straight to the heart.”
In the Māori world, a culture steeped in oral tradition, words create worlds and words matter.
Samoan author Lani Wendt Young, who has received horrific amounts of online abuse, says:
“The public shaming associated with online abuse is amplified many times over when you are Samoan… Because an attack on the individual is an attack on the extended family. ”
Our human rights, hate speech and communications laws need to acknowledge collectivist cultures and prioritise collective wellbeing-based solutions.
Māori digital rights advocate Karaitiana Taiuru says that
two Māori values in particular could help support those who build the technology that permeates so much of our lives to build tools for a safer, better internet. Manaakitanga (How can we build tools that encourage users to show each other care and compassion and work to uplift each other?) and Kaitiakitanga (How can we build tools where all users become the guardians of the experience and data in a highly trusted, inclusive, and protected way?).
This is applicable to Treaty Rights, Data Sovereignty as well.
Māori statistics and experiences from the research
The report shows that one in three Māori (33%), and one in five Asian (25%) and Pacific (21%) people experienced racial abuse and harassment online in 2018. The survey asked 618 Māori, Pacific and Asian people for their experiences.
- One user of a Facebook online survey stated “Some people have singled me out for abuse during some topics because I am Māori”.
- Other survey results showed that one in four Māori (26%), one in three Asian (33%) and one in three Pacific (34%) people had lower self esteem and/or a loss of confidence as a result of online harassment.
- Almost two in ten Māori (19%) and Pacific (18%) people, and one in three Asian (34%) reported a feeling of powerlessness in their ability to respond to the abuse or harassment.
- Most who faced harassment changed their behaviour because of it. 14% of Māori stopped posting content that expressed their views. The abuse was reported to happen most often on Facebook, the most popular social network amongst those surveyed and in the country.
Pākehā stereotypes
Research conducted by Unitec into perceptions of community safety in West Auckland found that high social media use, particularly of Facebook and Neighbourly, increased Pākehā people’s fear of crime, despite being the group least affected and despite crime rates consistently decreasing.
Pākehā people’s use of social media was significantly higher than other ethnic groups (89% vs 69%) as was their anxiety and fear about other people in their community. Pākehā, as a group, wanted more police and tougher justice policy, compared with other ethnic groups who wanted more initiatives that support community engagement and connection.
YouTube is a vehicle used to spread miss-truths and racist information
Much of the New Zealand-based misinformation on YouTube spreads mistruths about New Zealand history to hundreds of thousands of people
Searching for something as innocuous as ‘New Zealand History’ on YouTube (in a private browser) brings New Zealand Skeletons in the Cupboard, a discredited racist ‘documentary’ that was pulled from TVNZ for being inaccurate, as the top result. It currently has over half a million views on YouTube.
The YouTube recommendations from that video include a lecture by Jordan Peterson, known for his anti-women views, and other videos about an earlier race of people in New Zealand (6 Reasons New Zealand Was Settled by an Ancient Unknown People, 45,000 views, and Brien Foerster: Crimson Horizon – The Mysterious Red-Haired Sea Kings of the Pacific FULL LECTURE, 38,000 views) as well as videos about Bigfoot.
A video by a New Zealand conspiracy theory channel titled Evidence of Pre-Māori Civilisation has 114,000 views. The same channel has four videos about Southern and Molyneux’s visit to New Zealand.
Within a handful of recommended videos you can find your way from a search for New Zealand history to videos by American far-right figures arguing for white supremacy.
Stuff is a cesspit of racist comments and bullying of Māori
As a regular media commentator I know first hand that Stuff is the worst place online (worst than WhaleOil) for racist and uneducated diatribe that is fueled by hate and lack of education and facts.
From August to October 2018, ActionStation ran a pilot project called Tauiwi Tautoko where 20 volunteers were trained and supported to interact with people in online forums for one hour per week to listen, engage and discuss to find common ground with the goal of educating, supporting and encouraging people to develop more caring, thoughtful and educated responses to Māori people, culture and language.
The volunteers detailed their responses and reflected on what worked well (and didn’t) in the conversations using Google Forms. Those responses were collated in a spreadsheet that was analysed by an independent researcher from a University of Otago research project (Putting Hope into Action: What inspires and sustains young people’s engagement in social movements?).
The focus of the analysis was on the number of racist comments vs caring and supportive comments expressed in two online forums: Stuff and Facebook. Comments were coded against 15 ‘racist themes’ which are detailed in the Methodology section.
Six Stuff articles with a total of 446 comments were analysed for the purpose of this research.
Sixty-six comments were positive and engaging and there were 225 references to the fifteen racist themes. This does not mean that half the comments were racist because each occurrence of a theme was coded and some comments contained material that could be coded under more than one theme. However, the number of references to the racist themes does provide an overall ‘feel’ for the material encountered in the Stuff comments as the chart below shows. Only 15% of the comments were supportive even when there was a dedicated group of Tauiwi Tautoko volunteers involved in the online forum.
The six Stuff articles that the Tauiwi Tautoko volunteers commented on also provides a small database to analyse some trends in the extent and content of racism.
ActionStation analysis found that, on average, readers of Stuff comments will encounter nearly four times as many different racist ways of thinking for each kind comment. Facebook users will encounter nearly five times as many.
Eleven Facebook posts were analysed for this research. 4,011 comments were reviewed and coded. As with the Stuff comments, it was possible for Facebook comments to contain text that could be coded across more than one of the racist themes so the number of racist references reported below does not equate to the number of comments. It is a count of the number of times that each racist themes is mentioned. Racist themes emerged 553 times (14%) compared with 124 supportive comments (3%). The majority of comments were neither explicitly positive nor racist at 3,326 (83%). However, these comments should not necessarily be considered ‘neutral’: they are just neither ‘kind nor engaging’ nor racist as defined by the fifteen codes. Many of the comments were unpleasant, unkind or at best cheeky.
The analysis above suggests that comments to both Stuff and Facebook online media are much more likely to contain references to racist themes than comments that are supportive and caring. Additionally, because some posts contain text that can be considered ‘racist’ in more than one way as identified using the fifteen themes, it was also important to get a comparison using a basic count. This was done using the comments to one Stuff article and one Facebook post (of the same Stuff article).
This basic count shows that in both Facebook and Stuff comments, people are twice as likely to encounter racist comments than kind and caring ones.
ActionStation, along with many other organisations, groups and individuals, are concerned not only that these racist views are held by some people, but that forums exist that allow, invite and support the airing of racist views and attacks. This occurs despite human rights legislation, and censorship guidelines, which explicitly condemn material which “degrades or dehumanises or demeans any person.” There is increasing academic and public unease about internet safety and its implications for society, which have resulted in guidelines about staying safe online and are annually brought to our attention with “Safer Internet Day” on the 5th of February. While this safety focus is often directed at keeping individuals safe from breaches of privacy or cyberbullying, it is increasingly acknowledged that being exposed to racism has serious effects on health and wellbeing. It is therefore crucial that we also address online racial discrimination in order to keep people safe online and promote the type of society that we would prefer to live in.
Both Stuff and Facebook have policies about comments but these are not included with the comments sections and have to be searched for. Facebook’s policy was published relatively recently (April, 2018) and hate speech appears to be something Facebook has struggled with, particularly with regard to drawing the line between hate speech and expression of free speech. These boundaries need to be more clearly defined by policy makers and political action so that inciting disharmony and hatred has legal implications.
Finally, what the nineteen different articles/posts and 4,867 comments required for this analysis revealed was that the same names and pseudonyms come up time and time again, which confirms that there are online ‘trolls’. Although there are recommended ways to manage attacks from trolls, it seems incongruent that rather than restricting trolls, the recipients of ‘trolling’ have the burden of protecting themselves.
Recent research from New Zealand suggests that ‘successful’ trolling requires motivated trolls, reactive targets and the absence of capable guardians. This begs the question: Are Facebook and Stuff capable guardians? Our research would suggest not.
Conclusion
More needs to be done to address and protect online Māori from: trolls, abuse and bullying. Agencies such as NetSafe, InternetNZ, Ministry of Justice need to recognise there is an issue that impacts Māori and work together with Māori and Iwi to create preventable solutions and resource to assist Māori.
Organisations such as Stuff need to ensure comments are moderated for Hate Speech and generally lift their community standards as it also impacts on the readership of their content.
Conglomerates such as Facebook need to consider minority groups and how best to deal with language and cultural issues online.
Source: The report largely quoted here is from the following URL https://peoplesharassmentreport.com/
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