'Most violent targeting of any community': The aftermath of Posie Parker's visit

Thursday, 4 May 2023

A report published by the Disinformation Project on Friday has documented the aftermath of British anti-transgender activist Posie Parker’s visit to Australia and Aotearoa and the effects on the disinformation community.

Anti-transgender rhetoric has replaced Covid-19 as the “new unifying issue” for the disinformation community.
Report finds unprecedented increase in extremist, far-right content online.
“Some of the most extreme content” shows methods of torture and death directed at trans people.
Transgender community is victim to the “most violent targeting of any community” online after Melbourne rally.
Spike in engagement from Aotearoa’s white nationalist groups.

While far-right members gave Nazi salutes at British anti-trans activist Posie Parker’s Melbourne rally, Kate Hannah and her fellow researchers watched, documenting New Zealand’s disinformation networks.

Anti-transgender group, Speak Up for Women, organised a protest at Parliament on Wednesday. Many carried signs exemplifying the disinformation being spread under an anti-transgender rhetoric.

It wasn’t specific data collection on the anti-transgender movement. The Disinformation Project study’s aims remain the same. The independent research group has since February 2020 been observing, collating, categorising and analysing open source, publicly available data related to Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation.

But in the six weeks following the Melbourne rally on March 18, it witnessed the “most violent targeting of any community” focused on transgender, intersex people and their allies, as well as “some of the most extreme” queerphobic and transphobic content online to date.

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A counter-protest from the trans community and allies nearby.

“Our report in a way, surprised us,” Hannah said. “We could all see and feel what seems like really immediate effects,” she said, of Parker’s presence in Australia and Aotearoa.

In a report released on Friday, the Disinformation Project’s findings included the content targeting the transgender community and the “really concerning” patterns behind the way in which it spread.

“It’s the most detail we’ve ever gone into, but it’s because it’s also the most violent content we’ve seen,” Hannah said. The report noted much of the content was too violent and featured harm too graphic to include.

The group watched as the “unifying issue” within the disinformation community shifted from Covid-19 to anti-transgender sentiment. Explicit neo-Nazi and far-right content was shared and promoted on New Zealand Telegram channels at levels they had never seen before.

Data showed domestic Telegram channels beginning to republish material from Australia-based neo-Nazi channels in the period between the Melbourne rally and Parker’s arrival in Aotearoa.

Since Posie Parker’s Melbourne rally the report found increasingly extreme content circulating online.

This included explicitly violent text, images, video and memes.

The report also noted a “clear expansion” in the use of stickers, GIFs and other memes which were difficult to track and were increasingly “trans- and queerphobic”, including explicit methods of torture and death.

Kate Hannah says the transphobic narrative uses language which featured in the fight against homosexual law reform in the 1980s, civil unions and marriage equality in the 2000s.

Hannah said there was an assumption that after the Parliament protested ended last year and most vaccine mandates were lifted in the months that followed, the momentum and anger from the protesters would fall away.

Research showed the number of people consuming misinformation and disinformation online “exploded” during the three-week occupation of Parliament grounds, while protest-related channels on Telegram also saw a rapid growth in subscribers.

But since the Covid-19 pandemic began three years ago, disparate groups have formed more connections and alliances – which the report refers to as “community bridging”.

The report highlights the harm and threats that the transgender community faces.

“There’s never been a stepping back from that amplification process, we’ve never seen it subside again.”

However, in the past six weeks the researchers witnessed an acceleration of these connections forming between anti-mandate and anti-vaccination groups with anti-transgender communities.

Hannah said the neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups, which had been more on the fringes of the anti-vaccination movement, had been accepted into this new community due to the shared beliefs regarding transgender people – and this has become their unifying issue.

The report showed between March 26 and 31, fringe groups in Aotearoa’s disinformation communities opportunistically responded to the spike in content and engagement with anti-transgender material.

Local white-supremacist group Action Zealandia, for example, posted more content than ever on Telegram.

Hannah added that the transphobic narrative evoked moral panic, using the same language that was used in resistance to homosexual law reform in the 1980s, civil unions and marriage equality in the 2000s.

The content shared on social media platforms were overwhelmingly linked to ideas of harm to children – paedophilia and grooming, and language and imagery equating people to “things, animals, witches, or demons” which were consistent with the hallmarks of dangerous speech, it said.

“All of these things are part of a globally sophisticated marketplace of terrible, terrible ideas coming into New Zealand and being given more traction than they should because of links to other sets of ideas like Covid-19.

“People are being suckered and manipulated which is really, really distressing.”

Hannah said it raised concerns about how it could quickly adapt around other different disinformation-related issues in the future.

A key finding in the report was the level of violent rhetoric directed at Green Party co-leader and MP Marama Davidson, who attended the Auckland counter-protest, including death threats which spiked to “unprecedented levels”, the report said.

“No other individual has been the focus of so much content, and content of this nature except for former prime minister Jacinda Ardern.”

While Telegram was known for being a largely unregulated platform and a haven for violent extremists and conspiracy theorists, the report noted concerns about the sharing of content on more mainstream media platforms which recently saw a loosening in policing.

Hannah said it was important to highlight the data, distressing as the content was, to be able to advocate for the queer community and for the operation of democratic institutions.

“For trans communities, their whānau and their allies, this isn’t going away,” she said.

“The hope is that this working paper provides New Zealand communities with some insight to understand a little bit of what’s going on to draw on their wells of compassion and to support our most vulnerable community members.”