Graham Philip is charged with sabotage. That's all we can tell you

Friday, 29 July 2022

Stuff has strictly adhered to the suppression rules.

ANALYSIS: A man named Graham Philip has been charged with sabotage, an obscure, never before enforced law in New Zealand.

Philip has been held without bail since his arrest on December 8. He lives in Taupō. He likes sunsets and Mitre 10.

That’s about all we can say on the matter, under the direction of the court. Details of the offending – which Stuff knows – have been suppressed, and to say more about his background would risk contempt of court.

It’s a fascinating case; it reflects the fractures that have emerged in society and online, and how that manifests in the real world. It’s clearly in the public interest.

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The suppression order is understandable, but it’s also frustrating. It’s ostensibly there to prevent copycats, which it may well have done – it’s impossible to know.

It has also fostered confusion in a way that is likely to encourage the distrust that serves as the context of this situation in the first place.

First, some background.

Until recently, Graham Philip had name suppression. His name was nevertheless plastered over social media – mainly, on a messaging app – in blatant violation of the court.

Many of those breaking the suppression orders did so under their own names. One person even did it on camera, in front of a room full of people. No one, as far as Stuff is aware, has faced consequences.

It’s hard to blame them – how are they supposed to know about name suppression? Suppression orders were placed verbally by the judge at a court hearing. Unless you’re in the habit of lurking around courthouses in the central North Island, and happened to be within earshot of that specific hearing, you wouldn’t know.

Consider for a moment the people who frequent these online spaces. Many of them distrust authority, and are inclined to believe there’s a conspiracy between mainstream institutions (the Government, the police, the media, the courts) to suppress the truth. They are prone to collecting morsels of information and mashing them together into a narrative structure, even if they don’t fit. If there are gaps, they fill them with whatever sounds right.

One day they see a picture of a friendly-looking man named Graham. He believes many of the same things they do. He’s in jail. No, they can’t know why. The media’s not reporting it. Interesting morsels; the narrative writes itself.

Predictably, based on these bare facts, Philip’s supporters called him a political prisoner, jailed for wrongthink and held without charge. They called for Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission to get involved. They raised money for him, and organised protests outside the courts. They even posted his handwritten letters from prison. Some called for retribution against authorities.

Few of these people knew what he was accused of doing, and many were incurious to find out. He was already the perfect character to slot into their narrative structure; the plucky truth-teller, crushed by the state. Those of us who knew what was happening could not correct the misinformation, because doing so would be illegal.

On The Detail podcast, we talk to law experts about who receives this treatment in court - and why. (Video first published on September 20, 2021)

Name suppression has since lifted. You can now publish Philip’s name and the charges he faces.

It has probably made the situation worse. An ordinary man named Graham is facing obscure and sinister sounding charges of sabotage. How those two facts connect remains a secret; a hole in the narrative structure, begging to be filled in.

Since the NZ Herald published the existence of this case on Friday, the online dot-connecting has been rampant.

People inclined to both support and revile Philip have come to wild conclusions, based on the meagre public details available about what he supposedly did. Unsurprisingly, the speculation tends to align with their existing views – an innocent man, held unjustly; a saboteur, rightfully imprisoned.

The end result is that potential copycats now have a rich vein of sabotage-adjacent ideas to tap, and the net amount of confusion in the world has increased. There are no winners.

This is not meant to be a criticism of the court. It’s a uniquely challenging situation; Philip deserves a fair trial, which may require that details of the allegations not be publicly litigated beforehand.

But it pays to be honest about the consequences. It would be hard to engineer a situation more likely to increase distrust in mainstream institutions, which has come at a particularly unhelpful time.

An online community, primed to be suspicious of authority, knows one of their own is in prison, but the authorities say they’re not allowed to know why. Without concrete information, this community is free to haphazardly speculate, getting basic facts wrong and indulging their instinct that a conspiracy is taking place.

None of us who do know what’s happening are allowed to correct it, and are therefore unwillingly implicated in the conspiracy.

It’s likely that by the time we can write about this case fulsomely – probably not for more than a year – the horse will have bolted. These narrative structures will have had months to form.

Partial information can be as problematic as outright misinformation. Many of the conspiracy-fuelled explanations of the world, particularly involving vaccines, contain information that is partly true.

During a ranging infodemic, it pays to be alert to how this happens. Unfortunately, the court has given us an ideal example.