Published on the 01/12/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Senate enquiries and warnings ahead of NZ elections – and Census…

Australia is resurrecting an inquiry into foreign interference through social media, with a New Zealand non-government research group watching closely – and warning about the potential for concerted foreign influence campaigns ahead of Kiwi general elections next year.

Australia’s senate last week voted to establish a Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media to investigate and report on the risk to Australia’s democracy from the activities of social media platforms headquartered in authoritarian counties, such as TikTok.

James Paterson, Liberal shadow minister for cybersecurity and countering foreign interference, who put forward the motion to re-establish the committee, labelled the activities as posing ‘a unique risk to the national security of Australia’.

“It is very much still a burgeoning issue and the next year is really going to cement down how urgent it is.”

The committee will also look at the way social media companies headquartered in Western countries, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, have been ‘weaponised’ by authoritarian states, Paterson says.

It’s the second such inquiry, with the previous one producing an interim report outlining a number of recommendations, including a requirement for platforms to report suspected foreign interference. That committee was dissolved ahead of the 2022 Federal election, before it had delivered a final report.

Kate Hannah, director of New Zealand’s the Disinformation Project and principal investigator for Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for Complex Systems and Networks, told iStart she’s ‘definitely concerned’ New Zealand will see concerted foreign influence campaigns as the country heads into its general elections next. 

“Obviously Australia is restarting their senate group for a reason. They have just experienced a general election and some of the experiences from that will be why they have decided that this is an important thing that they need to do,” Hannah says.

“Australia is our most natural partner on such things and we should be talking very closely with them about why they made that decision – and I assume people are.”

While Hannah says there wasn’t a huge amount of overt and obvious attempts at foreign interference in New Zealand in 2020, things have changed significantly since then with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, issues around the Indo-Pacific and jostling for space and power.

“All that means it would be absolutely expected that we would see distorted information making its way to New Zealand from both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin.”

How that manifests, however, she says she isn’t sure yet, but she is expecting New Zealand to be on the receiving end of ‘experimentation’.

She says over the past 2.5 years, New Zealand has seen an increase in AB testing of willingness of people to engage in certain types of online behaviour, and AB testing of getting around platform parameters and guidelines.

“We see that across the board with the widely known disinformation groups and entities,” Hannah says, noting they are testing the limits and learning where the grey line is.

“That’s probably one of the most critical features over the last 18 months – the propensity for a little bit of knowledge, the experience of platform censorship or restrictions.

“All of those pieces of knowledge being used collectively and shared quite broadly across the community as ways to get around content restrictions. That’s why we see the proliferation of things like voice memos, images and memes because someone using a computational tool or NLP can only evaluate text.”

The country could have a pre-cursor to the general election with the March 2023 Census gearing up to collect gender and sexual identity information for the first time.

“We know that’s a topic for our friend in the Kremlin and one that we see as being multipurpose international talking points that always find a place particularly when you frame it around children,” Hannah says.

“I’m interested in how Stats NZ and the government are preparing for what will likely be backlash against those questions and also around the collection of the data itself given the prevalence of ideas around sovereign citizenship.”

A Microsoft report earlier this year found New Zealand and Australia had both been highly successful targets for disinformation campaigns by Russia following the start of its attack on Ukraine.

New Zealand in particular appeared to be falling into the disinformation trap, with propaganda consumption in New Zealand increasing by more than 30 percent relative to consumption in Australia and the United States.

In an interview earlier this year, Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told iStart New Zealand has been a strong target of ‘influence operations’ not just by Russia but by other countries including China.

Hannah says by early 2022, many of those involved in disinformation were moving off platforms that are easy to study and on to Telegram.

“So the lack of visibility doesn’t mean it is not there, it’s because of where it is located.

It’s not on places you can study easily or at all using tools like Crowdtangle, which are computational tools which easily pull data and you can share international best practice,” she says.

“Those locations where we first saw Russian disinformation in December-February are still very much promoting Russian disinformation topics but more broad wones, including anti-LGBQTIA community material, and a lot of traditional femininity material which is very Putinesque. So it’s broader than just pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine, it’s more broadly insidious around topics that might be of concern to some New Zealanders.”

Hannah is also concerned about changes at Twitter.

“A year ago I would have classified Twitter as the most willing to work with government, the most pro-democracy, at least in the west, the most willing to have direct conversations with communities about the nature of content platform and now that has changed in less than a month.

“That’s a really worrying signal to me because it means that even advice or conversations that someone like me might have had three months ago with agencies or people who are thinking about being MPs around what social media platforms to use, and how you might use them is now completely defunct, dead in the water. And it means we’re going to see a lot of reliance on Facebook and Instagram adverting and use, which will have its own issues and problems.” 

Paterson, meanwhile, says he’s concerned about the weaponisation of misinformation and disinformation, particularly on Western run social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as authoritarian states attempt to shape public opinion and debate.

He says he’s also concerned about the way social media platforms are being used to intimidate and coerce people into silence, particularly if they’re involved in ‘sensitive’ human rights issues.

Mike Burgess, director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, warned earlier this year that foreign interference and espionage have supplanted terrorism as the spy agency’s principal security concern.

In his annual Threat Assessment, Burgess noted that ASIO had detected and disrupted a foreign interference plot in the lead-up to an election in Australia, though he declined to identify where.

The plot involved a ‘wealthy individual’ with direct and deep connections to a foreign government and its intelligence agencies who covertly sought to advance the interests of that country and undermine Australia’s sovereignty, attempting to secretly shape the jurisdiction’s political scene.

Activity suspected to have been driven by Chinese interests has been a key focus in Australia in recent years. Back in 2017, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced laws requiring lobbyists working for foreign countries to register, in a move that soured relations with China.

US intelligence analysts found Russia used social media to attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.

The Senate committee will report by 01 August 2023.

As to New Zealand, Hannah says the country doesn’t necessarily yet have enough understanding of the issue to have an enquiry of its own.

“It is very much still a burgeoning issue for NZ and I think the next year is really going to cement down how urgent it is.”