We are all familiar with the concept of the ‘Ivory Tower’ where academics posit theories ‘from a state of privileged seclusion, divorced from the facts and practicalities of the real world.’
Te Punaha Matatini’s ‘The Disinformation Project’ (‘TDP’) has taken that to a whole new level. These guys posit from an Ivory Metaverse.
Let’s step inside this Ivory Metaverse for a moment.
Here livestreaming real events is deemed spreading ‘mis-dis information’; it’s a place where decent European folk are defamed as ‘white supremacists’; it’s where the Kremlin has stuffed up our country – but the Beehive hasn’t; it’s where those who insist on the fundamental right to informed consent to medical treatment, without coercion, are ‘trojan horses’ for the ‘Far Right’ (even if they’re actually far left, Maori or Islanders); and it’s where you are now labelled ‘Far Right’ if you hold middle-of-the road Islamic or judeo-christian values.
Yes folks, this is the looney, conspiratorial world we live in according to TPD in it’s state-funded report entitled ‘The Murmuration of Information Disorders’, released on 18 May (‘the report’).
The purpose of the report is to examine the causes and choatic end of the Parliament Protest, and ask: ‘How did Aotearoa New Zealand end up here?’ (Download the report here).
In answering this question, TPD focus exclusively on the spread of ‘mis dis information’ by ‘super-spreaders on social media. This exclusivity of focus renders the report of marginal value if we are trying to understand ‘how we got here’.
To answer the question researchers need to step away from their computer screens and get in the real world. To be fair, offline factors may have been out of TPD’s purview, but there is no acknowledgement of this and the report is presented in a way which puts the blame for events squarely on alleged super-spreaders of mis dis information on social media and the internet.
The protest did not exist in a vaccum. A belief that government action did not contribute to the chaos is fanciful. The government is as much to blame as anyone, in particular:
- The fact that Jacinda Ardern lied to New Zealanders when she said that there would be no consequences for those who declined the COVID vaccine. The sense of betrayal and anger felt by many as a result of this deception should not be under-estimated, especially given around 40% of protest attendees voted for Labour at the last election.
- Trevor Mallard’s highly inflammatory actions.
- The refusal of the Prime Minister (or indeed any MP) to meet with protest leaders, despite numerous requests.
Additionally, by focusing exclusively on the digital world the report is based on unreliable data.
I would agree with TPD on one point. The online world is a murky one.
It’s full of malicious and misleading actors, fake accounts, anonymous accounts, professional and amateur trolls, bot armies, bot individuals, algorhithms, artificial intelligence, viruses, trojan horses, spam accounts, spyware – and much more. Here, dark corners of the digital landscape are easy to manipulate by actors big or small, good or evil, by states, corporates and individuals.
Which is precisely the reason why any analysis of the digital social media world to explain real world events like the Parliament Protest has little value. They are not relying on pure data, but material which is infested with impurities and fake accounts.
The protest started on 6 February and ended on 2 March.
TPD had a window of 25 days to go to Wellington and engage with the protesters – interviewing them, canvassing their views, asking them to complete questionnaires – the basic research techniques of the social scientist. The vast majority of protesters, who were peaceful, I am sure, would have been happy to oblige. Highly accurate, valuable demographical data would have been obtained – ages, genders, ethnicities, income and education levels, political persuasions and motivations for attending – the kind of information that would really help the government, and the nation, understand the protesters.
That this opportunity was not taken is a shame. Was this failure due to incompetence or was it a deliberate ploy?
RT and Ukraine
The legacy media misinformation about the Ukraine conflict is worthy of its own article(s).
Incredibly, TPD have linked ‘Russian Disinformation’ as a cause of the end of protest chaos.
DTNZ has syndicated RT News since our inception, so I am well-placed to respond to TPD’s claims about the news agency, claims which typically follow the western mainstream narrative that Vladimir Putin and Russian media are to blame for all of western society’s current social and economic ills.
TPD claimed RT had ‘repeatedly featured’ the Parliament Protest. Well, why wouldn’t they? They are an international news agency, and by it’s own admission, TPD said the protest drew a lot of international media attention – somehow this is ok, as long as it’s not attention from Russian media. Secondly, my records indicate RT ran just five stories, which is about one story for every five days of the protest – hardly ‘repeated’. Here are those stories, which you can read for yourself and judge if they are ‘disinformation’, or just stock-standard news reporting of this important event: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4, Article 5.
TPD also claimed that RT is responsible for ‘significant COVID misinformation’, citing an article from legacy media publication New York Times (NYT) in support. This claim is completely false. The vaccine narrative RT has pushed is exactly the same as that of legacy media here and around the western world – advocating mass vaccination and denigrating ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘anti-mandate’ protesters. Putin, just like Ardern, has pushed mass vaccination and implemented mandates. In fact, RT’s treatment of ‘anti-vaxxers’ is far more scathing and derogatory in tone than we see here in the New Zealand media.
Conclusion
My concern is that the government will use the report exclusively as the basis for further erosion of human rights, in particular to crack down on freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of the press. In this they will be ably assisted by the bought-off legacy media who will no doubt abrograte their duty to hold power to account and simply amplify the report’s findings without addressing the numerous holes in it.
If we are really serious about investigating the protest an independent commission should be convened to examine all aspects of the event, including government actions, online and offline, of which the report would form part of a much larger body of evidence.
We all know there isn’t gonna be any “independent” commission unfortunately, only more lies and spin, more arse-covering, and more “look over here” (instead of at all those vaccine injuries beginning to emerge).
And the agenda will roll on, doesn’t matter if it’s team red or team blue running the WWE government. More money and power for them, fewer and fewer rights for the rest of us. And we’re warned and threatened to shut up if we don’t like it, or they’ll brand us as lunatics. They’ll run these little propaganda vanity projects like TDP to try to lay the blame on OUR shoulders, the same way abusive scumbags do when they beat their wives.
Well with NO due respect, F*ck all of them. I will not be lectured and condescended to by liars and criminals.
GFY
And Jabcinda and her corrupt cronies are about to sign NZ as a member of WHO’s proposed global pandemic response. Something this serious is not even spoken about by any politician or MSM. i shiver to think what the repercussion of this will be on ALL New Zealanders. If one thinks the mandates violated human rights, well prepare for something much much worse. This creature is A COMPLETE SELL-OUT. Its hardly to believe she is NZer!!!
The Covid scamdemic was just the beginning.
Always love you comments. Smart with just the right amount of warranted disgust.
Seems like a clear first step (textbook conditioning tactics) aimed at softening the general population for a US style disinformation czar. Disgusting!
Only wish I had an inkling of an idea as to how we, the people, could get our country back. No point voting, that’s for sure. Unless the fringe parties merge and commit to a unified ethos revolving around strengthening human rights now and forever – #nzconstitution
ABSOLUTELY!!!
We voted for Billy TK and Jamie Lee Ross in the last el-ection, but no doubt vote fraud ran against them!
This time around we will be voting for the Outdoors and Freedom Party, and supporting the info platform Voices for Freedom!
& Luxom is NOT to be trusted either way! He takes his orders from ‘Sir’ Jhn Key, a Zionist Talmudic International Bankster!
See Vinny Eastwoods expose’ on both Jabcinda and Key…
Have a look at Social Credit before you chose, very similar but more policy.
A simple scientific principle is that a treatment effect has to be compared with controls and/or other treatments. This is an intermediate/high school level science topic.
Te Punaha Matatini Report does not compare the count of 5 RT articles with the count of other country news media articles at all. I did a Google search with three keywords **wellington parliament protest** restricting to abc.net.au. The number of hits is well over the count of 5. The coverage is much higher on dailymail.co.uk. Indian news sites had about 5 hits. This crude comparison of counts of articles suggests that RT coverage of wellington protest is not an outlier or excessive count.
May be the staff at Te Punaha Matatini may go back to high school and learn some basic science.
The online world is a murky one. Who are the perpetrators? Scammers etc are easy to spot and the loss due to them is a very small proportion compared to Multinational Corporate spying on NZ public. Google, Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft collect more private information for profit even if we do not use their services. Read: You Are Worth $182 To Google, $158 To Facebook And $733 To Amazon!
https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/
For example, if anyone browses STUFF, the visitor information gets shared. STUFF has a poor privacy rating; see https://privacyscore.org/site/36406/ STUFF gets a cent or more selling a user I guess.
Most websites also collect geo-location data. Phones always use geo-location. Our fibre internet has a fixed IP address, which means the location is shared. We are part of 5 eyes, and lots of monitoring goes on. To put it simply, there is NO informed consent for any of these collection of private information by Corporates and Government. It is extremely difficult to stop snooping, even with a secure VPN (and many VPNs are actually fool public).
Secrecy is the act of hiding information. Privacy is about being unobserved. Online privacy forums expose the cheats that is going on, and yet they invent new tools to collect our private activity data. Every computer/phone/browser, software in general, contain unique signatures that exposes our privacy and we are monetised or spied on.
Would Te Punaha Matatini talk about this organised corporate/govt murky treatment of public? No way LOL
‘How did Aotearoa New Zealand end up here?’ The answer is simple. Autocracy.
The government and media lied, used mass psycological formation tricks to push the jabs without sharing the pros and cons fully, propagandised and politicalised a health issue, imposed mandates violating human rights and spread fears, divided the public, and demonised anyone disagreed, reduced health professionals to robots to spread one side of the story etc.
Media and politicians should have stayed away, and let the medical practioners do their job, directly handle their registered patients at a local level without setting any targets for jabbing, allow alternate treatments etc.
‘How did Aotearoa New Zealand end up here? GREED my friend, GREED! Money will make you sell your soul to the devil. And this is what our politicians have done.
That would have been the best public health outcome indeed. Not the best outcome for Pfizer and their cronies tho.
I spent most of my time during the 25 days of the Parliament grounds in Wellington occupation watching a live feed of the event.
I was amazed from the outset at who was there. Those were voters who came to say their piece. 40 years ago such an event would not have taken place. Government’s would not have been so arrogant. Our PM’s then did not have thick heads either, they respected the rule of law and anyone who approached the boundaries was shifted away.
MMP has done a disservice to NZ allowing such a bunch of power hungry incompetents access to their dreams. If this was a commercial situation they would be held to be fraudulent for their reckless failure in their duty to care.
Now they have sent Health Minister, Little, to the UN for a pow wow AND to promote NZ’s agreement to the WHO Boss taking over our sovereign responsibilities to manage our own health concerns. This starts on the 22nd of this month so urgent action is needed.
I doubt if they have the lawful authority but they will squirm and squawk at any argument. Might is right (Maori way).
This govt needs to be rescinded.
There’s no science in Te Punaha Matatini’s ‘The Disinformation Project, in fact it’s anti science as is any process that is anti debate, anti dissent. This is caccoon building to keep away challengers, Jacinda doesn’t like being humiliated, doesn’t admit when she’s wrong or when she fails so this is a grand way to save face, save her position amongst the WEF while perpetuating a false paradigm that the uninformed can get on board. Another new thing.
A guy who has been in NZ just over coupla years, is now telling whole of NZ what the truth behind the Parliament protest is?? Nuff said!
Jabcinda the narcissist picks out some desperados to peddle her propaganda.
A movement naturally evolved from all sections of Aotearoa. All ethnicities, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, employed as well as unemployed or fired, all age groups protested without someone taking an Organiser role. Even the police admitted this fact.
Imported protests such as the BLM, Climate Action (supported by the media and Jacinda) were artificially organised; there was a spoke-person and organisers for each of these two protests. Lock down violations were allowed. Why not these (fake) researchers do a comparison of all the protests that occurred and contrast to find the facts? They wont obviously.
PM stands for Proven Misinformation
The reason “we ended up HERE” is because the NZ Government is participating in a global criminal conspiracy that is systematically demolishing our old world order – called the Great Reset – by the World Economic Forum, to make way for a New World Order which is essentially a planetary dictatorship. We are blindly being led to the slaughter!
Let’s be clear: The real reason Jacinda Adern refused to meet with the protesters and seek to discredit them – ironically, through the use of “misinformation” – was not to draw the attention of the public to the extraordinary high numbers of adverse reactions and deaths caused by the Pfizer vaccines.
????????????
Australia witnessed the largest gathering ever assembled to protest. There are so many situations to look at and answer ‘How did Aotearoa New Zealand end up here?’ For example, many of the protesters voted for labour in the past. So, it was a peoples movement and not a political movement. Te Punaha Matatini staff have zero background in “Causal modelling and analysis”, which is a very hard area to research. But they are good at “gas lighting” with their media brains.
This is similar to the U.S.’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ (slang for the 1984 version of the same…) which was slapped-down 2 days ago by the U.S. Congress!
The woman who was organising this in the U.S. was no less than Volodoor Zelenskyy’s campaign manager in 2017 in the Ukraine.
Both are Jewish…as has been the last two Ukrainian Presidents.
Similar to GWB’s appointment of the former East german head of the STASI to implement the Patriot Act in 2002, which is renewed every year in the U.S. House & Senate!!!
Notice how the Modus Operandi of ‘Misinformation Laws’ are occurring simultaneously in many UN Nations???
In Oz, they’re locking-up ‘political activists’ before today’s election. case in point? The ‘Aussie Cossack’ Simeon Boikov!!!
Zionism thrives when people are less religious, divided into conflict groups, no national pride, immoral, little basic values, extreme poverty etc.NWO has lots of these settings for it to thrive.
A horribly sad story is here.
https://rumble.com/v15i1ej-horribly-sad.html
Te Pūnaha Matatini will say this video is dis/mis/malinformation. Anectodal, not science, conspiracy theory etc. There are hundreds of similar sad stories in NZ; some of which are Liz Gunn’s channel https://rumble.com/user/Lizalwaysfree.
These three infowar mercenaries will say all these are anti-vax propaganda. After having sold their souls for dollars, they dont have any sort of empathy or balance in their heart. The whole working paper uses a woke language to confuse and nothing is written in plain English. If something is BS, it smells in many ways; the language style is one of them.
Great article. A follow up focused on the misinformation and disinformation coming from the government would be good.
A recent report on Sky News said up to half of joe Biden’s twitter followers are either fake or bots (estimated).