Voices for Freedom and the mis/disinformation war

Anyone paying attention to the controversy surrounding New Zealand’s COVID-19 response measures will be aware of Voices for Freedom (VFF), with its distinctive branding, provocative signage and a growing presence throughout the country.

Blogger David Farrier recently announced in his ‘When an advertising watchdog chases its tail’ blog entry that he was “calling bullshit” on both VFF and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), following an ASA ruling on one of VFF’s advertising leaflets.

The ASA rule fell in VFF’s favour, finding the claims on its ‘What’s all the fuss about masks?” leaflet were “adequately substantiated in the context of advocacy advertising”. Farrier sought alternative opinion on the ASA’s decision-making, called into question the organisation’s ability to perform its role, and claimed that “people are dying of misinformation”.

In another blog entitled ‘Taking flight: the QAnon crowd avoiding masks’, Farrier discussed the legal ramifications around mask exemptions, slamming people who exercised their right to self-determine their need for an exemption when, in his own opinion, they didn’t require them.

Farrier also claimed to have worn a “boring blue disposable” mask on a flight rather than a “funky personalised” (i.e cloth or reusable) one, despite the fact a Danish study published the previous month said humans were using around 129 billion face masks every month, made mostly from micro and nanoplastic microfibres not readily biodegraded in the environment, and threatening to become the planet’s “next plastic problem”.

The specific mention of VFF in Farrier’s ‘Taking flight’ blog is brief and entirely false. Claiming the group is a front for QAnon beliefs, Farrier mentions child trafficking, ritualistic satanic abuse and conspiracy to microchip the population via vaccination, with a reference to ‘mark of the beast’, the biblical phenomenon believed by many to mark the end of time.

But VFF has not discussed, referred to, promoted or advertised any of these topics.

Taranaki VFF local group coordinator Tanetoa Webster said Farrier’s blog was another desperate attempt by mainstream media to paint VFF as something fringe, when the truth is the opposite. “Our group is made up of a wide cross-section of society. We represent many disparate voices and our achievements over the last year have proven our track record of representing everyday Kiwis.” These achievements included growing a database of close to 100,000 followers, establishing over 100 local groups and creating an Odyssey channel of webinar content and interviews with international experts including Robert F Kennedy, Jr and Dr Peter McCullough.

By definition, it’s Farrier’s assertions about VFF that fit the description of misinformation or disinformation. According to Auckland University Department of Physics Te Pūnaha Matatini’s 2021 working paper about its ‘The Disinformation Project’, misinformation is defined as “false information that people didn’t create with the intent to hurt others”, and disinformation is “false information created with the intention of harming a person, group, or organization, or even a company.” Farrier alone knows whether his comments were created with intent to hurt or harm VFF.

One of the authors of the Disinformation Project paper said there now exists in this country a social “hellscape”* of aggressive, violent, misogynist, racist bigotry online, claiming, “The social fabric of New Zealand is being tested and threatened daily.” A word cloud, a collection of text depicted in different sizes, features in the working paper, extracted from social media during August and September 2021, one of the longest periods of restrictions New Zealanders had experienced since COVID19 arrived. The biggest word in the cloud was “people”, and it included many other words including God, one, government, now, think, want, know, get, many, new and time. It can only be assumed the authors adjusted the word cloud to exclude the violent and offensive words which led to their assumptions. It would have been instructive to learn why The Disinformation Project kicked off in February 2020, before any COVID19 response measures were enacted by the government, however a request for more information was “politely declined” because the Communications and Marketing representative had been unable “to find anyone available to answer these questions”.

Another academic openly critical of VFF was professor of medicine at University of Auckland, Des Gorman. In a Radio NZ (RNZ) interview in May 2021, Gorman said VFF’s flyer campaigns could create vaccine hesitancy, claiming New Zealand had “no choice” but to follow an elimination strategy, and that “mass vaccination” was the only way we could “reintegrate with the planet” through a “high level of herd immunity.”

At that point, Delta was yet to hit our shores, but when it did, in August 2021, NZ was already well underway vaccinating its population with the Pfizer product developed for the original virus, and international experts were claiming herd immunity would be virtually impossible as the virus became more infectious.

By October 2021, New Zealand had abandoned its elimination strategy, choosing to tentatively learn to live with the virus while pushing for widespread vaccination of the population in an unprecedented manner, including mandating sections of the workforce, despite previously promising not to do so.

So, what exactly is the misinformation and disinformation VFF is considered to be promulgating? It seems nearly impossible to find out. A request to the Ministry of Health (MOH) for more information resulted in a protracted series of emails – the spokesperson seemed reluctant to acquiesce to the request without first being told which publication the article was being prepared for – and the correspondence concluded with the spokesperson providing a press release which discussed ‘trusted sources’ of information about the virus and the vaccine, urged us all to play our part in stopping misinformation, referenced mechanisms to report misinformation, gave reassurance that many government departments are working closely on dealing with misinformation, but provided no details on what the misinformation was, nor a single, specific reference to the Voices for Freedom organisation.

It seems MOH is highly efficient at talking about the subject of misinformation, but not so helpful when it comes to discovering what that misinformation might actually look like.

Tiffany Brown is a freelance writer based in the Auckland region. She has extensive experience in feature writing on pregnancy, childbirth and parenting topics, a diverse range of commercial work, as well as local news and features journalism An active community volunteer and a cappella singer, Tiffany has managed to complete her first novel, and is currently ruminating on her next. Since 2020, Tiffany has been increasingly concerned about global government overreach, and is currently a contributing member of Voices for Freedom.