Disinformation spread by political parties is still disinformation
The Disinformation Project lets us all down
In response to the Labour Party’s social media team and candidates being called out for making repeated lies and misleading statements about opposition policies this election, the independent group The Disinformation Project issued a press release claiming that the “individual instances” of Labour’s were “not comparable to disinformation campaigns in terms of scale and harm” and tried to narrowly define disinformation and being “closely tied to extremism and foreign interference”.
The problem is The Disinformation Project is wrong on all counts. At the time of writing the number of “individual instances” of misleading or outright false statements made by Labour has hit at least ten.
Hardly a series of isolated incidents
They’ve incorrectly claimed National would cancel non-existent public transport subsidies for disabled people, that teachers would be sacked and schools be sold, that the minimum wage would be abolished, that National was only selected men as candidates, that interest would be reinstated on student loans, that fees-free first year tertiary study would be ended, that an expat tax would be introduced, that sick leave would be halved to five days, that the Matariki public holiday would be abolished, and they even tried to pass off their own press release as a genuine news article.
A handful of examples might be able to be attributed to being individual instances, but when you’ve hit double figures in little more than a week, you can’t brush it off as human error anymore.
What’s wrong with the nothing to see here approach
Crucially though, The Disinformation Project trying to minimise this behaviour by attempting to define disinformation in their press release as being linked to extremism and foreign interference doesn’t reflect reality. New York University’s Stern School of Business published a report in 2019 highlighting the risks of disinformation to the 2020 US election. As one of their threats to watch, they identified the shift from foreign interference being the source of disinformation to domestically generated disinformation and distortion campaigns instead.
In the report, NYU Stern specifically cited examples of both Republican and Democrat activists using the same methods as foreign actors to spread disinformation and run distortion campaigns about their political opponents.
We’ve seen similar scenes play out here, notably in relation to the occupation of Parliament in 2022 where local fringe actors used the same techniques of foreign powers to spread disinformation. Sadly, we’re now seeing those same tactics spread to mainstream political discourse too. To some extent disinformation has always been part of the dynamic dating back for as long as people have cast ballots, but the ease and low cost at which it can be deployed at scale has never been greater.
We should expect better
Arguably, that’s what we’re seeing now.
It’s not unusual for politicians to get things wrong in the heat of the moment about the policies of opposition parties – it’s hard enough keeping across your own policy platform at the best of times! But when you have digital and media teams - which should have processes in place to review and verify the content being produced across social media, websites, and email newsletters - there should be a lot less room to get things wrong. When you have repeated examples and clearly cavalier attitudes from across Labour, you can’t simply dismiss it as “individual instances” anymore.
Thankfully, The Disinformation Project has a simpler definition of disinformation on their website than the convoluted one they deployed in their press release. There they define disinformation as “false information created with the intention of harm. This harm could be to a person, a group, or an organisation.”
There’s no mention of scale, no mention of extremism, no mention of foreign interference.
Likewise, the Government has a similarly broad definition of disinformation. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet defines disinformation as “false or modified information knowingly and deliberately shared to cause harm or achieve a broader aim.”
No room for excuses
Under both these definitions Labour’s behaviour can clearly be classed as disinformation. Labour is knowingly and repeatedly sharing false information created with the intention of harming the electoral prospects of their electoral opposition.
Amusingly, Labour has been running the tag line of “You can’t trust National” on their social media channels. It’s an age-old claim to make about your political opponents, but if you’re going to use it, it’s probably best you don’t get caught multiple times spreading your own disinformation in the first place.
Gwynn Compton is a communications and government relations consultant and has written previously about the risks of disinformation and distortion campaigns on social media. He is a former local government councillor and worked for Prime Ministers Sir John Key and Sir Bill English during the Fifth National Government.
The harm is to the general public, too, and to the democratic process itself, because the public's ability to make good voting decisions is impaired by the spread of disinformation.