I monitor the social media feeds of political policies – it’s even worse than you think

A frightening look inside the entrance boxes of two recent politicians.

Damon worked as a creator of social media content for the Green Party and helps create content for Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau. This piece is written in its own capacity as a particular citizen. Opinions do not represent Wellington City Council or the mayor’s office.

I still remember the day I received access to the social media accounts from Golriz Ghahraman.

It was 2018 and I was a green party creator in Parliament. Shortly before, my edition of his inaugural speech became viral. Like many New Zealandes, I was thrilled with her story and was incredibly proud that our country has been lined with one of the first refugee parliamentarians in the world.

However, I understood that she was receiving some cruel messages on social media, which were causing some tension, and I offered to manage her social media accounts for the day, just to help take a load.

By context, I am a white guy and saw the unpleasant side of social media, both personal and professionally. In my personal accounts, I tried some messages less than Polite and unpleasant comments. Working for the greens, I had seen unpleasant trolling and much ignorance, so I understood why Ghahraman could need a break.

But nothing could have prepared for what I saw.

I started to go through the comments about your posts, filtering your DMs and following the links that were sent to it. I quickly discovered a vitriol flow that I never imagined possible, its social media a relentless cycle of attacks and harassment. People telling her to “go back to her own country”, calling him “stupid retarded” and “fucking money from taxpayers.”

It wasn’t just a few bad apples, it was a totally different world in which I had traveled. A world in which Alt-Right bloggers puts her in swastika Photoshop and were applauded for doing so. A world in which his daily online appearance caused discussions full of hatred and disgust. Comments like “shut up, no problem, and people don’t want to kill you,” they were quite typical. Threats of violence, rape and aggression were spread everywhere.

I began to feel physically sick: shaken by what I was reading, eliminated by the threats of violence I was seeing. And I was just a spectator, not the recipient.

I excluded and blocked the worst, reporting what I found to parliamentary security, and after a few days I handed Ghahraman’s social media channels back to her.

To be honest, I assumed that parliamentary security and police were taking care of the subject and returned to my job. It was something I just didn’t want to sue. It was very disturbing.

Try to imagine living with this kind of sustained attack. What does this do with your sense of identity and your sense of what is normal? How does it affect what you write when you make a post or make a speech?

Then there is helplessness. Police claiming that there was nothing they could do, and inaction dragging the foot of the social media platforms themselves. Things did not improve in the years that followed.

Unfortunately, Ghahraman’s experience is not unique. We saw this with the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and how the former prime minister Jacinda Arden was targeted. There may be little doubt that this is part of what made its role as PM ultimately unsustainable.

And now, a report released this morning shows that of 11 parliamentarians who work in Parliament in 2023 who talked to researchers, each one suffered a gender -based harassment and abuse and several had received death threats. The deputies were from the whole political and demographic spectrum, but shared the same on -line experience.

None of this surprised me. I see this in my work today, monitoring the social media accounts of the mayor of Wellington.

Online, I see crowds of trolls accumulating in the posts of the mayor and DMS. Often, they are talking lines they saw in the media comments or reacting angrily to a clickbait headline.

All political figures experience on -line abuse and harassment, but it is much worse for women, who simply should deal with it. Attempts to get involved in this conversation are often received with negligible comments. Women are instructed to “harden” obtain a “thicker skin” and ignore threats of intimidation and violence. He said he is not “so bad”.

But what happens when this he does Are everyone too much?

Well, they leave.

This is the crucial point of the question. Because it means that social media have become armed, designed to expel a certain kind of politics person. Something that directly affects the kind of people who are left to represent us – and finally change the appearance of our democracy.

Recent social media Bloomberg Report It makes it clear that it is unlikely that women leaders, especially women of color who have experienced this abuse, encourage other people to follow their steps. One of the parliamentarians of today’s report said, “On the one hand, I want to see more young women and women in this space. And, on the other hand, I’m like, stay away, do not do it. It’s a real contradiction. Now, I think I wouldn’t have chosen to do it …”

Certain commentators claim that any attempt to limit abuse or hate speech is an attack on freedom of expression and, in a purely binary sense, they are right. But the fact is that by not controlling hatred speech, freedom of expression is already being limited: freedom of women and minorities speak, intimidating or frightened for not speaking because of constant threats and abuse directed at them.

As we all know very well, social media are widely driven by engagement, which is particularly feeds on negativity and controversy. Goal has known this for some time, as it is well -documented. For years, they have fought teeth and nails against anything they think they can disturb the profit that these algorithms give them.

In recent months, owners of our most important social media platforms have openly declared their loyalties. Whether through the occupation of the White House of Musk, Trump’s embarrassing Zuckerberg’s embarrasser or Tiktok’s newcomer, it is now brutally clear where these companies and their leaders sit in the political spectrum.

So why aren’t we dealing with this problem? There are a number of immediate measures that our government can easily take, such as updating the harmful digital communications law and regulating social media companies for more transparency and responsibility and with significant application measures.

Personally, I would go much further. The failure of social media has been very spectacular.

What is happening now is too big to be ignored longer. We can’t just pretend this is not happening, as I tried in 2018. The costs are simply very high.

As disturbing as it may be, it was a privilege behind the scenes of these women’s channels. It has been a humiliating and strangely intimate experience and woke me up to the digital challenges faced by our society. I’ve seen one side of the internet that many people, especially white men, will have to see.