Data reveals level of online hatred for Jacinda Ardern

Since the Prime Minister resigned last week, there has been considerable debate about whether she (along with other women) receives more vitriol online than male politicians and other public figures.

As a recent article by Stuff journalist Nikki MacDonald points out, there are strong indications that she does, but there is a lack of systematic data to say so for sure and to what extent.

This article, and a more detailed report that our research team at Hate & Extremism Insights Aotearoa (HEIA) at the University of Auckland will soon release, is an attempt to provide one body of data to inform this debate.

As part of our research into hate, extremism and social instability in New Zealand, we collect anonymous posting data from various online platforms.

This includes platforms where the darkest and most extreme posting often occurs: Gab, 4chan, selected New Zealand Telegram channels, Reddit, and 8kun.

We use a range of techniques to include only those posts we are reasonably sure are written in New Zealand. We include posts from 2019 to 2022, although the quantity of posts collected increased markedly from late 2021.

We counted the total number of posts about Prime Minister Ardern and six other leading politicians and bureaucrats, both men and women, from parties on the left and right, some with prominent positions in the fight against Covid, some not.

In doing so we hoped to be able to identify potentially important differences between posting about politicians from different positions on the political spectrum and of different genders.

What we found was that the Prime Minister faced online vitriol at a rate between 50 and 90 times higher than any other high-profile figure.

While the other individuals were each mentioned in between 200 and 400 posts over the study period, the Prime Minister was mentioned in over 18,000 posts. This was 92 percent of the total body of posts mentioning any of these individuals.

Of the posts our natural language tools classify as strongly negative, angry, sexually explicit or toxic, those mentioning the PM made up 93 percent of the total – 5438 posts were particularly abusive in this way.

The other individuals referenced each had fewer than 100 such angry or threatening posts directed at them.

A striking aspect of the posting mentioning the Prime Minister was that it was largely consistent across the period. While for the other politicians and bureaucrats such posting generally peaks in response to events and then drops, posting targeting the Prime Minister was constant, incessant.
 

Also striking was that the average negativity, anger and toxicity targeted at the Prime Minister was increasing in the last six months of 2022.

Rather than showing signs of subsiding as Covid era restrictions were lifted and New Zealand returned to a form of normality, abuse of the Prime Minister was rising once more.

There is also partial evidence for greater poster fixation on the Prime Minister than on other public figures.

While posters who wrote about the other individuals would on average post about that person 1.7 times, those mentioning the PM would on average post about her almost five times.

The vast gulf between the levels of posting targeted at the Prime Minister and those directed at other high-profile government figures suggests that Jacinda Ardern became a lightning rod for a range of fears, misogyny and anger throughout the pandemic. HEIA will explore potential reasons for this extraordinary volume of online abuse in an upcoming report.

This is not a claim about why the Prime Minister resigned. But our study does provide one form of data to support claims that she faced exceptionally high levels of abuse.