Max Key cyberbullying a sign that politics is getting too nasty?
OPINION: Is politics getting nastier? Prime Minister John Key talked about his concern this week after son Max revealed some of the ugly abuse he has copped on social media.
In Max Key case, Key Sr has clearly done a good job of reinforcing to him that these attacks are directed more at him as prime minister than at his son. But some politicians kids may not be as resilient as Max. And some politicians may not be as resilient as Key.
As Key Sr has become more polarising, so too has opposition to his leadership become more visceral. On a Radio New Zealand Face book page recently there were death threats, including a reference to “gassing” the prime minister. Comments on Key’s own Facebook page can be just as ugly.
It’s a symptom of our increasingly hard-edged politics. Yes, we’ve seen it before – during Helen Clark’s tenure the hatred got just as ugly, personal and visceral towards the end.
Right wing blogger Matthew Hooton has even given it a name, Clark derangement syndrome, which he describes as an extreme dislike of Clark that was unrealistic and exaggerated. A self confessed sufferer of this syndrome, he blames it on the ability of “political rhetoric [to] get out of hand in group-think situations (like blogs, twitter etc).”
The Government’s opponents are now exhibiting the same symptoms as victims of Key derangement syndrome, Hooton suggests.
And yet somehow it’s not the same.
Over the years politicians families have occasionally been thrust into the limelight by their actions but not in the way that we are seeing now. Max Key’s celebrity status is a completely new phenomenon
In large part, this is due to social media, because politicians children are more accessible than would have been the case a decade or so ago when there were only a few grainy newspaper images around.
Max, for instance, has a large and growing social media following, so much so that on the PM’s recent trip to Sydney he attracted a bigger headline than his dad. But he is hardly unusual in putting his life on show via social media. It’s what young people do these days. It would be more remarkable if he had no social media footprint.
Here is another big difference.
When Helen Clark was prime minister an ugly rumour or meme may have been shared among a comparatively small circle. The internet has exploded since then and smartphones make us connected in a way we have never been before, amplifying and exaggerating everything
So while back in Clark’s day the memes and personal attacks were circulated mostly among those who held roughly similar political views, the potential audience these days is exponentially huge and politically indiscriminate.
One meme apparently doing the rounds on Facebook, for instance, has Key standing in front of a flag bearing a silver fern which slowly morphs into a ponytail. And that’s a tame one. If you do an internet search on John Key memes there are hundreds if not thousands of them. They pop up on Facebook feeds everywhere, not just of those who oppose National.
Research confirms that when it comes to social media birds of a feather don’t always flock together.
A study by the Pew Research Centre dating back to the 2012 US election reveals that 25 per cent of those using social network sites (like Facebook, Twitter or similar) said they became more active in a political issue after discussing or reading posts about it on those sites; 16 per cent said they had changed their views about a political issue as a result and nine percent said they became less involved in a political issue after encountering it in a social network site.
The same research showed that around a third of those who used sites like Twitter or Facebook use them to post their own thoughts or comments on political and social issues and they are also likely to repost content of that nature after it’s shared with them by others.
And yet among social network users whose friends posted political comment, a staggering majority (73 per cent) only sometimes or never agree with what’s being shared with them, according to Pew.
So what does that mean for politicians?
The natural conclusion would be to assume that it shortens their political lifespan; the speed and frequency with which critical posts and memes ridiculing them are shared presumably hastening the day when their personal stocks are irretrievably diminished in the eyes of the public.
And yet so far that has not been the case with Key, despite his increasingly polarising leadership, or at least so the polls show.
The main effect appears to have a hardening of feelings against Key at one end of the spectrum. Or maybe it’s the other way round, a chicken and egg thing.
For evidence of that, see the extraordinary speech in Parliament by the usually mild mannered Green MP Gareth Hughes, where he referred to Key as a “derping, planking, rape-joking expert at getting us on late night American comedy shows”.
It has always been seen as something of a truism that personal attacks boomerang in New Zealand politics because the public find them so distasteful. We saw that to an extent at the last election when a concerted assault on Key by his opponents – while not personal in its nature – ultimately fuelled a backlash that helped propel National back into power.
The big question has been whether social media and its massive reach in some way tips that thinking on its head.
That is still unanswered.
