ICT4Peace Foundation’s Special Advisor Sanjana Hattotuwa was invited by New Zealand’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to speak at He Whenua Taurikura, New Zealand’s first annual hui (meaning a large gathering in Maori) on countering terrorism and violent extremism. The hui was held from 14-16 June 2021 in Christchurch. He Whenua Taurikura translates to ‘a country at peace’. This presentation was delivered as part of the fourth panel at the hui, on day two.
Sanjana followed presentations by Jordan Carter from InternetNZ, Kate Hannah from Te Pūnaha Matatini and University of Auckland, Dr Nawab Osman from Facebook, Nick Pickles from Twitter, and Anjum Rahman from Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono and Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand. The panel was chaired by Paul Ash, head of the Christchurch Call.
This presentation complements a policy brief by Sanjana also written for the hui, available here.
Download the presentation as a Powerpoint slidedeck (with embedded videos) here.
Download it as a PDF here.
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Panel 4: Violent Extremism online: new directions in preventing radicalisation and violent extremism in the digital world
The internet is essential to modern life. The ability to connect individuals and share ideas across the world has delivered huge benefits. Connectivity is a force for good, but it has also empowered violent extremists who seek to inflict harm.
This session will look at the role of the internet in violent extremism – from radicalisation and connecting extremist elements across the world, through to the sharing of violent and extremist content.
The discussion will consider ways to prevent harm and keep people safe and secure, including efforts to address terrorist and 14 violent extremist content (TVEC) online. It will consider the role of multi-stakeholder collaboration, with a focus on the Christchurch Call, and the measures governments, industry, and civil society can each take on- and offline.
This session will discuss the following questions:
- How do violent extremists (ab)use the online environment? What effect does this have on our safety and security?
- What role do online environments – including social media and online algorithms – play in radicalisation? And in preventing radicalisation?
- How do we make positive change in the online environment? What are the roles for government, industry and civil society?
- This is a global problem. What international developments can we learn from in Aotearoa New Zealand? And what unique contribution can we make?
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In seven slides, Sanjana articulated a vision for a radical revision in definitions of, discourse around and policymaking to address disinformation and violent extremism. He began by critically framing the chair’s opening remarks, noting that geographic exclusion won’t stop Aotearoa New Zealand from dealing with, at increasing pace, threats to its democratic integrity and institutions. He also noted that though recent reports of anti-Maori and minority online violence generated significant discussion and pushback, racism, violence against minorities and discrimination was not a new phenomenon in Aotearoa New Zealand. He also questioned the Chair’s assertion that “no one group has the definitive voice” on the internet, noting that a critical gaze around privilege, power asymmetries including platform governance and policies by social media companies, the voice of G7 or OECD countries over the collective experiences of the Global South and factors including identity, language, location and gender, were central in biases inherent in information flows on the internet, and especially featured in social media.
With these initial comments, Sanjana introduced the central theme of his presentation, which was around an eco-systems or ecological perspective on disinformation, misinformation and violent extremism. Noting that ecosystems are heterogenous, endogenous and in Aotearoa New Zealand, indigenous, Sanjana flagged now approaching complex issues from a systems perspective aided in strengthening what binds and unites society, as much as the study of and responses against that which seeks to divide it, and seed a democratic deficit.
Slide 2 synthesised two-decades of activism, research and work in the domain of technology for peacebuilding, which Sanjana noted took him to five continents. Through this lived experience, where embodied realities and the existential negotiation of violence, manifest through online vectors as well, Sanjana noted how early research from Sri Lanka led to early warnings around the instrumentalisation of social media platforms to incite violence and hate. Flagging the fluid and complex nature of disinformation landscapes, Sanjana noted how prolonged research – embracing big data, anthropological and ethnographic perspectives, grounded data to context – led to brains of disinformation researchers that were wired differently (using an image of trees around Lake Wanaka in winter). A patina of violence, experienced and studied, Sanjana noted, allowed researchers to see novel and enduring connections between online and offline content.
In slide 3, Sanjana presented a new way of looking at threats to democracy arising from hate innovation, autocratic expansion and authoritarian political entrepreneurs. Stressing that the discourse required a new vocabulary and imagination to fully capture the contours of, Sanjana used the analogy of surfing to explain how what entities like Aotearoa New Zealand’s intelligence services and government were geared to respond to stochastic, episodic moments and short-term impacts, without adequate study of who producers were, intentionality, strategy and long-term entrenchment. The emphasis on the long-term strategy, and impacts, Sanjana averred was necessary since disinformation architects were working beyond timescales bound by the lifespan of a single PM, government, with influence operations that often lay beyond the directly or easily observable phenomena.
In slide 4, Sanjana recalled a point in the policy brief written for the hui,
Like a digital Novichok, the manner in which society sees itself, negotiates difference, communicates with each other, deals with the past, and envisions the future – and an individual’s or community’s place in it or ownership of it – can be corrupted through online content and social media platforms. Unlike a nerve agent however, which has an immediate and visible physiological impact, through influence operations conducted over time, the tone, timbre and thrust of divisive frames can become the foundations of political and social discourse. Sociologist Diane Vaughan called it “the normalisation of deviance” in relation to what caused the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986. Over time, individuals can come to accept a problem as a feature, instead of an aberration. The bad actors become those amongst us – our extended family, friends and neighbours – who come to believe in things we can no longer identify with, or subscribe to.
Sanjana noted that those in Aotearoa New Zealand, used to a certain liberal-democratic order, political culture, media landscape and way of life, may lack the imagination and thus the ability to pose critical questions around the nature of disinformation operations and strategies far more prevalent in the Global South. In a related point, Sanjana noted that while the Christchurch attacker was a foreigner, the instrumentalisation of media and offline vectors meant that over time, accelerated by issues related Covid-19 including vaccine hesitancy, those who spread misinformation and contributed to the evaporation if not evisceration of democracy, would be citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand. Like the pictured Craters of the Moon geothermal park in Rotorua, Sanjana noted that unrest in society could grow, without being noticed, if the questions asked around countering violent extremism weren’t fit for purpose.
In the next slide, Sanjana used photos from Dunedin’s Botanical Garden to present an ecological perspective of policymaking and regulation. This slide builds on discussions with Aotearoa New Zealand’s Chief Censor and others from government around a radically new approach to policymaking, that eschewed the codification of laws and regulation as an end point or solution, and instead focussed on process, iteration and responsive all-of-government and all-of-society mechanisms as guardrails against violent extremism’s seed and spread. Noting that disinformation, misinformation and extremism were socio-technological and socio-political issues, Sanjana stressed the need to move away from technocratic solutionism, highlighting the importance of rights and roots. The interplay of light and darkness, which trees grew where and how, and essentially, to approach the domain as the Department of Conservation would approach a park’s ecological health, Sanjana noted, shifted the conversation, study and response.
Using murmuration as an example, Sanjana flagged now swarm dynamics could help explain and, in Aotearoa New Zealand, strengthen social cohesion, recommended by the Royal Commission Report on the Christchurch massacre. Noting that the princples of social cohesion (belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy) could be mapped on to the three fundamental principles governing murmuration (adhesion, cohesion and repulsion) Sanjana said that studying what attracted, retains and results in the rejection of violent extremism, at scale, could help better inform policymaking.
In the next slide, Sanjana called for a new imagination, flagging the work of Thomas Wright, who centuries before Hubble, presented for the first time the spiral shape of the Milky Way galaxy and spoke of the possibility of many solar systems.
In the final slide, against the background of a photo from Doubtful Sound and based on the poet Browning’s call to reach beyond what was immediately within one’s grasp, Sanjana flagged how the response to terrorism, extremism and disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand was fundamentally different to similar and contemporaneous discussions in other contexts and countries. Reaching into his experience of working on these issues in the Balkans, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and on both sides of the Atlantic, Sanjana emphasised the importance of meaningfully incorporating, as first principles, the Maori including definitions of community, country, culture, ground, identity, time, reparation, redress, the negotiation of difference and conflict transformation.
A video of Panel 4 is embedded below. Sanjana’s presentation starts at 33 minutes and 50 seconds (click here to go directly to segment).
This video is also on Facebook, on the ICT4Peace Foundation’s page.