3 October 2024: After nearly four and a half years of pioneering research, analysis, and reporting on the growing landscape of disinformation in Aotearoa, The Disinformation Project is closing as our small team moves on to new things.

Please be assured that our public reporting will always remain available for public access.

When we started the project in 2020, our focus was on the COVID-19 pandemic and how false information contributed to people’s responses to public health interventions. Since then, we have charted the descent of many New Zealanders into more extreme conspiratorial beliefs. These include widespread vaccine refusal, climate change denial, opposition to immigration, reductive beliefs around gender, anti-Māori racism, and hatred towards the LGBTQ+ community.

In 2024, it’s clear that the disinformation networks established or expanded during the pandemic are deeply connected to far-right, neo-Nazi, and accelerationist networks and actors – both domestic and foreign. Disinformation has become both more mainstream, and more connected to wider issues of political and social division, violence, extremism and national security.

Domestic and foreign influence operations have grown more sophisticated, while gaps in legal, regulatory and policing frameworks allow for harmful, polarising narratives to (conservatively) reach hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders daily.

At the same time as disinformation grows, social platforms like X (formally Twitter) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) are part of a larger trend of companies preventing independent researchers from accessing the open-source data they need to study disinformation growth on their platforms. Generative AI is now front and centre to disinformation spread, and it continues to be an emerging threat to Aotearoa New Zealand’s democracy.

We want to specifically note the marked increase in polarising and dehumanising rhetoric we have studied since our research began, specifically anti-Māori racism. We witnessed a shift from relatively amateur, individual or small network-based tactics, to polished, technical strategies for spreading disinformation at scale.

These challenges to social harmony, democracy and the maintenance of a shared reality in Aotearoa New Zealand require urgent, meaningful responses.

We are proud to have served diverse communities with our research and commentary, and we’d like to thank all those who’ve supported us over the last four years.

Director of Research, Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa continues to maintain an in-depth daily study of truth decay trends, and signatures building on analysis going back to 2021. He is available for client services including expert or confidential briefings on influence operations, institution, community or sector specific analysis, future scenario planning, and disinformation’s growing all-of-society, and all-of-government impact in New Zealand via contract.

Director of Communications, Nicole Skews-Poole continues to specialise in strategic communications, countering disinformation and building organisational resilience at anchordown.nz.

Founder and Director Kate Hannah is moving from focusing on disinformation to a wider portfolio of work in sustainability, social cohesion, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. She is contactable on kate.hannah@thedisinfoproject.org.