New Zealand is currently holding a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the government’s response to the global Covid-19 pandemic.
While many organisations and groups have valid reasons for informing their members and encouraging submissions, two groups seem to be deliberately hijacking the submission process to insert their own framing into submitters’ responses.
First up is Reality Check Radio, a creation of Voices For freedom. This fringe group has railed against everything from Covid vaccines and 15 minute cities to healthcare for trans people and the World Health Organisation. For now they are returning to their roots by encouraging their members to submit to the Royal Commission.
Voices For freedom have been agitating for some time for their members to petition the government to sack the two current commissioners and replace them. Voices For freedom are also advocating for the terms of reference of the inquiry to be replaced with their own, introducing such issues as the origins of the Covid virus and the refusal of the NZ Blood service to screen and supply non-vaccinated blood to patients.
Part of their strategy is luring people in via a web address that looks official but isn’t. In recent days a full page paid advertisement in the NZ Herald exhorted people to go to covidenquiry.co.nz to make a submission to the inquiry. The fine print says the web site isn’t official, but that sort of disclaimer won’t do much to protect people who already take VFF at face value. The domain is registered to Voices For freedom co-founder Claire Deeks.
Voices for Freedom continue to sow division and misinformation and the framing below demonstrates the lens they are putting over the inquiry.
The second organisation using similar tactics is the Free Speech Union, who readers may recall are an astroturf organisation created by the Taxpayers’ Union.
Like Voices For freedom, the Free Speech Union wants to draw submitters in via their own web site in order to insert their own framing. In this case the effort is a little more deceptive, in that both the web address and the branding are very similar to government branding used during the Covid response.
The Free Speech Union are advertising this site on X (formerly Twitter) with no clarification that covid submissions.nz is not a part of the Royal Commission.
The site very clearly guides submitters to select pre-written pieces of text to populate their submission. Perhaps as learning from previous submission-stuffing efforts, the Free Speech Union also makes it mandatory to include some of the users’ own words “to ensure your submission is valid.”
The domain covidsubmissions.nz is registered to Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union. This revelation will surprise no one who has read our detailed outline of his previous astroturfing campaigns with the Campaign Company.
Readers may wonder why these groups have to go to such lengths to deceive submitters when their arguments should stand on their own merits, like every other submitter to the inquiry.
Here is the official link to the Royal Commission of Inquiry web site. It only takes a minute or two to have your say.
Thanks to Twitter user farmgeek for spotting these