Election 2020: few fake news, some half-truths in the campaign – research

By RNZ

While New Zealanders can be sure they are not being bombarded with “fake news,” there is evidence of deceptive behavior by some political parties, researchers say.

Researchers from the University of Victoria, Dr Mona Krewel and Professor Jack Vowles, have been leading a team of coders examining the use of social media by political parties during the election campaign, and have already looked at more than 1000 Facebook posts placed by parties and leaders in a two-year period. period of the week.

Krewel says parties that are already in Parliament have not shared fake news, but some have shared “half-truth” posts.

“In fact, we had a very conservative approach when coding that, so our research probably underestimates rather than overestimates what is out there about fake news and half-truths because we didn’t want to accuse the parties for the different usual positions within political communication. “.

“For parties in Parliament it looks great, so we have almost no fake news for parties in Parliament. We have some half-truths for them, so for example, Act is even 9 percent true. half on their Facebook posts. “

“To give an example of half-truths, we’ve seen a National post that said they had a poll where they were leading 43 out of 39 percent for New Zealanders who trust the parties and can get the economy back .. But the graph they were putting out that came with that actually showed that the bar for Labor was half as high as National’s. “

He said that some of the parties outside of Parliament, Advance NZ and New Conservatives, seemed to be spreading more half-truths and also spreading some false news.

Advance NZ was the worst offender with 31 percent of its Facebook posts considered half-true and 6 percent completely false.

The research also measures positive versus negative campaigns. Individual posts can be both positive, meaning they were supportive, encouraging, affirmative, beneficial, or assertive in nature, and negative, meaning they are intended to criticize a political opponent.

“Most of the matches are very positive, most of the matches are run with a positive message rather than a negative message. We see that Act stands out, half of its posts are actually negative,” Krewel said.

Labor, who in the last election billed themselves as “relentlessly positive” and whose leader Jacinda Ardern has insisted she will not run a negative campaign, appears to be largely complying with that. Labor held the fewest positions attacking other parties.

Interestingly, however, the National Party had a slightly higher percentage of posts with positive sentiment.