They may be half a world away from the horror of war in Ukraine, but a small group of New Zealanders are helping to spread Russia’s lies.
The Kiwis have formed a “Vladimir Putin Fan Club” and post propaganda daily, sharing false claims of “bio-weapons” and “Nazi governments”, in an attempt to justify the destruction that has taken the lives of innocent civilians all over Ukraine.
The group is part of a wider “disturbing” spread of Russian propaganda in New Zealand, according to disinformation researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa.
“I think one has to be very concerned about it, we've never seen this volume of Russian disinformation,” he told 1News this week.
“The emergence of it, the entrenchment and the expansion and the speed at which it has occurred in Aotearoa New Zealand is surprising, it's something that we've never seen anything akin to before in our research before here.”
The Putin “fan club” has 4400 members on Facebook and appears to be full of home-grown New Zealand conspiracy theorists.
It’s one of many communities where Pro-Kremlin messaging is spreading online, including the social media app Telegram.
A 1News analysis of the Facebook group revealed New Zealanders happy to spread blatant Kremlin messaging.
One member, posting on the same day that an air strike pummelled a children’s hospital in Mariupol, shared material directly from Russian state-controlled news outlet Sputnik.
Other Putin “fans” claimed NATO had “opened the doors of hell” and suggested that “history will reflect that Russia intervened when she had to”.
While another Kiwi shared an email he had sent to the Russian embassy in Wellington, saying it was “sad” Putin had added New Zealand to his list of unfriendly countries.
“Please pay no attention to the psychopath lunatic PM Jacinda Ardern,” Russian diplomats were told.
“These circus clowns are not liked here, in fact they are very much hated”.
Foreign policy analyst Stephen Hoadley, an associate professor at Auckland University, said the group appeared to be caught up in a wider Russian effort to create disenfranchisement and distrust in government.
“Every narrative that the Russians put forward blames somebody else - saboteurs, the West, the United States - so this sows dissent and division in the target population,” he said.
“The propaganda easily piggybacks onto existing social discontent and those who are discontented are quite open to conspiracy theories and to the Russian view, the disinformation view, of the world.”
The Russians used a “scatter-gun” approach, with New Zealand at the “end of a long chain of social media”, Hoadley added.
“I don't the Russians are specifically targeting New Zealand, they are targeting social media,” he said.
“They're using proxies - that is individuals or blogs or accounts which are receiving Russian messages and sending them on as if they were their own.
"These are disguised Russian messages, by what the Soviets called ‘useful idiots’.”
Researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa, who works with The Disinformation Project, is actively studying the uptake of Russian messaging in New Zealand and warned it was “very disturbing”.
The propaganda fit into the world-view of some conspiracy theorists, who see Putin as a saviour standing up to the West, he said.
“There is the input of material, but there are also Kiwis producing this material, and there are Kiwis engaging with it, and propagating it, so it's not as if it's an imported thing, it's very, very quickly becoming a domestic thing,” he said.
“And so it is concerning for social cohesion, for the people who believe in this, and, simply put, what people may do offline as a consequence of what they believe online, linked to Russian disinformation.”
Meaning some New Zealanders are living in an alternate reality, immune to the horrors of war.
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