The investigative journalism was conducted with @lighthousereports.com. The related journalism from Oct '25 is a long read, but utterly compelling. www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/... What's never been reported by New Zealand media, AFAIK, is how the country's also implicated. #nzpol
Listened to an updated podcast from @motherjones.com about their extremely consequential Oct 2025 reporting on a global surveillance network. | Exposing a Global Surveillance Empire www.motherjones.com/politics/202... @openpolicy.bsky.social
The growth of climate-related disinformation in New Zealand - accelerating sharply after the 2023 general election, and under the coalition govt - has served as a significant vector for a transnational industry working to normalise climate change denial. sanjanah.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/s... #nzpol
Thank you so much. ❤️ We lost over 5X those who were killed in Christchurch, but with no accountability, meaningful investigation or, for survivors, closure. There is a rage within for those we know are responsible, & walk free, I don’t have words for. Opt to silently respect, & remember lives lost.
lol suck it.
Investigations launched into Telegram and teen chat sites under the Online Safety Act
We're investigating Telegram, Teen Chat and Chat Avenue after evidence suggests child sexual abuse material being shared on Telegram and predators using teen chat sites to groom children.
Read about our investigations in full: www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...
Yes, and actually agree. Never been a tech-utopian, and I'd argue the horizon's less than 5yrs, given VC economics + enshittification. But precisely because of this, I guess I prefer to critically engage, as much as I can, inside this small window of opportunity. Dum spiro, spero.
Sri Lanka marks 7 years since Easter attacks amid continuing calls for justice www.vaticannews.va/en/church/ne... 😥 #SriLanka
And, FWIW, from a Sri Lankan perspective, wrote this almost exactly a year ago: From English to Sinhala, and Tamil: The potential of Google NotebookLM’s intellectual capital redistribution sanjanah.wordpress.com/2025/04/30/f... Last couple of paras esp echo the points I've attempted to make here.
All three things are true at once. Which is why I called it a negotiation, not a resolution. And this is what guides what I do with AI for my own advocacy, and in the training that I do to help others understand better what they will not be able to escape from (even if they don't use it).
Question (for me, at least) is whether engagement compounds the harm or works against it. Where I land, provisionally: the tools are ethically compromised at origin, their use in advocacy carries real risks, and opting out isn't equally available to everyone.
Fair points, well made - and respect your position. I don't think I'm waving original sin away so much as holding it alongside use. Every infrastructure I work with — academic publishing, platform data, even the electricity running this device — carries exploitative histories.
None of which resolves the contradiction you flags ofc. Using AI accountability, activism, advocacy, & related comms does complicate civic engagement, but I hold both truths. AI helps, & harms, simultaneously. It's not black & white from where I sit. It's a daily negotiation.
Choice to refuse AI outright is itself a position available mostly to those who've never had to work without the infra, socio-political structures, institutional support etc the Global North takes for granted. A blanket rejection reads differently when you've never had the luxury of opting out.
There's also a Global South register to this your framing misses. Part of what I try to do with AI is relocate agency using the same tools that strip power from our contexts to hold power accountable within them. That negotiation isn't optional for researchers working from here, it's constitutive.
My working position (not fixed, fluid, iterative): the interesting question isn't whether to use these tools but how to use them whilst holding those concerns in view. Blanket refusal and uncritical adoption are both easier postures than the harder middle ground.
That said, your core worry, well noted, has a real core worth. Questions about epistemic laundering, about audiences mistaking AI summaries for primary engagement, about training data provenance, about the political economy of the companies producing these tools are all legitimate, all unresolved.
Refusing on principle to engage these tools in disinformation work looks less like ethical rigour to me and more like a purity stance that cedes ground to actors operating with no such restraint. The asymmetry matters.
The volume of research, policy material, and case studies on information disorder now exceeds what any single researcher can hold. Retrieval tools grounded in user-supplied sources (which is what NotebookLM is) may be among the few tractable responses to that problem.
That said, worth separating 2 things that often get conflated, as you do: using AI to manufacture disinformation, and using AI to make disinformation research legible to wider audiences. The second isn't contaminated by the first. Tools acquire their ethical weight through how they're deployed.
Use NotebookLM in particular to translate the writing into ways others find useful to learn and engage with, including through videos, and infographics. Has been immensely useful to raise awareness amongst those who don’t want to read, at least from get go, deep, long form research.
Yup. Logo on bottom right.
Visualisation of key points. #nzpol
1. Denial has changed shape, not shrunk. What required fringe platforms three years ago now issues from sitting MPs, highly influential podcast hosts, and the incumbent government's own political messaging. The disinformation ecology, and parliamentary speech are no longer separable in any practical sense. The fringe hasn’t dissipated; the centre moved to meet it. 2. A storm that fails to produce catastrophe is weaponised against the credibility of all future warnings. The “boy who cried wolf” motif has become the central discursive device. 3. Pandemic-era distrust has proven fully portable, as the 2023 analysis warned it would. “Just like covid” now circulates as a complete argument wherever extreme weather is discussed. The epistemic damage of 2020–2022 has migrated wholesale into institutional communication on unrelated subjects, and shows no sign of waning. 4. Climate adaptation policy is now contested almost exclusively through conspiracy vocabulary. "Agenda 2030," "WEF land grab," and "fifteen-minute cities" - peripheral imports from foreign networks in 2023 - are the default lens in 2026 through which managed retreat, zoning changes, and planning decisions are discussed. Debating adaptation on its actual merits has become structurally difficult, if not near impossible amongst large swathes of New Zealand’s population. 5. The denialist dictionary has been Americanised or MAGA-fied. "Woke," "fear porn," "Jacinda's sheep," "leftist media" - the register is imported wholesale from United States culture war discourse, often without meaningful local adjustment. Local disinformation producers are increasingly indistinguishable from their American counterparts. 6. Racism, and specifically, anti-Māori racism, has migrated from the edges of post-disaster politics into the core of climate governance. Managed retreat, for example, is attacked as pro-Māori land transfers. 7. The target has shifted from individual experts to the category of expertise itself. Institutional…
Key points in the research. #nzpol
6 minute video explainer / synopsis of the report's main points, and highlights. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfGk... #nzpol
Robustly debate the FTA, sure. But if NZ journos operate in a world independent of, & oblivious to the far-right's capture of country's information ecologies, evidenced by choice Jones made to appear on RCR, NZ'ers will remain ignorant of extremism's adjacency to, & invocation by leading figures.
WHERE is it circulating RNZ? WHERE was it posted? WHERE did Jones appear? Why should that platform matter, profoundly, for any critical appreciation of what he said? What has that platform seeded, and spread with regards to what Jones noted, and how? What's he signalling, to whom, & why? #nzpol
🎯
Seeding the storm: Climate change denialism from Cyclone Gabrielle to Cyclone Vaianu
www.linkedin.com/pulse/seedin... (LinkedIn)
sanjanah.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/s... (WordPress)
#nzpol #ClimateChange #Disinformation
@caadcoalition.bsky.social @counterhate.com
I see Shane Jones appears on far-right network that regularly platforms, & promotes Christchurch terrorist's violent extremist ideology (rebranded as 'remigration'), & amplifies the same anti-Indian racism, & xenophobia through his "butter chicken tsunami" framing. Dangerous, & disgusting. #nzpol