Playful or harmful? David Seymour’s posts raise questions about what’s OK to say online

Deputy Prime Minister and ACT Party leader David Seymour says he is being “playful” and having “fun” with his “Victim of the Day” social media posts, targeting opponents of his Regulatory Standards Bill.

But the posts – which have singled out academics and MPs who have criticised or made select committee submissions against the bill, accusing them of suffering from “Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome” – have now led to at least two official complaints to Cabinet.

Wellington City mayor Tory Whanau has alleged they amounted to “online harassment and intimidation” against academics and were in breach of the Cabinet Manual rules for ministers. According to the manual, ministers should

behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical and behavioural standards. This includes exercising a professional approach and good judgement in their interactions with the public, staff, and officials, and in all their communications, personal and professional.

Academic Anne Salmond, one of those targeted by the posts, has also alleged Seymour breached the behaviour standards set out by the manual. According to Salmond:

This “Victim of the Day” campaign does not match this description. It is unethical, unprofessional and potentially dangerous to those targeted. Debate is fine, online incitements are not.

When is a joke not a joke?

Seymour’s claim he was being “playful” while using his platform to criticise individuals follows a pattern of targeting critics while deflecting criticism of his own behaviour.

For example, in 2022 Seymour demanded an apology from Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi, after Waititi earlier joked about poisoning Seymour with karaka berries. At the time, Seymour said:

I’m genuinely concerned that the next step is that some slightly more radical person doesn’t think it’s a joke.

But the same year, Seymour defended Tauranga by-election candidate Cameron Luxton’s joke that the city’s commission chair Anne Tolley was like Marie Antoinette and should be beheaded.

In 2023, Seymour joked about abolishing the Ministry of Pacific Peoples:

In my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there and it’d be all over, but we’ll probably have to have a more formal approach than that.

Māori researcher and advocate Tina Ngata criticised Seymour’s argument that he was joking:

Calling it a joke does not make it any less white-supremacist. What it does is point to the fact that in David Seymour’s mind, violence against Pacific peoples is so normalised, that he can make a joke out of it […] but he’s not any person is he? He is a politician, a leader of a political party, with a significant platform and the means and opportunities to advance that normalised violence into policy and legislation.

Designed to silence

An analysis of Seymour’s recent social media posts by researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa at the Disinformation Project has argued they have the potential to lead to online harassment, saying they are:

designed to silence opposition to the controversial Regulatory Standards Bill whilst maintaining plausible deniability about the resulting harassment, harms and hate.

The “Victims of the Day” posts about Anne Salmond and former Green leader Metiria Turei were textbook examples of “technology-facilitated gender-based violence and online misogyny”, Hattotuwa argued. And the use of the term “derangement” framed academic criticism as a mental disorder – undermining expertise.

As my own research shows, online harassment and violent rhetoric can raise the chances of real-world violence.

Since the early 2000s, researchers have used the term “stochastic terrorism” to describe a way of indirectly threatening people. Nobody is specifically told “harm these people”, so the person putting them at risk has plausible deniability.

Seymour is already aware of these dynamics, as shown by his demand for an apology from Waititi over the karaka berry poisoning “joke”.

Free speech for who?

Seymour and ACT have long presented themselves as champions of free speech:

Freedom of expression is one of the most important values our society has. We can only solve our most pressing problems in an open society in which free thought and open enquiry are encouraged.

By going after critics of the Regulatory Standards Bill, Seymour may only be ridiculing speech he does not like. But he has taken things further in the past.

In 2023, he criticised poet Tusiata Avia for her poem “Savage Coloniser Pantoum”, which Seymour said was racist and would incite racially motivated violence. He made demands that the government withdraw NZ$107,280 in taxpayer money from the 2023 Auckland Arts Festival in response.

ACT list MP Todd Stephenson also threatened to remove Creative NZ funding after Avia received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Avia said she received death threats after ACT’s criticism of her work.

The more serious purpose of saying something contentious is “just a joke” is to portray those who disagree as humourless and not deserving to be taken seriously.

ACT’s “Victim of the Day” campaign does something similar in attempting to discredit serious critics of the Regulatory Standards Bill by mocking them.

But in the end, we have to be alert to the potential political double standard: harmless jokes for me, but not for you. Dangerous threats from you, but not from me.