For the first time in years, New Zealand’s political parties are actually pulling back from the murky world of online disinformation—not completely, but noticeably. That’s the encouraging word from Dr. Mona Krewel, director of Victoria University’s internet, social media, and politics research lab. Her team runs the New Zealand Social Media Study, a long-running project that tracks the Facebook pages of political parties and party leaders, both during election season and in quieter political moments. And right now, the findings are surprisingly hopeful. Since the study began in 2020, the current period has recorded the lowest level of disinformation ever seen. To be clear, this doesn’t mean the internet has become a clean, honest marketplace of ideas. The researchers still found around seventeen posts that could be described as “half-truths”—content built mostly on accurate facts but sneaking in one dodgy detail, the kind of thing that might nudge your opinion without ever telling a flat-out lie. They also found a single instance of what could genuinely be called fake news. After the storm of conspiracy theories, vaccine panic, and mandate madness that choked social media in previous years, that feels almost like a breath of fresh air. But Krewel is quick to warn against celebrating too loudly: fewer bad posts does not automatically mean less harm.
The reason for this sudden bout of good behavior is rooted less in moral awakening and more in electoral strategy. Populist fringe parties, Krewel explains, were largely responsible for the disinformation flood of previous campaigns, especially around Covid and vaccine mandates. Those parties thrived on anger, fear, and confusion. But this election is not about those things. The dominant issue is the economy, and the economy is not a topic that fires up fringe populists in quite the same way. They do not have the same easy slogans, the same comfortable villains, or the same emotional shortcuts. So they have stayed, in the researcher’s words, “pretty quiet.” Meanwhile, the established parties are running the show, and they are competing on economic plans, cost-of-living solutions, tax promises, and practical governance. That may be duller than the wild worlds of conspiracy and outrage, but it is also safer. Fewer emotional grenades are being thrown around, and fewer false narratives are being seeded into public conversation. That is a genuine improvement. Still, there is a frustrating catch: the couple of bad posts that did slip through are precisely the ones that get the most attention. Disinformation has a kind of magnetic pull. People share it more, comment on it more, and react to it more than they do on a boring policy announcement or a careful fact-check. Krewel puts it bluntly: “Low prevalence doesn’t mean low impact.” Even a single fake-news post on a Facebook page with an enormous reach can travel through the digital world like wildfire.
That danger is especially uncomfortable because social media is where political battles are won and lost for so many voters. Krewel’s study also took a hard look at how younger New Zealanders are responding to the way parties talk to them online, and the results are not flattering for the would-be viral-marketing gurus inside political headquarters. Young voters are not impressed. In fact, they are cringing. Many parties seem to believe the path to the youth vote runs straight through a TikTok account, and so they have tried to imitate youth culture with embarrassing earnestness. You might have seen it yourself: a politician awkwardly attempting a “get ready with me” video before hitting the campaign trail, or a party account dropping memes in a desperate bid for relevance. According to Krewel, this strategy is backfiring. Young people see through it instantly. They do not buy the image of a party leader pretending to be a content creator. They find it inauthentic, artificial, and more than a little patronizing. They are not looking for their politicians to be their friends or their influencers. They are looking for the same thing any serious voter wants: people who deliver on the issues that matter. In a way, this is a healthy sign. It suggests that younger generations are not shallow digital natives who can be won over by a carefully deployed trending audio clip. They are actually more demanding and more discerning than many party strategists give them credit for.
The findings also give us a glimpse into what the current social media battlefield actually looks like. According to the study, the National Party is currently posting the most content, followed by Labour, and then a somewhat unexpected presence in the third spot: the NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party. That lineup is itself a little story about the strange state of modern politics. The bigger parties are pushing out massive amounts of material, trying to drown each other in announcements, attacks, and carefully polished snippets of leadership. The smaller party, by contrast, is there because it knows how to work the algorithmic channels—perhaps not in a slick professional way, but effectively enough to stay visible. For all the talk about voters drifting away from mainstream politics, the actual online conversation still seems to be dominated by the established players. And while that might make for a less chaotic online experience, it also raises quieter questions about how real the conversation is. A political Facebook page is a curated, controlled space. It is not a town hall, not a debate, not even a social club. It is a broadcast studio disguised as a conversation. That is why Krewel’s point about impact is so important. Even if the total number of disinformation posts is low, the posts that do exist are sitting inside huge digital platforms, wearing the same comfortable clothes as the genuinely useful information, and traveling through networks of people who are already inclined to believe the worst.
What should we take away from all this? First, a little realism. The fight against disinformation is not over, and it will never be won by simply counting the bad posts. The real challenge is not the volume of lies, but the power of a single well-aimed falsehood to do damage. A lie that feels true, that matches what people want to believe, that gets shared by a friend or a family member, can still cut through the noise and land with tremendous force. The past few years have taught us that the machinery of misinformation is not always loud. It can be subtle, patient, and deeply embedded in the way we communicate. What is encouraging is that researchers like Krewel are watching. They are counting, tracking, and warning. They are giving us the tools to understand what is happening beneath the surface of our social media feeds. That kind of work matters. It is easy to take it for granted, but without it, we are just floating on currents of information and emotion, unable to tell what is true, what is half-true, and what is designed to manipulate us. New Zealand is lucky to have this kind of monitoring, but monitoring alone is not enough. The rest of us need to bring a healthy dose of skepticism to everything we read, and we need to hold our politicians to a higher standard than we sometimes do.
In the end, the story here is not just about data. It is about trust, and about the strange relationship between the digital world and the democratic one. Political parties have learned that they cannot simply dump disinformation into the water and expect it to work the way it did a few years ago. They have also learned, or maybe they are still learning, that younger voters are not a puzzle to be solved with memes and TikTok trends. They are actual people with real frustrations, real hopes, and a sharp sense for when they are being talked down to. The parties that succeed will be the ones that treat voters like adults, that talk honestly about the economy, that respect the intelligence of young people, and that understand the difference between speaking to someone and trying to perform youth culture at them. The internet will never be a perfectly clean place, and democratic politics will always be messy, contested, and full of half-truths. But sometimes the news is quietly good. Disinformation is down. Young voters are holding politicians accountable for authenticity. And researchers are still here, watching carefully, reminding us that low prevalence does not mean no impact. That is not a perfect ending, but it is a start. And in a world where trust is fragile and attention is scarce, that might be enough to keep going.