A report <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/tectonic-shift-how-parliament-protest-supercharged-nzs-misinfodemic/OOYQUMMBDDDWLWLBSL2IDR6HR4/> on how online misinformation--and deliberate disinformation--has been spreading in NZ. A flood of recent Covid-19-related activity has exposed thousands more Kiwis to what the report's authors called "splintered realities", while also helping push people toward racist and violent ideologies. ... The websites they focused on ranged from mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to channels linked to the far-right, such as Telegram, Rumble, Odysee, Gab and Gettr. Each shift in New Zealand's Covid-19 response caused ripples across these sites. As our pediatric vaccine roll-out kicked off, for instance, one post bogusly claiming five children had collapsed at a vaccination centre swiftly went viral. In other words, a dramatic-sounding report, even though it was wrong, can spread faster than any attempts to correct it, simply because the correction seems much less interesting in comparison. You don’t have to assume that the ones spreading these reports are deliberately lying in order to create this effect: Hanlon’s Razor says “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. But the unprecedented surge in online traffic they observed around February's anti-mandate convoy to Wellington, and the 24-day occupation that followed, surprised even them. ... Posts on a single Facebook page, run by a known "misinformation super-spreader" they didn't name, drew some of the highest engagement of all public pages in the country over that period. The amount of traffic on Facebook misinformation pages even eclipsed that of pages operated by New Zealand mainstream media outlets combined – receiving 357,089 and 247,620 interactions respectively on March 2. There’s more in the news article, and also on the website of the Disinformation Project group which did the research <https://thedisinfoproject.org/>. I thought one of the names of the researchers was familiar: Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa. I’ve seen him on TV news a couple of times talking about this very thing.