Peter Bassett: The Greens Discover the Internet Is Mean

The Green Party has made a troubling discovery.

The internet, once a kindly meadow where progressive ideas fluttered freely from phone to phone, has become — according to its co-leaders — an outrage-generating machine.

This revelation comes via an end-of-year Newsroom chat in which Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson explain that their biggest fears are now found online. Not climate change. Not emissions. Not biodiversity loss. But nasty algorithms.

The pair say they’re looking to make an “in-person impact” during a general election campaign they know will be fought online.

They plan to meet voters in city centres, where their ideas find more common ground, but also in rural regions — places where, they say, the average voter’s exposure to the Green Party is when government ministers mock them online.

Swarbrick credits social media with her entry into big-time politics and says it will still be central to any campaign. But she and Davidson now agree the internet is no longer a neutral rallying tool. Engagement-driven algorithms, they argue, have created a digital space where reach and reality can be manipulated — and where their opponents have proven just as successful.

With young MPs and a firm digital footprint, the Greens are no strangers to social media. But for Swarbrick and Davidson, it’s time to get back to basics.

“If we could all just get out and touch grass, we’d all be a lot more chill — we could come back down to Earth and have some real conversations with people face-to-face,” Swarbrick says.

Her rise in politics several years ago, she adds, “would be impossible today, because of the way that the algorithms are ‘jigged’.”

Swarbrick says she has “around 200,000 followers on Instagram”, but her stories are now “lucky if they reach 1500 people”. This is offered as evidence of something close to censorship — a “shadow-ban”, no less.

There is no data, no comparison, and no acknowledgement that political reach has collapsed across every major platform as algorithms pivot to paid promotion, advertiser safety, and short-form video. Millions of users have noticed this. Ask any Facebook user. Influencers complain. Businesses complain. Journalists complain.

Only the Greens conclude they are being uniquely silenced.

Outrage Is Bad (Unless It’s Ours)

The Greens’ central grievance is that algorithms reward outrage.

“Engagement is engagement, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative,” Swarbrick observes.

Quite so. Which makes her next claim — that the Greens “stay away from rage-baiting” — an interesting one.

Last year, Swarbrick wanted “six of 68 government MPs with a spine” to support her sanctions bill on Israel — a remark that earned her a week’s suspension from the House. The comment was clipped, shared, applauded by supporters, denounced by opponents, and circulated widely online.

In other words, it achieved precisely what outrage-driven algorithms reward: moral provocation, tribal applause, and furious rebuttal.

This was not a rhetorical slip. It was content that predictably travelled — and it did.

The problem, then, is not that outrage politics is distasteful. It is that outrage no longer belongs exclusively to one side.

Davidson, too, laments the rise of online “muck-rolling” and polarisation. The internet, she says, has put bullying and exploitation “on steroids”.

What goes unmentioned is Davidson’s own contribution to that environment.

In 2023, while serving as Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence and Sexual Violence, Davidson declared at an Auckland rally:

“I know who causes violence in the world, and it is cisgender white men.”

The backlash was immediate and ferocious — not because algorithms invented outrage, but because a senior minister had just attributed violence as a class trait of a demographic group. One might call it over-specific.

Davidson later apologised. The quote remains. And it remains instructive.

If outrage now dominates political discourse, it did not materialise spontaneously. It was supplied willingly — often by those who now complain about the harvest.

Deepfakes and Other Convenient Terrors

No progressive lament is complete without a technological apocalypse, and duly one arrives.

Davidson recalls seeing a deepfake video of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon saying something he never said. It “genuinely scares the shit out of me”, she says.

Swarbrick worries what would happen if a deepfake of her went viral in the final days of an election.

Would the algorithms notice — or would they simply shrug and keep ‘jigging’?

This fear is treated with solemn gravity, despite the fact that deepfakes remain rare in New Zealand politics, have influenced no election here, and are overwhelmingly produced offshore — well beyond the reach of any regulation the Greens might propose.

Fear, like outrage, is a reliable accelerant.

What is never explored is how much power over speech the Greens would like the state to wield — or who decides what counts as “harmful” once politics itself is increasingly defined as harm.

What the Greens Can’t Quite Say

The Greens are not being cancelled.

They are not being censored.

They are not being silenced by Big Tech.

They are being answered back.

In a noisier, more plural, less deferential digital world, moral certainty no longer guarantees amplification. Outrage no longer belongs to one faction.

Authenticity is harder to perform when everyone has a camera.

When everyone can speak, those accustomed to amplification feel muted — and mistake it for oppression.

The Greens’ solution is to “touch grass”.

The real solution might be to rediscover humility.

But humility, unlike outrage, has never gone viral.

To close out the prelude to an elections year, Swarbrick and Davidson took their message to RNZ’s Russell Palmer.

The result was familiar: long on moral certainty, short on detail, and untroubled by follow-up.

We begin, inevitably, with “corporate greed”.

Swarbrick tells Palmer the Greens are “very much clearly taking a stand against corporate greed over public good” — a phrase repeated so often it begins to sound less like policy and more like a nervous tic.

What does this actually mean? We are not told.

Instead, we’re offered the familiar Greens cosmology: economic hardship is not the result of choices, trade-offs, or constraints, but a “doom loop” caused by insufficient borrowing, insufficient government intervention, and insufficient Greens in charge.

Swarbrick proposes “taking on more government debt earlier” to reshape the economy — the fiscal equivalent of prescribing more wine to cure a hangover. It will, she assures us, boost productivity, decarbonise electricity, build houses, and presumably solve world peace somewhere around Q3.

No numbers are offered. No costs tested. No risks acknowledged.

Swarbrick informs us this is “definitely the most toxic Parliamentary term” she has experienced, largely because “truth has completely fallen off the table”, making meaningful debate difficult when others refuse to accept that “up is up and down is down”.

This from a party that insists climate policy, tax policy, and identity politics are morally settled questions, beyond debate, and that dissent is evidence of bad faith.

The Greens, we are told, want commitments to avoid personal attacks, misuse of AI, and general nastiness — a touching sentiment from a movement that built much of its brand on denunciation, moral sorting, and permanent accusation.

The interview ends where it began: with “public good over corporate greed,” a “government of change,” and the promise that if you want the “real New Zealand First,” you should party vote Green — a sentence that alone deserves its own column.

But perhaps the most revealing line is Swarbrick’s complaint that meaningful debate is impossible when others “refuse to accept that gravity exists”.

The problem for the Greens is that Chloe’s version of gravity bears little resemblance to the real thing — and reality, inconveniently, still applies.

Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.