Parliament’s X-it is only to be expected

This is not what I’m supposed to be writing. But something I read really annoyed me, so now you all get to hear about it. You’re welcome.

Once upon a time, back when X was called Twitter, it was the pinnacle of social media. Used by billions and bought for billions, is arguably the most successful social media site to ever exist. The structure it engineered became so successful that upon its purchase by a far-right sycophant, mass-migration immediately occurred to many, many twitter clones that had sprung up over the years built off Twitter’s immense success — Bluesky being the most well-known of these.

Even this very site has a Twitter clone for its “activity feed”. Substack has successfully taken newsletter distribution and turned it into social media, but most of what is “social media” about Substack is just mimicry of popular Twitter features.

This “theft” is a natural part of web development. Clone sites have a long, long history, dating back to the internet’s early forum days, before ‘social media’ was ever invented. It seems to be unavoidable during the development of internet communities that at some point, the user base will disagree with each other or with overall site direction and split off. The sites they migrate to or create invariably end up being incredibly similar to the original site they just left.

A social media platform is made up of more than just its mechanics, you see. It is also its community.

One Twitter alternative touted during “the Exodus” was Mastodon, a social media site that was itself originally a Tumblr clone, back when that social media platform saw a change in direction that mass amounts of users decided they couldn’t stomach. Every video-based social media site, too, stole from each other when implementing their short-form feeds based off TikTok’s youth popularity, something that suddenly seemed very prescient when TikTok was banned for less than 24 hours during the current US administration’s efforts to “nationally acquire” TikTok. Banning the app from being accessed in America successfully pressured TikTok to sell to American interests, allowing its profits and data to be harvested securely by American companies before being sold on the international market, as opposed to going straight to China and cutting out the American middle-man. But in that brief period of downtime, other social media apps that had copied TikTok’s interface saw surges in users, especially Chinese social media site RedNote.

(Originally Trump’s suggestion of a TikTok ban was a response to negative videos circulating during his election run, but national acquisition and concern over data became the driving motive for the momentum that followed during Biden’s term. The Democrats foolishly bought into this, to their own cost when it allowed Trump to win some of the youth vote in 2024 by promising to “save” TikTok. A promise which, notably, he did fulfil.)

X has gone through a dramatic shift in the past decade, across every facet of its operation — user base, function, limitations and features, ownership, and more. It has become an entirely different site to what it was when Parliament decided to use it as an official means of communication. This transformation has not been considered at all by Dr Bryce Edwards in his criticism of Clerk of the House David Wilson’s decision to withdraw from X.

X is not a politically neutral site.

Discounting for now that House presence on X requires Parliamentary staffers to use a site that features increasing amounts of racism, Nazism, queerphobia, disinformation, misinformation, rape and pedophilic content, and other stressors and threats to employee wellbeing (which is the duty and primary consideration of David Wilson). Parliament’s bureaucratic arm is perfectly entitled to make political decisions when and where they affect his administrative duties. It misrepresents the situation to pose leaving X as a political decision arising from a neutral stance; it is a political decision to have a presence on X at all. It was political (though not necessarily partisan) when first made, and it is a continuous decision for as long as accounts operate there.

When Parliament joined Twitter in 2008, it was still an SMS-based service, and had recently rebranded from “twttr”. The original idea of the site was that you could text in a “status” (a term taken from then-popular MySpace and Facebook) and this would be distributed to your “group” (who would later become “followers’). This is also the origin of the 120 character limit — it’s a text messaging service.

From this, the site evolved into essentially an internet pinboard, where you would post your thoughts, or in the case of businesses and organisations, important updates the public might want. Users could follow you to see these “statuses” in their feed. Simple concept, and it is easy to see the appeal for government departments. Newsletters via email were the big tech back then (oh how things have changed…), but the in-thing was this idea of “pages” or “profiles”. Fully-resourced agencies might create their own sites and host their own posts in a sort of archive, but these sites were all seperate, saw little traffic, had few features, and functioned mostly as a record of updates.

Twitter connected these users, with each other, with communities, with audiences. Twitter popularised the idea of an “official” account, which would come to be denoted with a blue checkmark, not bought back then but issued for free by the site to select, verified users. This made it easy to distinguish the real from the fakes, a source of great anxiety in the early days of the internet, and perhaps relatable again in these early days of AI. Anyone could be anyone online — but not on Twitter, where users were verified by the site itself.

The appeal that would have for the various administrative arms of Parliament is easy to see.

Situations like OSHA sending an impersonating Tumblr account a cease-and-desist simply wouldn’t happen on Twitter, because the site itself determined the official from the unofficial.

Then, as now, New Zealand government departmental decisions to join Twitter was done on an individual basis. The Clerk’s decision to cease using X was actually more an announcement of an existing status that had naturally come about via independent decision-making by the various Parliamentary X accounts — almost all had stopped posting there already.

This makes Winston’s partisan accusations ring quite false.

X is not the site it was, and government departments already don’t post there because it had already stopped being helpful or appropriate to do so.

Once a place for public announcements from verified accounts, checkmarks can now be purchased by anyone. A formerly free-to-use site, money is no longer made through advertising but via subscriptions that dictate access.

The moderation and management of X has taken a distinct pivot under its current owner Elon Musk. His purchase of Twitter was explicitly to control the sorts of speech allowed online and to shape the political conversation that then was being limited by restrictions around hate speech. Musk’s changes successfully caused hate speech to increase, with a 50% increase on average in the 8 months following his takeover. There has been several mass exoduses of users because of the dramatic shift in tone and content under Musk. The latest incident concerning deepfakes and AI-created sexual imagery of children, which X’s user base has been minimised and under-addressed by Grok’s developers, is only the most recent straw added to the camel’s back.

But it is a heavy straw. The sexual exploitation of women and children should not be a partisan issue. Nor is it fair to say it is the presence of this content that has caused the Clerk’s reaction, but rather the response to it and how it came to be on the site in the first place.

It’s no surprise that our right wing parties in New Zealand would prefer our independent, non-partisan constitutionally-seperate administrative arm of government to remain on their radicalised-right site, owned by a (semi-disgraced?) member of the US Trump administration.

Participation on X is such a political action that not participating may well come with political consequences.

It is bizarre to read a university academic, supposedly-left-wing writer, and director of the Atlas-opposed Integrity Institute supporting this right-wing beat down presenting a co-opted social media platofrm as a bastion of Free Speech. That is of course why our party leaders are responding to this, after all: because attention was drawn to it by the partisan organisation the “Free Speech Union”, which exist largely to frame social exclusion as “freedom of speech” issues.

By presenting typical moderation of private-public spaces and exclusion of extremist speech as excessively rights-limiting and a fundamental threat to democracy, the Free Speech Union network has been a big contributor to the idea that restrictions like routine Terms of Service is suppression of political freedoms. . While you can debate the legitimacy of some of their arguments, it cannot be considered an authority on matters of civil rights given its positions are so frequently used to attack other civil rights.

On many occasions, it has been Dr Edward’s himself pointing out the FSU’s insidious network and culture-war fallacies. Dr Edward’s is also one of the key kiwi light-shiners on the Atlas network’s influence in New Zealand politics, highlighting its historic and international activity and putting in significant work to trace its continued presence in the present day. His voice, research and writings has added vital legitimacy to the combined effort in raising public awareness of such organised, outside influences on our politics.

It therefore perplexes me that he is so ready to legitimise the positions of organisations that exist because of the Atlas Network, in the style of the Atlas network, and as a result of the Atlas Network’s influence on New Zealand politics.

The Free Speech Union is part of a network of pressure groups started by a handful of key political players (Jordan Williams, David Farrar) who now provide paid services (via the Campaign Company, Curia, etc) to right wing political organisations, politicians, and causes. They are not just partisan in focus, they are actively seeding the sorts of speech that support the positions of the right (see their list of alt-right speakers they have facilitated and even paid to come here).

This oversight coincides with continued criticism of Tamatha Paul for the Moa Point spill, where Dr Edward’s backed up the criticism of the Atlas-affiliated New Zealand Initiative that Paul’s WCC decisions to underfund sewage plant maintenance in favour of cycleways contributed to the plant’s failure. NZI then directly cited this to support their point in a new release on Moa Point, without disclosing that Dr Edward’s opinion was based entirely on their own original assertion in a classic demonstration of Atlas-described misinformation-creating technique.

Presenting agreement with your stance as an independent opinion anrtificially amplifies that opinion and lends credibility to it, the credibility of the person who is agreeing with you. In this case, Dr Edward’s. But NZI left out a few facts in their initial reporting,, allowing them to frame the decision very disingenuously, as confirmed by right-wing city counsellors present at the meeting.

In reality, not only was it never a decision between funding cycleways and funding water infrastructure, it was not even possible to fund one over the other because the money was coming from entirely seperate pots. Money was assigned by council to Moa Point, but at a later point, once a suitable plan was submitted.

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Dr Bryce Edward’s has himself not posted to X since 2024. Nor have any of his various political organisations. His ‘status’ (that now means the permanent message under your name rather than your tweet) specifies he is not checking notifications or replying. Perhaps he too, like Parliament, no longer finds it as useful a political tool as it once was.

X is described by many as a cesspit. This is a common description attached to websites that have been co-opted or covertly influenced by the right. Turns out, when you promote the fact that you are a haven for the worst sort of speech around, that’s largely what you get. Such a stance dictates who wants to remain as part of your community.

Although communities of users may not overlap directly, there is a “contagion effect” that spreads and contributes to overall site culture. This is compounded by top-down moderation decisions, design choices and behaviour engineering which supports this shift.

This is what is happening to Twitter. This is also what happened to 4-chan. A key moderation decision was made to replace a news forum (/new) that had become taken over by neonazi sentiment, resulting in the creation of /pol as a "containment board" for extremists.

But instead this created a growing, spreading community that would over the years collaborate to falsely report mass shooters, hand over intelligence on Syrian rebels to Russia, create QAnon, campaign for Trump's presidencies, attempt to contaminate Al language association with ethnic slurs, co-opt Pepe the Frog as a symbol of Nazism, attempt to co-opt the 'okay' gesture as a symbol of Naziism, attempt to create an 'anti-trans sexuality, Nazi-fy that sexuality, inspire mass shootings and facilitate discussions of ideology that would lead to terror events, spread the Great Replacement theory and other racist conspiracies, and create the even-more-extreme copycat board 8-chan/pol (infamous for hosting the Mosque Shooter's manifesto) that went on to do a whole load more Nazi stuff.

They also used to flood sites with child porn. Y’know. “For the lolz”.

Instead of containing this community of extremists, /pol it gave it a home. It gave its users - neonazis - a place to belong. And a place to coordinate. Quantitative analysis shows /pol were probably successful in their mission of spreading "alternate" news sources to other sites, and there are clear connections to be drawn between reddit sub TheDonald, /pol, and Twitter.

We also explored complex temporal dynamics and we discovered, for example, that Twitter and Reddit users tend to post the same stories within a relatively short period of time, with 4chan posts lagging behind both of them.

However, when a story becomes popular after a day or two, it is usually the case it was posted on 4chan first, lending some credence to 4chan's supposed influence on the Web.

Opinions were also spread by "raids" of other websites where the community would comment there en-masse, shifting the tone of conversation. This was an activity also popular in the now-banned reddit sub r/conservativekiwi, a far right political New Zealand discussion board. It is likely there was overlap in these user bases.

Musk was himself a participant in these early communities. When he pulled a Nazi salute on stage after Trump’s inauguration, these communities are who that salute was for. A “semi-ironic”, plausibly-deniable salute that “trolls” the left and signals to the online radicals that he is one of them.

/pol, after all, was short for politically incorrect.

This is the mantra, the ideology that unites the online right. To be politically offensive, by any means necessary. That is the subculture that Musk signalled would be welcome on Twitter.

Of course separating from that environmental is a political decision. By definition, it is the politically correct one.

And what is more politically incorrect than child porn?

Grok’s output too is a direct consequence of Musk’s user base and development decisions. Musk is the man who wanted to “party hard” with a post-conviction Epstein on his island. And the recent FBI file has 4chan founder Christopher Poole scrambling to deny Epstein’s influence in the creation of /pol and thus the continued presence of neonazis on 4-chan. But this connection and the attention drawn to Poole’s meetings with Epstein around this time has now led to speculation that /pol’s favourite activity of spamming child porn may also originate from or somehow serve the Epstein class.

Donald Trump himself is suspected to be one of the key accused benefitting the continued suppression of the Epstein files, and the latest “missing file” to appear and then disappear inexplicably is a record of FBI interviews from 2017 and 2025 with a child sex abuse victim who directly names Trump and who the FBI found “credible”. Legislators who have seen the unredacted files have said explicitly this is a coverup of a sex trafficking ring in which Trump is implicated. It is entirely unclear the extent to which Musk may be included in and incriminated by the unreleased files. It is clear, however, that he created an AI that “accidentally” generates child porn. It is politically naive to insist that is a coincidence.

This is the political context in which the Clerk of the House has decided to officially cease posting on X, which was functionally already the status quo. It is not simply the presence of sexual abuse content that has caused this, but rather the context in which it has been created and the unsatisfactory response from the billionaire and potential pedophile who owns and runs X.

Sex abuse should not be a partisan issue. But somehow, again, Winston Peters has managed to make it one. Except this time he’s on the side of pedophilia.

If condemning sex crimes has become political, and if decisions to participate on social media sites have become political, it is only because the right have deliberately made them so.

I for one am glad to live in a democracy where the separation of powers entitles the Clerk of the House to make such “partisan” calls.