The Christchurch Massacre Aftermath: Censorship, Democracy and Dissent.

i'm on the phone with a new zealander
named fraser and i decided to talk to fraser to invite him on to talk to me while i'm on camera because he mentioned having i guess uh some negative experiences maybe in a sense and positive experiences with him uh pointing the finger at identifying or reporting uh neo-nazis on the internet in the aftermath pardon me in the aftermath of the christ church shooting and he got to say see the way in which certain online organizations reorganize themselves in that period which is now you know just a few months ago so my experience on youtube has been extremely negative with pointing the finger at um drawing attention to and criticizing neo-nazis fascists and white supremacists i have on three different occasions had a video uh deleted by youtube and i have been punished because my video was quote-unquote hate speech and in two of the three cases i was quoting criticizing and denouncing um a white supremacist or a neo-nazi for their hate speech or for their political position so this raises a lot of weird questions about how youtube works how the internet works and the future of political discourse so just before we turn on the camera he said to me well i hope i hope this interview is in good faith i hope this discussion is in good faith so it's a great it's a great question but i mean like you know um i think actually part of what what's being questioned here is how can we have these discussions in good faith if you're in a situation where i mean maybe it's just using the word nazi gets your video banned it doesn't matter that you're that you're that you're saying nazis are bad or whatever you're saying this guy's a nazi it should it should be addressed or stuck it's criticized so how did you respond to this we just um you know you i heard you vaguely mention this in the chat forum what uh what happened next uh amplitudes of freedom of information acts calls to the internet service providers trying to find out what's going on here why can't i go and use the internet like i should be i i go on spark as my internet service provider and i call up their helpline and ask why can't i go on 4chan and they say oh it must be on your end then i have to go to an alternative social media to find my true answer that i was seeking for i have to go on twitter which twitter is sharing uh these these horrible videos and is sharing links to the great replacement but i have to go on twitter to find out why i can't go on 4chan so these are two social medias right right 4chan has been around for longer than twitter if i want to get information if i want to get news i'll be honest with you i'll go to 4chan not twitter because it's not algorithmic on twitter so did the government of new zealand unfortunately did the government of new zealand formally pass a law like communist china does that that you know was creating i mean in china they call it the great firewall of china that was creating a censorship regime that was blocking these websites or was it was it ad hoc was it informal was there no no legal and political justification while it was all happening that both parties acted like they had nothing to do with it the freedom of information act said no we didn't do anything the internet service providers say it's my problem not theirs and if it's the government doing it it's out of our control but in reality what the case was is that the internet service providers acted in haste on their own volition and also were given a list they were informed by the government let's say the government gave them a list and said hey here's something to consider and then the internet service providers did their bidding but not in a legal sense okay has it has it lasted or is 4chan and so on are those sites now now visible in new zealand it took like about a week and a half maybe two weeks so it wasn't down for the whole time now personally i think that there's there's not a big there's not a big issue around it if it wasn't for it being uh equally applied right so if 4chan is going to get taken down because this shooting video is being propagated then why isn't the same happening for facebook and twitter yeah i mean well okay that already is an interesting question where it's not an ideological contrast it's just a different competitor in the free market providing the same service that's bizarre yeah less um historic competitor as well like 4chan is one of the originators i would say i admit i have never once used 4chan in my life just disclosure yeah it's okay i don't feel there's anything lacking in my life for having never used uh never used 4chan but yeah i mean the other question is where does it stop uh massacres are an important part of history you know whether it's massacres in cambodia or whatever and i mean i've just been making videos asking you know well if you're going to censor every video that lies about world war ii and i understand i understand the sensitivity to that i understand emotionally why people feel it's better to shut down anyone who's telling lies but this year world war ii well are you also going to shut down japanese people who lie about world war ii are you also going to shut down communists and left-wingers who lie about world war because people who support joseph stalin still today are still out there on youtube making positive statements about joseph stalin history so i mean i'm only comfortable with censorship we have very clear standards that are applied to everyone equally i wasn't even thinking about it in terms of everyone meeting two different corporations like facebook versus fortune but everyone meaning every every ideology and um yeah i could take this to like even an academic level you know so when the great replacement got casted as objectionable then only uh those accepted or certified by the government were able to possess this book this document right i have read the manifesto um you know the christ church shooter and i commented on the time and i think that many people working in the mainstream press had not read it it's possible they were just being dishonest but i assume you've read it one of the things that left out at me was the fact that he refers to china positively many times and he refers to his own past as a communist and linked to communism several times that to me is very significant i recently met people so he's obviously someone who made the switch from communism to what he called eco-fascism so but that's primarily about the authoritarian aspect of it right right but you see but already that that is something people can learn from that's something that's important you know like i that's why don't you learn what his agenda was if we're gonna well right but do you give me so i spoke to some people on discord recently voice voice chat over the internet and they were presenting themselves as completely 100 percent hardcore communists and then a couple days later i was there were other people in the room and they told me oh you know two of those guys who were talking about communism you know just a few months ago they were right-wing white nationalists just a few like they remembered these guys from maybe was six months ago maybe was four months ago whatever they only recently became marxists and then communist extremism so again i just say there's something important to be learned there there's a lesson there um anyway sorry i mean here i am smiling and laughing about it but it doesn't matter if you want to laugh you want to or you want to cry okay so i i just asked what was part of your experience also uh kind of reporting who the nazis were and seeing those dominoes fall or no was that not part of what was going on yes so there was a point in time where i was trying to figure out if there were any white supremacist movements in new zealand and who these people may be uh what what ideas they rally behind and i discovered this uh fairly recent they had been operating in 2018 a group called the dominion movement and the dominion movement they seem that they're pretty straightforward right they have the black sun uh symbolism which is also on the front page of the shooter's manifesto and they describe themselves as a grassroots identitarian activist organization committed to the revitalization of the country and our people white new zealanders with this purpose in mind so not a lot of mystery there not a lot of mystery to travel yeah yeah it's pretty straightforward stuff right if you're gonna talk to a white supremacist they make it well known they don't use these very ambiguous dog whistles like okay hand gestures if they want to get their point across they talk about uh our people and and things like this you know it's rather straightforward so the dominion movement they took their website down quite a way back but fortunately somebody had captured their page on the wayback machine so i was able to have a dig through after the shooting and see what they're about try and find some names and things like this there's not really much to uh dig up out of it yeah something i just i just want to say in general i find disturbing um how did this custom develop in the western world that when someone commits suicide immediately their youtube channel is deleted their facebook page deleted all traced and they translated when someone commits murder like you know regardless of the case whether it's political murder or not i i really i really fundamentally disagree with this and it's just a custom it's not required by law i can remember many years ago when i was in the internet um a relatively young man committed to i think he was in his 20s and his mom took over his website and you know put a notice you know you know my son's now dead but you know many of you left you know nice messages here so i'm going to maintain the website you know in his memory you know why why not and you know um there was the um the so-called youtube shooter the woman who went in and had a shooting at your quarters why would you delete the evidence of who this woman was in her struggle you know again obviously you know to to keep that evidence intact is not to celebrate it you know um but but even so even if there are people who are drawn to that like a moth to a flame and celebrate it then at least you can address those people i mean then at least it can draw out and you can solve the problem yeah yeah yeah anyway i find it i find it very problematic i don't i don't have a problem with some website maintaining the standards that say um cnn maintains or mainstream news channel maintains where you know nobody gets to swear there are no swear words there's a very limited range of political things that are that are possible but i mean what the internet presented to us i don't have to i don't have to fantasize with the internet in the future i can just talk about the internet in the past what the internet presented to us was the possibility of a much wider and deeper range of political discourse um i think that 4chan is the epitome of that where any person can go online and be given an equal platform to anyone else so there's there's some rumor that taylor swift uses 4chan and this is because she gets treated like everyone else that's the idea of the website is you get treated like anyone else no anyone who's a celebrity you get treated just like any other [ __ ] poster you know yeah everyone's on an equal platform whereas the likes of facebook and youtube their uh political sway to the left has been very very well documented especially in the past week yes yeah i just i just made a video talking about that yesterday um so within the last 24 hours ted cruz has addressed that in uh america it says i'm very interested in that as it as it develops so let me ask you i i would imagine current people wrong your feeling was the problem is not 4chan and here you discovered this group this nazi group that really was the problem so what did you do with that information i mean if it were me i might try to make a youtube video about it or something i don't know what what can you do with it once you got it um like i i write a small amount of documents there's there's honestly not much one man can do other than to share the word of a nation that not not many people give a [ __ ] about you know like i i listen to the not the mainstream media but the state media and i'll listen to these clips and hear people advocating for political violence like the throwing of milkshakes and saying that uh 4chan and video gaming is what is fueling these deranged shooters and i all i hear is the ostracizing of cultures of video gamers in general you know saying that video gamers have deranged people who are going to commit school shootings on average right well look i just mentioned you know so my both of my parents became communist extremists and and one so this is this is a hundred years ago this is many many decades ago you know before i was born um but you know one of the questions you kind of have to ask and most of the people you'd ask today would already be dead or very elderly is why didn't someone intervene like why didn't someone step in and say look i understand you're being drawn deeper and deeper into this kind of subculture you know you're surrounding yourself with people who regard this stuff as normal and so on but you know um who who is going to check that now the difference is in that time there was no internet my father got drawn into that through you know pamphlets on paper and he didn't just have to walk places to go to meetings he had to take long bus rides canada is a big empty country you know he had to really he had to really move long distances to go to different kinds of events by bus and by hitchhiking so i mean like the level of motivation you had to have compared to just watching some youtube videos was much much higher but i mean kind of the question i mean you know my grandparents that whole generation is now dead um but you know and again it's nobody's responsibility right i mean to counter that kind of tendency it's nobody's job to sit down with someone and say look i know you've been reading these really biased sources about history because a lot of it is constructed out of history whether it's left-wing or right-wing you've been reading this really and you've become radicalized you've become motivated by it you know but you know have you have you thought about this it could someone someone to sit down and challenge it i i i think that it's up to our as much as i hate i truly hate to say it it's up to our surveillance agencies to find the correct language that these people use personally i don't think that they organize on 4chan because 4chan is absolutely chaotic i think that 4chan is like the top of the pipe when it comes to pipelines you may you may uh group up and form on a different platform but it's once it goes to those points and onwards that the surveillance agencies need to know the language the explicit language that they use it's such a difficult it's the internet you know it's such a difficult issue i'm gonna say i'm gonna say something oddly optimistic to you though um so i used to be a buddhist i'm now openly an ex-buddhist but i can remember saying to people within buddhism the reality in prisons today so this is very true of canada and the united states it's probably a little bit less true of australia new zealand but not so different so the reality in prisons today is people go to prison and they either become neo-nazis get involved with white power movements in prison or they get involved with they convert to islam also very common in prison they need to critique themselves yeah and also it's just you know prison is a is a desperate lonely boring time in their lives um and then of course there are some who maybe convert to protestantism some form of of charismatic you know christianity you know this is what's going on in prisons you know don't you think buddhism could be a really positive alternative for people in prison you know even if it's just even if it's just to be intellectually stimulating go on i think the issue is that how the hell is it going to make its way in you know well wait wait but i'm not talking about passively right oh no no no no no but i'm talking about i'm talking about buddhist charities with money and organization actually going in and doing things which you know which the muslim organizations do too and so on i can give you a very very relevant example of new zealand's most prevalent um religious what do you what do you call the one of the top dogs in um news in in the church like as far as you can get a bishop yeah so there's this man called bishop brian tamaki and he wanted to advocate for a a thing called the man up program in prisons where they they like you're saying they put in charitable hours and bring these gang members of violent thugs and meth addicted you know people have had [ __ ] up childhoods and they they man them up they turned them into adults the issue with that is that brian tamaki has also been um inundated in his own political controversies of how gay people cause earthquakes and all this you know dumb [ __ ] the problem is that religion is built on a lie i mean fundamentally it's a bunch of yeah this is a big problem but you know this this is an example of a religion wanting to move in and uphold some good values among these very uh gang gangs are quite a big problem in new zealand and they're they grow because you know people don't have the [ __ ] their father figures right so i've i've met a couple i knew a couple of new zealanders in when i lived in asia in southeast asia and the theme they came back to again and again about new zealand culture was loneliness which i found interesting so that it's that's a very and hey video games may be a part of that too i mean you know um it's a way of being alone it's okay you know everyone has their advices and their hobbies but yeah i think i'm blessed with the technology i'm given just just to just to finish the point though so i wasn't specifically saying the answer is more buddhist monks going to going to prisons but i just point out so i'm not a buddhist anymore i'm not part of any buddhist organization but my point was you know instead of just hoping that government surveillance captures these things i wonder if there isn't some kind of positive alternative you know philosophically or you know into it as an organization that can try to press forward you know i i'm i'm horrified to see communists communists are gaining new converts communism really is making a comeback i can't believe it in 2019. so go on brendan tarrant had almost no history he had no reason to be in a prison in the first place this is why it's so difficult to pick up on uh radicals like him you know he he he did nothing that would uh suspectedly put someone on a government watch list you know i don't think he did at least yeah he must have done some things but not not anything that i would be able to figure out well i mean i i think that the reality is we live in a world where you know belief is dangerous i think that's true across the board i think you know christian faith is dangerous i also think you know these kinds of extreme political beliefs are dangerous but you know we live in a world where you know increasingly people are the arbiters of their own faith and they look around on the internet for little bits and pieces of information that affirm the faith the firm whatever it is they they want to believe in okay so it's it's been nice talking to you i was going to try to wrap it up why don't you give me some final thoughts we're coming up on the 30 minute mark uh oh no i've lost it now i sabotaged your outro look you know you can tell me but i mean the the future of new zealand is in some ways bright i mean in some ways nobody is seriously worried about the future of new zealand despite this massacre and despite the consequences in the government in a somewhat amateurish way you know um scrambling around i mean you know i i don't know when when you look ahead to the next five years obviously that this has been a huge in new zealand there's an absolutely huge disruption to the regular political status quo but yeah so i can yeah i can make a finishing point on this it's just that there is always a consistent push towards authoritarianism in my country that's the main point is that even though i i was saying that the only way we're going to capture these sorts of people from stopping to stop their crimes is to increase surveillance that's the exact opposite of what i really want because surveillance in my country is already over the top there's there's already examples of private citizens having their phones traced and things like this with the example of kim.com the owner of mega and mega upload yeah he had his house broken into because i i would say hollywood just has too much power over our country well you know i'd say also when you talk about authoritarianism the alternative being democracy one of the things i think is most um positive about democracy is that it draws people out to defend and explain their ideas in in a theatrical way so i can remember i was at city hall so this is the lowest level of democracy in canada at city hall and there were some real far left wingers they were either communists or left-wing socialists who came in and gave city hall a lecture about labor rights and the oppression of the the workers it was a specific group of workers too it was a you know it wasn't wasn't all workers in general and then so they finished their their presentation which was so many minutes and then the the members of city council the elected people so they said oh okay so so what's what's your proposal what do you want us to do and they were stumped they really they really had nothing they were so used to probably at that time already on the internet they were so used to just the tuperating and speechifying and i was like oh oh no wait okay you've come here look we're willing to hear your proposal for how like you know how these people's lives can be improved or what you want us to do differently you know what you want us to do so even that right right well no but i mean even that just drawing people out and and giving them the chance to feel embarrassed you know because maybe that's a bit of oh gee i never really thought through you know um a lot of extreme views become less extreme i think when they're really included in the public forum in that way maybe maybe that's recklessly optimistic of me but uh that's where i'm gonna end this conversation because like you say even you uh arguing against white supremacists have your video centered on the internet i think that the other side of the debate will be um rather concerned say you are to debate a far leftist upload that video to youtube and have that video get censored then that far leftist is just going to be as pissed off as you are that that video got taken down because of hate speech yeah yeah so we gotta rally together and have some debate not hate okay thanks very much this great note ended on thank you