NZ coronavirus conspiracy: Man comes clean over Reddit post

A man whose post on Reddit became ground zero for a national coronavirus conspiracy theory has admitted it’s the “dumbest thing” he’s done.

The man that planted the seed for a conspiracy theory that gained such support in New Zealand that health authorities had to address it publicly is “quite basically horrified” with the steam it gathered and the racism and vitriol that followed.

The Reddit user was tracked down by Dylan Reeve, a New Zealand journalist and friend of Netflix’s Dark Tourist host David Farrier, with whom he also made the documentary Tickled.

Mr Reeve found him after a Facebook post by a New Zealand page called “Expose Hatred” reposted information from the Reddit post that led to “deeply vitriolic, racist and untrue” conspiracy theories about coronavirus’ resurgence in New Zealand.

had multiple people send this to me.

racism, hatred, disinformation.

we gotta unplug (but we won’t) pic.twitter.com/6IVq1RSovu

— David Farrier (@davidfarrier) August 14, 2020

“It is entirely normal to be inquisitive, to ask questions and to want to know what‘s going on, but what we’ve seen over the last 24 hours has taken things to a new and concerning level,” NZ Health Minister Chris Hipkins said on Sunday.

“There will always be rumours, but this one smacked of orchestration, of being a deliberate act of misinformation spreading,” Mr Hipkins added.

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“I wanted to know if this was some troll trying to win imaginary internet points, or if there was something else happening,” Mr Reeve said in an account of the conversation with the Reddit poster.

“I’m a journalist and I am just tracking down something from Reddit,” Mr Reeve told a user known as “James” when he reached him by phone.

“Yeah, I got a feeling,” James said, “I was waiting for this.”

Quoting a source “who went to uni” with a girl from the University of Auckland, James posted on Reddit that a woman in her 20s had snuck into a managed iso facility “for roots” with a guy who arrived from Australia at the end of July but had tested negative.

He then claims she infected her mother and father and that the man later tested positive.

He also accuses the woman of lying to health authorities and blamed the Melbourne man, the woman and the isolation facility for letting people sneak in.

You’d be forgiven for thinking it sounds familiar, but we’re not being patriotic in saying the New Zealand conspiracy theory largely echoed ones that already took hold in Australia and similarly led to racial abuse of the supposed “super spreaders”.

“Some people think that the laws and, even more importantly, the notion of socially responsible behaviour does not apply to them,” Health Minister Greg Hunt told Nine newspapers about an unidentified couple who breached isolation restrictions to play golf.

The recent Melbourne hotel quarantine inquiry shows that while more than 99 per cent of the city’s second wave of cases come from the hotel system, it’s unclear exactly where and how the virus transmitted between security guards, a night manager and returned travellers.

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A nurse tests members of the public at the Eden Park testing station in Auckland, New Zealand on Sunday. Picture: Hannah Peters / Getty Images

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Mr Reeve wanted to know how New Zealand’s theory spread when James’ Reddit post was deleted hours after it was first posted.

“I made a poor decision to put that in writing on Reddit,” James said, noting it was based on “a bunch of chat” on August 12.

“I realised a couple of hours later and removed it as much as I could, and by that stage it had been used in screen shots,” he said.

“I have been quite basically horrified where it went, and if I had not put that in writing, if it had stayed … I wonder if it would have happened organically. I don’t know,” James said.

James said the theory seemed legitimate based on what friends in the army had told him about the “mickey mouse” isolation protocols but later feared he’d violated New Zealand’s Harmful Digital Communications Act.

“It was probably the dumbest thing I have ever done, actually,” James said.

“I have been posting drivel and pushing send on that Reddit website for nine years.”

A text James sent to Mr Reeve after they spoke on the phone.

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He told Mr Reeve he’d been in “fight-or-flight” mode for two days, expecting phone calls from the media and the police after his post took on a life of its own, that could now threaten his career as a consultant.

It even came back to haunt him in a family group chat.

”That image of what I’d posted was forwarded into the chat by my father’s mother,” he said. “It came full circle from my boomer aunty.”

“He’d done what I think a lot of us do,” Mr Reeve wrote after talking to James.

“Heard some rumours and ‘facts’ from a few places and put them all together.”

“James couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle, and now he was just waiting for the penny to drop and his life to fall apart.

“It’s fun to play what-if, but sometimes we don’t think about the broader ideas and narratives our ideas might feed into. And once we put them out there, there might be no going back.”