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CHAPTER 28
WHAT NEXT?
In the minutes and hours following the shooting of nearly 100 Muslim worshippers at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 this year, Matt Blomfield’s 13-year-old daughter had live footage of the carnage shared to her Instagram account by four separate people. She watched the whole thing, filmed by the gunman on a GoPro attached to his helmet. She saw terror and panic; she saw real people ripped apart by real bullets. She saw the blood. She didn’t tell her parents. Many of the other kids at her school also saw the video, as did many thousands of others around New Zealand and the world. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube… it was shared more than 1.5 million times. It just popped up on people’s – children’s – social media feeds,unasked for.
It was only some months later that his daughter told Matt what she’d seen. It’s a parent’s nightmare, he says. He felt keenly that his ability to raise his daughters the way he wanted to - that is, appropriately protected, with some control over the rate at which they are exposed to the complexities of the world - had been usurped by the giant corporations whose platforms bring horrible material straight to his kids’ devices. It felt very wrong. Something needs to be done, he said to himself. In May this year, the book Whale Oil was published, telling the story of Matt’s eight-year legal battle against the blogger Cameron Slater whose online lies had almost destroyed Matt’s life. Ever since, he’s received messages from people who have read the book, all expressing great sympathy for what happened. Many shared their own experiences of being bullied online, some at the hands of the same blogger. Most asked: what’s next for Matt? A few, whose expertise lay one way or another in the online world, asked: How can I help? In fact, Matt had already begun work on “next”. After years of putting energy into the fighting negative court battles with Slater, Matt wanted to work on projects that contribute positively. During his years of struggle he thought long and hard about the wider issues inherent in his personal battle: the immensely complex matter of balancing democratic access to the internet and freedom of expression on it, against controls to prevent it becoming a weapon of harm; the inability of our justice and enforcement systems to effectively respond to breaches of the law when they happen on social media; the sheer, global scale of the platforms that dominate the internet, and the difficulty for individual jurisdictions in controlling content. In November 2016, he drafted a Universal Declaration of Rights Pertaining to the Internet. He managed to get some interest from the Privacy Foundation, with a little more interest expressed by organisations in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings. He’d hoped it might get championed at government level, but so far that hasn’t happened. He’s still proud of it – its thoroughness, thoughtfulness and logic. Article Eight would have been very relevant to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “Christchurch Call”: _“ALL MEMBER STATES SHALL DO EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO PREVENT THE INTERNET BEING USED TO FACILITATE AND DISTRIBUTE MATERIAL AND IMAGES THAT PORTRAY THE ABUSE, TORTURE, HUMILIATION OR DEGRADATION OF ANY PERSON OR PERSONS WHERE THEY HAVE NOT CONSENTED, OR ARE UNABLE TO CONSENT TO THAT TREATMENT.”_ He watched with considerable interest as Ardern headed overseas in the wake of the Christchurch shootings to try and win multi-lateral cooperation to better control the spread of harmful material. He noted the increasing public concern and debate about social media platforms but, along with that, the powerless handwringing that usually accompanies such conversations. Many people, and certainly many parents, not only worry about the material that children are watching, but are also deeply conflicted about both their ability and their right to do anything about it. Matt has no such dilemma. _“As parents, we have a responsibility for our children not to watch mass shootings at age 13, or porn at age 10,” he says. “Let’s stop and take a look at what the problem is, the elephant in the room, which is what’s happening right here on our own shores. Our kids, here in New Zealand, are watching stuff that no parent would want themwatching”._
_“We’re sitting here worrying about youth suicide statistics, youth mental health, young kids who feel shit about their own bodies and their own lives, kids who are getting their sex and relationship education through free porn sites controlled by massive corporates. And we're sitting here going, this needs to change. And we're waiting for the government to do it. Waiting for Facebook to do. Waiting for Instagram to do it. Waiting for who?”_ “Jacinda’s efforts are good, but only partially deal with the problem. Up until now, the corporates have decided what happens to us online, and now they’re deciding what steps they're going to take to help us. We can’t leave it up to them. Let's take the steps ourselves and get back some control.” It takes a village to raise a child, the saying goes. Matt believes it will take a community effort to save our children from the harmful effects of exposure to damaging and illegal material on the internet. Our own community, saving our own children. _“Who are we counting on to sort this out for us? And the answer is, it's not one person's fix. This is not just a corporate or government issue. It’s a collective issue. We need a combination of commercial businesses, academia and government to work together on this with a common goal of saving our kids.”_ He talked to people he knows in the technology sector, and it became apparent to him that the technology already exists that could put the power back into the hands of parents. What doesn’t exist, however, is a system around the technology to ensure that it’s easy to use, flexible enough to provide for individual choice and control, and expertly tailored to acknowledge important steps of a child’s developing maturity. In other words, this concept needed a comprehensive vision and, crucially, a plan. _That_ is what Matt’s doing next. _“People are always talking about the problems in this space, but no-one ever talks about what we can actually do,” _he says. He’s begun putting together an informal working group, comprising technology experts in big data, AI and software development, child development specialists, media academics, and ISP and handset providers – as well as smart business minds, branding and sales experts. He’s casting his net wide, hoping other people with expertise and ideas in this broad area will get in touch. He envisages a carefully designed and flexible package that parents would sign up for when they purchase their phone and internet plan – a package that they pick and choose themselves, according to the level of protection they want to provide for their child. Information will be provided about child development, and the levels of understanding inherent in each stage of a child’s developing intellectual andemotional maturity.
_“Parents should have the flexibility of how much control they want to put in place. There is no compulsion in this proposed system, at any level. If you don’t want any controls, that’s fine. Leave it up to Facebook and Instagram – they were more than happy to send your child a video of the mosque shooting. But for me, as a parent, I don’t want those companies out there deciding what kind of human being my child becomes.”_ _“We're taking that responsibility of how we raise our kids seriously and we're going to do it ourselves, so we're going to be the ones that are deciding what our kids see.”_ There is increasing evidence of the extent to which young people are routinely seeing horrible material on their social media feeds. The Youth and Porn study that came out late in 2018, commissioned by the Office of Film and Literature Classification, showed that of 2000 New Zealand teenagers aged between 14 and 17, three-quarters of the boys had seen online porn, and more than half the girls – including sexual violence and non-consensual sex. One in four had seen it before the age of 12. Most had not been looking for it, but they came across it anyway. Most had not talked about this with their parent orcaregiver.
Such facts can make parents feel very disempowered and helpless. “People are daunted by the scale of the internet,” Matt acknowledges. “We know that China simply banned Facebook – they can do that because they are an authoritarian society. Of course, we don’t want to do that anyway, but it points to the difficulty of creating safeguards in a society like ours where we’re concerned about censorship and the fair balance of opinions. So, let’s give the power back to the people and let the people decide. “Big corporations want your data. They use it to learn a lot about you, to push advertising and sell you more. On the other hand, they do not enable _you_ to have access to that data, and there is no AI looking out for people in this equation. There is no balance of data, no fair exchange of value. As an example, Google is starting to get its hands on individuals’ health data (Stuff: ‘Google wants to get its hand on your health data’, 17-11-19) without people’s consent; its objective is to grow its revenues. “My plan is about taking that control away from the corporates, and taking the responsibility away from them in some sense because we don't trust them with that responsibility. We'll give parents the choice to decide what they can and can't see.” New Zealand is the perfect place to trial such a system, he believes. We’ve already flown the flag with the Christchurch Call, and we love our identity as a world leader in forward-thinking ideas. Votes for women, nuclear-free, zero-carbon… safe internet. If you are interested in discussing this with Matt, send an email to: MATT@BLOMFIELD.CO.NZWatch this space.
CHAPTER 27
KARMA CHAMELEON
Back in one of our early interviews I asked Matt what he wanted to achieve from his court action against Cameron Slater. Even then, it was obvious he couldn’t be doing it for financial compensation. Matt talked for a bit about recouping his reputation, about not letting Slater get away with spreading lies. Justice, in a word. But then he said something audacious. What he really wanted, he said, was to take control of whaleoil. ‘I want people to log on to whaleoil.co.nz and find themselves directedto this book.’
He reached for a cigarette, savouring what was then just a crazy idea. ‘That would feel really, really good,’ he said. We laughed, and the smoke danced. I didn’t really think such a thing was possible. In August 2019, Matt Blomfield took control of the whaleoilblogsite.
If you are reading this, you have just logged on to whaleoil.co.nz, and you will shortly be offered the opportunity to buy this book. Since the watershed events of February, when Slater abandoned his appeal and declared himself bankrupt, much has happened. This entry – chapter 27 of Whale Oil — takes up where the book, published by Potton & Burton, left off. It is both update and epitaph to Matt Blomfield’s Whale Oil saga. Some of the recent events are traceable within the records of the Companies Register. There, the dry accumulation of company names, name changes, changes in shareholdings and directorships whispers of the sheer human drama and desperate planning that has gone on behind the scenes as Slater and his supporters seemed to do everything they could think of to rescue something from their sinking ship. Social Media Consultants, then-owner of the whaleoil blog, went into liquidation. A new company, Madas 114, was set up and then shortly after became WOBH; whaleoil.co.nz became whaleoil.net.nz before morphing, chameleon-like, into a completely new blogsite. Slater passed all his shareholdings and directorships to his wife, to his accountant, and then back to hiswife.
A liquidator, Victoria Toon of Corporate Restructuring Ltd, was appointed at the end of March, and it transpired that Social Media Consultants owed creditors around $670,000. Slater himself, now bankrupt, was shown in the insolvency report dated 15 June to have further total estimated claims against him of $4,032,167.14. This amount comprised costs associated with the Colin Craig and Matt Blomfield defamation cases including the $2.5 million Matt will seek in damages (but excluded any damages that may be won by the three health professionals who are also suing Slater for defamation), and the Human Rights Review Tribunal award to Matt for breaches of his privacy. The lawyers who acted for Slater in the various defamation actions brought against him – Brian Henry, and David Beard’s Legal Street — were shown to be out of pocket to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In short, the estimated claims against Slater and his company so far total more than $4.7 million. The liquidator quickly took issue with what she identified as the illegal transfer of assets away from creditors and into new entities. Following a post written by Slater’s wife Juana Atkins at the beginning of August trumpeting a ‘new era’, directing subscribers to a new site to which all whaleoil content had been transferred, and promising to honour their subscriptions, Victoria Toon posted a warning on the original whaleoil site: ‘It is the liquidator's opinion that the director of Social Media Consultants Limited, Juana Atkins or someone directed by her has illegally used the customer database for the benefit of anotherbusiness entity.
‘This appears on the face of it to have been done for the purpose of misappropriating the company’s goodwill and causing the company loss, therefore breaching the duties as a director to preserve the assets of the company for the benefit of creditors.’ Juana Atkins did not reply to the liquidator; neither did she comply with demands to relinquish control of the assets. On August 5, the liquidator who, remember, is an officer of the Court, wrote to the police for assistance, citing six sections of the Crimes Act she believed Atkins may have breached. The police replied briefly, telling Toon she should take her complaint to the front desk of her nearestpolice station.
In general, with their lack of response and compliance, it seems that Slater and Atkins are giving a metaphorical finger to the liquidator and, less directly, to Matt and other creditors. Perhaps, having lost so much, they feel they have little left to lose. Their debts are so huge they perhaps seem meaningless. ‘Fill your boots,’ Slater said a few years ago. ‘When you’ve got nothing to lose, you’re dangerous.’ Also, there’s every indication that, despite everything, they still feel they are the victims. ‘Shadowy forces’ conspired to take their blogsite down, Atkins wrote in her post; ‘numerous legal cases against it’ have taken their toll. Perhaps they just don’t understand. Or perhaps they are still calling bluff on the powers that be. However, a strange twist offers some depressing insights into the reality of life in whaleoil’s backroom.
In early June Matt received an email from Victoria Toon. She had been to visit Slater and Atkins at their home. Slater soon went out for a long walk with a friend, leaving his wife — who was by then the director and sole shareholder of the company — with the liquidator. Atkins showed Toon a stack of boxes – seven fullsize file boxes filled with what she said were legal records relating to ‘the discovery process’ in the Blomfield case. Atkins said she wanted them gone from the house. It was arranged they would be picked up and delivered to Matt. Matt assumed he would thumb through boxes of organized files, perhaps identifying information that could be useful in the final High Court hearing in 2020. What he found was complete disarray. ‘The boxes were filled with a whole mishmash of material. ‘I realised how disorganized he was. I was struck with almost a feeling of sorrow. This dude is really a mess. Everyone is in a mess. All the people who never got paid. It was really sad.’ Everyone is in a mess. I marvel that Matt can still find sympathy. Since this book was published at the end of May he has been subjected to a daily stream of anonymous phone calls from blocked numbers – his phone rings, he answers but no-one speaks. There’s breathing, background rustling, then the click as someone hangs up. This happens around ten times a day, sometimes more. As he sits in my office one afternoon to catch me up on events, it happens three times in just over an hour. ‘You might never be free of these people,’ I say, suddenly struck by the possible truth of that. At the end of April, Matt received a short email from Detective Sergeant Chris Goldsmith. The police re-investigation had concluded, and recommended ‘that no charges be laid against any of the individuals who were the subjects of the re-investigation’ into how Slater and his friends obtained Matt’s files, and also into the police handling of the armed attack, with the exception of one possible ‘avenue of enquiry pertaining to the Lauda Finem website’. It could scarcely have been a more different outcome, in substance or tone, to that indicated by then-investigator Detective Inspector Hayden Mander in November 2017. Mander had stated his belief there was there was ‘a failure from the outset in comprehending the complexity of this investigation’, and apologized to Matt for the handling of his file. There was no longer any trace of that perspective in the police’s communication. Goldsmith said he would be in touch with Matt once everything had been reviewed by the Crown solicitor. By August Matt had heard nothing further. Since the publication of Whale Oil, the book, there’s no question Matt’s life has changed. He is now generally perceived for who he is, and no longer for what Slater’s blog said he was, and he reaps the benefits of that every day, every time he gets a new client, every time someone reads the book and sends him a friendly message. And yet the exercise of holding Slater to account was, he says, a kamikaze effort. Winning against Slater in the High Court, finding justice for himself, was a massive victory but whether he can claw his way back to financial stability and to a sense of peacefulness for his family remains an open question. I know he’s doing it tough. I probably know it better than anyone outside his family, after my four years of almost daily contact with this indefatigable man; yet I can’t believe he won’t do what he always does: tough it out, battle through, do something audacious that will — somehow — save the day. And so we arrive back at this masterstroke – this takeover of the whaleoil blogsite. What’s in it for Matt? Why would he bother? The toxic stuff once written up here about him is long gone, thanks to Matt’s efforts through the courts. The whaleoil site itself is worth nothing now, but it’s also worth everything. All those other people, the ones who like Matt were slandered, bullied and humiliated on that blog over all those years — the horrible stories about them are still out there, recurrent reminders of vicious attacks. People like the woman I interviewed who was still too shaky to tell me what had happened but who simply googled herself and silently showed me the result on her phone; people like Scott Poynting, who knows that anyone googling him runs immediately into the whaleoil accusations against him. There are many, many such people. All of that will — after Matt’s won the required court orders — be gone. Because the internet never goes away they will never be completely destroyed, but they will be gone from casual searches. All the nasty stories, the lies and the taunts, will be pulled down. This site — whaleoil.co.nz — now serves as a perpetual memorial to the injustices inflicted on all those people, and to Matt’s long battle to curtail falsity, bullying and manipulation. That is a very fine ending. CLICK HERE TO GET A COPY OF WHALE OIL BY MARGIE THOMSONWhale Oil
Chapter 28
WHAT NEXT
Chapter 27
KARMA CHAMELEON
Whale Oil
MATT@BLOMFIELD.CO.NZDetails
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