While there are many things that probably ought to take precedence when it comes to my writing time, including the fact I’ve been hounded – indeed cyberbullied (the topic of this reflection) – by two different crowds this week; those who deny that women can be perpetrators of sexual harm or that men could be victims of such women, and those who stubbornly insist that anyone who is neurodivergent is disabled and a victim of society’s expectations.

I’ll address both these at some other point.

The most immediate concern I think is that regarding cyberbullying itself.

But not for me – for Chloe Swarbrick, the Greens party co-leader.

Swarbrick recently claimed that she was “effectively being cyberbullied by the most powerful people in the country” – the National party.

Such a claim is not without foundation. RNZ themselves noted that 37/94 Instagram posts over the last 6 days mentioned either the Greens or Swarbrick herself. Richard Hills on Twitter this morning noted that of the National Party posts on that platform in the previous 24 hours, 70% mentioned Swarbrick and 30% focused on the National Party itself.

Even to the most detached person, this sounds pretty obsessive.

But is it cyberbullying?

I have written about cyberbullying before, as it was one of the topics I was most fascinated by in my earlier years at university. As with most things in psychology, I was particularly fascinated with the mechanisms that underlie or even motivate such behaviour.

As cyberbullying in the psychology literature was broadly defined by a form of online harm perpetuated by some collective effort, we may consider that this very narrow definition of cyberbullying (which may well have been altered since 2017) is roughly equivalent to the mainstream phenomenon of a “pile-on” – a group effort to wear down and hurt an individual who is otherwise defenceless against such an effort.

This is to be distinguished from trolling, which I both noted at the time, and elaborated upon in later writing, which is a more individual effort to lure an individual into some pointless discourse – usually for the amusement of the troll.

My interest in cyberbullying back then, or rather identifying the mechanisms which underpin it, was both in relation to the tragic death of Charlotte Dawson – who had been relentlessly hounded by cyberbullies, and because it seemed to be motivated by something wholly different to trolling. Cyberbullying is a collective effort, trolling is not.

What could motivate such inhumanity? The answer seemed to lie in the same mechanism as rioting – deindividuation.

Deindividuation is where ones personal, individual identify takes a back seat and their group identity comes to the fore – they are essentially anonymous – acting as one of the herd – doing whatever the herd seems to want or need. Going with their flow, as it were.

There’s no sense of individual responsibility, only a sense of collective responsibility.

That was the mechanism the research suggested, and I concurred was likely to be implicated in motivating such horrific pile-ons against people such as Dawson.

By contrast, trolling is much more individual – being fuelled by personality traits which may include dark traits like sadism.

With all this in mind, then, is the National Party’s obsession with Swarbrick tantamount to cyberbullying?

Not by this very narrow, academic definition it isn’t.

But it’s plainly clear that they are doing everything they can to instill fear among any undecided voters that the Green party are not to be trusted, but they (despite their nasty tactics) somehow are.

So, while this isn’t cyberbullying according to the old school academic perspective, I think we could at least conclude that this behaviour comes pretty close to the stalking behaviour outlined in the recently passed stalking legislation.

In that act, trying to discredit an individual several times is recognised as a form of criminal stalking. I’m not of any legal training, so I can’t say that it actually constitutes such behaviour.

But what I’d suggest is that instead of looking around the cyberbullying literature to explain National’s creepy obsession with Swarbrick, it would be much more appropriate to consider it a form of stalking.

Stalking is a form of fixation, obsession, alongside an accompanying pattern of repetitive behaviours – such as tracking of movement, hyper fixation with their lives, and a constant attempt to undermine or discredit that individual at every turn.

The latter is what we’re looking at here.

I’m not sure anyone in the National party has the self-awareness, or even the inclination to engage in self-reflection in this regard, but I would urge anyone who will or can to do so very quickly.

I know such tactics aren't all that unusual during an election campaign.

But they are when it comes to an obsession with one person.

This is where it crosses a line, and it risks encouraging members of the public to also cross that line.

We’ve seen overseas the effect of such toxic and hateful attitudes against women politicians, including very recently in Australia. We now have a solid idea about what outcomes the fueling of such hate by these tactics will result in.

It’s not too late to drop the dirty politics and play a good clean game.