Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Social media users have, in recent weeks, been inundated with posts alleging to be sharing RNZ news stories.
From Prime Minister Christopher Luxon allegedly saying goodbye to New Zealand after shocking events to poorly edited photos claiming to show Guyon Espiner with the police, the posts all share completely fictitious headlines made to look as though they come from the RNZ website.
They have appeared across a range of platforms.
Sean Lyons, chief online safety officer at Netsafe, said there were a lot of posts of this kind and they could be trying to achieve a number of different things.
Some of the posts used news outlets' names, while others used brands or sporting codes. Some used stories of missing pets or missing children.
TVNZ has also been a target of the false news-style ads.
"We became familiar with a lot of them through Covid, the straight-up misinformation ones … They're using [the RNZ] good name and reputation to convince people to believe in the story. We know that one of the issues people have, certainly in New Zealand, with the sharing of misinformation is that they don't read the story - they see the headline and share it. People recognise it's a problem."
He said scammers were trying to come up with something sensational that would grab attention so that people would send it on to others.
"Even if you're not sending it on you're looking at it and thinking Luxon's dodgy, he's involved in some malpractice of some sort. It might be that."
Scammers could use the posts to identify people who might be susceptible to a particular sort of scam in future, he said. People who shared a post about missing kids or dogs, for example, might be more likely to give money to a scam raising money for those sorts of causes.
"Our real worry is the commercialisation of this stuff - people almost selling their services. They're able to build lists [of people] and offer those lists to people. They may just be speculative collecting information about us online to resell it … there's great value in your name, address, specific details about you and thing you might be interested in or things you've shown affinity for, those are really valuable to scammers."
RNZ chief executive and editor-in-chief Paul Thompson said the advertisements undermined trust in RNZ but had also started falsely attributing content to RNZ journalists.
"This is disinformation of the highest order and is very detrimental to the respect and trust we have spent nearly 100 years building with the public.
"We have complained, in the past, directly to those companies responsible for the advertisements, where they can be identified, which is a difficult problem in itself and we have also complained to the platforms on which they appear.
"These are paid adverts that are breaching copyright laws as well as potentially damaging the reputations of our people. We do believe that those that are accepting payment to run these adverts on their channels need to do more to check the legitimacy of content and claims made."
Marketing expert Bodo Lang, of Massey University, said the posts could improve awareness of the RNZ brand but they could also damage credibility.
"To gain further insights, it may be useful to distinguish between two groups of people: those who are current or lapsed users of RNZ, and those who are not. Regular users of RNZ will quickly recognise that these fake news campaigns are scams unrelated to the broadcaster. Therefore, the scams are unlikely to affect their perception of RNZ's credibility.
"However, the impact on people who are not regular users of RNZ is likely to be different. In particular, individuals who do not engage with mainstream media, or who mistrust it, may see these scams as confirmation that mainstream media, including RNZ, cannot be trusted.
"In other words, while RNZ may gain some new audience members, these fake news scams may also reinforce resistance to mainstream media in general. This could drive some consumers further into making poor choices, such as spending more time in social media echo chambers or relying on second-hand news via social platforms, or turning to 'news providers' that are not credible sources of balanced information and insights."
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