Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz supports Nicola Willis’ stand against online trolls

Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz says the online world can be hard for politicians. She encourages real-life engagement with robust discussion.

Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz says she tries to avoid social media as it’s a “toxic, unpoliced space” – she prefers to chat with people directly.

National deputy leader Nicola Willis last week called on people to join her in “belittling” online trolls.

The Minister of Finance was speaking at a gathering for women in local government, at which she said gendered harassment had become normalised.

Willis provided examples of social media posts from anonymised accounts and said she filed screenshots of the abuse to a “folder of doom”.

Stoltz said Willis’ talk was encouraging as social media had become a space for faceless abuse.

“We see it on Facebook pages or social media – absolutely unacceptable comments you would never make to someone’s face.”

Stoltz sat next to Willis at the women’s breakfast event last week and they spoke about dealing with the abuse and trolls.

Rather than going on social media, Stoltz said she opened her office doors to people for a chat.

“People have 100% access to me via phone and email. They can come into my office because I know social media is such a toxic, unpoliced space.”

Stoltz said no one won on social media because there were no rules.

“It’s also unrealistic to expect a politician to spend hours every day trawling the internet to see where people are choosing to engage, then take part in that. It would take me 10 hours a day just to sit on social media.”

When someone wrote on social media, they might not have all the facts, and engaging in that space was often not productive, she said.

On the odd occasion when she was on social media, she might see a post and contact the person by phone and say “‘I see you are frustrated with this. Do you want to come for a cuppa?’ One hundred percent of the time this person comes into my office, has a cuppa and leaves as a friend.”

“So it just shows you, when people do sit in dark rooms or behind a keyboard, sometimes it’s behaviour that if the sunlight is shone on that they won’t be proud [of].”

Often when people wrote on social media, it got on a tangent with people attacking each other, she said.

Her message to online trolls was “straightforward”.

“Send me an email. Flick me a text. Give me a phone call. I’m more than available.

“I think as a community, we need to call out bad behaviour, too.”

She had seen encouraging behaviour in responses to people writing letters to the editor in the Gisborne Herald, where in the comments section people would often say: “What have you done about this, or are you just whinging about it?”

“Let’s see how we can constructively work together,” Stoltz said. “There are enough things that we don’t agree on but there’s so many things that we do agree on.

“Why don’t we put our energy into making most things happen for our kids and our region?”