New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern announces US, Microsoft, and Twitter investments for a research initiative under the Christchurch Call anti-online hate project
Lucy Craymer / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Christchurch Call began in 2019 as a voluntary pledge when Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and Amazon signed its nine-point plan after the Christchurch terror attack, but it spent years without the US government behind it — Washington only endorsed the effort in May 2021, reversing the Trump White House's earlier rejection. Ardern's announcement converts that endorsement into money: the US, Microsoft, and Twitter are now funding a research initiative aimed at countering online hate.
The timing matters because New Zealand has been pressing platforms on both fronts at once — Netsafe secured a self-regulation commitment from Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, and Twitter in July 2022, while Wellington separately revealed that Twitter failed to detect or remove clips of the 2019 attack until the government alerted it. Funding research is the third leg: pledges, enforcement pressure, and now paid-for evidence.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and Twitter move from being pledge signatories to paying participants, putting their own capital into research on countering extremist content rather than only internal moderation.
- The US government's financial involvement gives Ardern's initiative official American backing two years after the US endorsement of the Christchurch Call, deepening the bilateral tech-governance relationship.
Second-order effects
- Platforms that signed the original 2019 pledge but did not fund this round — Google, Facebook/Meta, Amazon — face pressure to contribute comparable resources or explain why not, especially given the Netsafe self-regulation commitments they already made in New Zealand.
- Twitter's participation sits awkwardly against its documented moderation failures in New Zealand, where it missed the attack footage entirely — the government alert over undetected attack clips makes its research dollars a reputational necessity as much as a contribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anti-extremism governance shifts from voluntary corporate pledges toward state-cofunded research infrastructure, with governments like New Zealand's setting agendas and platforms financing the evidence base — a model that could extend to the newer signatories, including the AI companies that joined the Call to Action in late 2023.
- New Zealand is building a layered regime — voluntary pledges, industry self-regulation via Netsafe, and targeted bans such as the parliamentary TikTok ban — that smaller nations may copy as a template for pressuring global platforms without domestic market leverage.
The trend: Governance of online extremism is evolving from voluntary Big Tech pledges toward state-backed, funded research partnerships, with New Zealand positioning itself as the agenda-setter.