December 21, 2018
Golriz Ghahraman, elected last year as a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives, says she gets a lot of nasty threats and hostility over Twitter because she is Iranian.
The Green Party MP is the first refugee to be sworn into New Zealand’s Parliament, after fleeing from Iran with her parents when she was nine.
“My childhood was marred by war and repression and my parents weren’t willing to raise a little girl in those conditions, so they escaped,” Ghahraman said last year.
“That place was Iran, which had been gripped by Revolution and taken over by a repressive regime that targeted minorities.”
Interviewed on the television program Newshub Nation, she said Twitter has changed in recent years.
“Twitter used to be such a nice, leftie, liberal political bubble,” she said. “Now it’s Trump-land. I get the misogyny, I get the ‘you’re young, too young.’ then I get the ‘immigrants shouldn’t even be allowed into politics.’
“Then I get the real race stuff, when it’s like ‘you’re a terrorist, we need to load our shotguns.’
“That stuff goes up to parliamentary security. It has to. At one point it was getting taken up to Interpol because it was getting a bit … yeah.”
Later she said the threats and verbal attacks come both from people “fearing I might be a terrorist cell very ineffectively trying to bring down Western civilisation through the back benches of the Green Party” and from “Iranians and Muslims and people who feel I’m letting that team down.”
The “overwhelming majority”, said Ghahraman, don’t relate to policies, but occur “when I appear to be confident – it gets taken as being smug.”
She said: “Some of our messages have to change when we talk to women about political participation. We tell them often to ‘lean in’, to just put themselves forward, to smash that glass ceiling, and I don’t think it’s safe in a lot of circumstances to keep telling women as individuals to do that.”
Last year Twitter launched new rules against hate speech, which prohibit users from threatening or promoting violence against others “on the basis of their group characteristics.”
Users are also not allowed to post violent threats or statements.