OPINION
By Ian Wishart
Since Friday, social media has been burning up with discussion of the Benjamin Doyle child images scandal.
For those not reading social media, you’ve probably missed it because only two media outlets had published anything on it by Monday morning – the Centrist on Saturday and The Platform.
The rest of the legacy media, who each continually claim to be trusted keepers of editorial independence, have published nothing. Normally quick to explode at the sight of an overripe banana in a school lunch, or an MP from a party they don’t favour touching a staffer’s arm, or an off colour tweet that some National MP posted when they were, like, 10, the mainstream media have stayed silent this weekend as allegations of child abuse swirl around proudly queer Green MP Benjamin Doyle.
It’s not the first time the MSM have been crippled in the face of Green kryptonite: the James Shaw fake Bachelor’s degree and uncertain provenance of his Masters degree comes to mind. And legacy media had to be dragged kicking and screaming for about a week, by Philip Crump’s NewstalkZB Plus and Centrist in the media, and virtually all of social media, to run the story about Golriz Ghahraman’s big day out shopping.
Now, another weekend has gone by with our traditional media paralysed in fear because this is an actual real story, not the opening of an envelope at a protest event about some slight to sensitive millennial or Gen Z sensibilities.
Despite state broadcasters RNZ and TVNZ having huge staffs and budgets to match, with editorial mission statements up the wazoo, none of them or their so-called investigative teams were brave enough to cover a breaking story which, at best, proves that Doyle’s future is no longer tenable as a spokesperson for the Greens on Early Childhood Education and sex education in schools.
I say “at best” advisedly, because Doyle’s decision to post a photo of his son sitting in his lap, captioned “Bussy Galore” – gay male slang for “boy pussy” – indicates incredibly poor judgement for an MP holding those portfolios. As #MeToo’s Ali Mau probably says in her new book tomorrow, child sexual abuse is no joking matter.
As it stands, that’s the political story NZ’s media could have run since Saturday, following Centrist’s lead. But they didn’t. Media were met by a wall of silence from Doyle and the Greens – no comment to any journalist who asked. And to their credit, media did ask. It’s just that they are so badly trained they don’t appear to know how to research or write anything other than a news release handed to them.
Without a news release from the Greens, the media felt powerless to report. Even though they could plainly see the Greens were locking down Doyle’s social media accounts, deleting up to 90% of posts on some and making them all private.
“Nothing to see here, move on,” intoned the Greens, and the legacy media obediently did so.
Lions of Journalism, the lot of them. Not. After all, even the fact of a Green MP’s social media being wiped is newsworthy, in a Watergate kind of way. Sadly, I suspect 9 out of 10 Gen Z reporters, if asked, would believe Watergate is a pool complex near the end of Auckland’s northwestern motorway.
But I digress. That’s the angle the media could have safely run with over the weekend to buy themselves time and credibility. But they didn’t.
Over the weekend, however, I’ve investigated further and I believe Doyle has messed up so badly that there needs to be a formal investigation launched immediately by Police and Oranga Tamariki.
You see, I believe the evidence now in the public domain indicates that Doyle is dog-whistling pedophilia. At worst, I believe there is now sufficient reason for authorities to investigate the welfare of his child.
For the sake of clarity, I am not saying Doyle “is” anything more than a political buffoon whose social media posts make him unfit to hold child portfolios in my opinion. I’m not saying that Doyle “is” a pedophile. I am saying however that in my view the smoke threshold on this story has reached the point where you send in a fire crew to check.
Here’s why I believe that:
Doyle, touted as NZ’s first openly non-binary MP, maintained official social media accounts as a Green MP and spokesperson on Early Childhood Education, and also relationships and sexuality education in schools. But he also had a separate personal Instagram account under the name @BibleBeltBussy.
“Bussy”, according to Google AI, is a portmanteau of “boy” and “pussy”, in reference to anal sex. A Men’s Health survey of queer men found 70% knew the word meant “boy pussy”, while 15% thought “butt pussy”.
In October 2023 Doyle uploaded a photo of a young boy, believed to be his son, sitting in his lap. Nothing odd about that, except the photo caption: “Bussy Galore”.
Swap places and imagine a father with a young daughter in his lap, captioning it “Pussy Galore”. He’d be lucky not to have Oranga Tamariki knocking on his door that very night.
But that was just the first red flag. A second picture in 2020 shows Doyle kissing the boy on the lips in what seemed to be a more sexualised pose. Most parents don’t kiss their children on the lips, to avoid sending the wrong message about adult/child boundaries. For Doyle to do it, and have someone with a camera take it, and then post that photo online risks sending messages in the same way that posting pictures of your child naked in the bath is now avoided.
A third picture, appearing to show a child standing at the edge of a garden, is captioned by Doyle simply with the words “Swipe to see a [eggplant emoji]”.
I shouldn’t need to tell you what the upright eggplant emoji is modern code for. So Doyle appears to be making the deliberate and provocative link between a child wearing pink crocs (decorated with rainbow and daisy Jibbitz) and emoji slang for an erect penis.
A fourth picture, dated October 2023 shows a child at the beach, and again the caption “Bussy Galore”.
One can argue, with all these, that Doyle as a vocal queer activist is making a joke. If so, it’s in bad taste, as the sexual abuse of children is anything but funny, and it has backfired. Because when you combine it with some other disturbing elements, the whole thing reaches a threshold that I believe leaves no option but consideration of the child’s removal and a formal investigation, as happens to dozens of ordinary families every week.
Let’s look at those elements.
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT?
Item One is Doyle’s pronoun emoji on social media before he cleaned it up. The emoji he chose was a blue spiral, the so-called cyclone emoji.
Global internet security company ActiveFence says the blue spiral in social media chat is used by pedophiles to signal themselves to like minds.
ActiveFence makes the point that emoji code evolves as law enforcement catches up. An earlier version of a blue triangle spiral found by the FBI a decade ago became the cyclone spiral.
To illustrate the point, if you type the spiral emoji into an Instagram search right now, you will get a warning that it may lead to illegal material.
Doyle’s supporters on the Left argue that analysis of emojis is just a witch hunt of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, but in my view, they overlook the obvious: Doyle is an activist who communicates through carefully chosen emojis in his posts. Tagging a child photo with an eggplant emoji means something to Doyle.
In 2018, America’s Stop Abuse Campaign noted that most abuse takes place at the hands of someone the child trusts:
“We know that most child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child has a significant trusting relationship with, and that money rarely changes hands. In other words, child sex trafficking, which is the sexual access to a minor for money, is rare…
“So, where do the creepy cartoon symbols come in? Originally, in the early days of social media and chat rooms, they were supposedly used so that pedophiles could identify each other. This makes logical sense; pedophiles use social media to connect with other pedophiles, to provide mutual support for battling their attraction to children, and discuss ways to meet, “groom” children, subvert law enforcement, and exchange child pornography.”
Yet, as Wired magazine reported in 2020, much was hidden in plain sight:
“As technology giants, law enforcement and organisations such as the Internet Watch Foundation have become better at detecting abuse content and dismantling the networks behind it, the offenders have evolved their behaviour to avoid being caught. It’s a horrendous game of cat and mouse. To stay one step ahead, paedophiles have long-used secretive code words and phrases to disguise the conversations and sharing of abusive content. Without knowledge of this language, it was impossible to decipher much of its meaning from everyday chatter. Until now.”
That was in April 2020. By August 2020 thousands of pedophiles had been arrested globally after revelations they were using the Cheese and Pizza emojis to secretly communicate their interest in Child Porn to other like-minded collectors.
In Doyle’s case, a photo is posted of his young boy drawing a picture. Doyle includes cheese in the shot and in a throwaway line, invites his followers to “talk to us about cheese”.
This may entirely be an unfortunate coincidence, and hopefully any formal investigation finds that and clears him, but as it stands on Monday morning, March 31st, the photos and sexually loaded captions and Doyle’s decision to use a blue spiral on his Instagram profile – an emoji linked to pedophile networks in the same way the Far Right dogwhistle “88” and other iconography (as the media repeatedly tell us) – means Doyle has dumped himself in the proverbial and has no option but to endure whatever investigation follows, in my view.
This is why I believe there is now sufficient evidence for authorities to immediately investigate, and why I believe you have a journalistic duty to tell the story as it stands, and a moral duty to act. There’s enough circumstantial evidence to generate a suspicion of fire warning.
My message to the mainstream media: grow a pair and do your bloody job. This is a legitimate public interest news story in either best case or worst case scenarios.
Tell it.
