There are eight long weeks to go until election day, but an RNZ analysis shows online ill-feeling and negativity is already ratcheting up to fever-pitch.
Since 14 July, National has changed leaders; two of its senior MPs - Nikki Kaye and Amy Adams - have announced they're leaving politics; another National MP, Andrew Falloon, resigned with immediate effect after complaints from multiple women that he sent them inappropriate texts; and Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway was forced to step down as a minister after his year-long relationship with a government worker was revealed.
The breakneck pace meant New Zealand politicos on Twitter have had plenty to discuss - or more often, fight about.
So RNZ has broken down tweets (excluding retweets) containing the #nzpol hashtag (popular amongst politics followers) into individual words, passing them to a 'sentiment library' to assign positive or negative ratings to each word. The ratings were then aggregated together to give an overall positive or negative rating for each hour of tweeting since the day of Todd Muller's resignation as National leader.
The result may not be highly scientific, but the overall pattern is clear: #nzpol over the past week was a dark hole of ill-feeling that became increasingly bleak with every new political development.
Increasingly negative tweets using #nzpol, hour-by-hour Photo: RNZ/ Kate Newton & Vinay Ranchhod
Negativity peaked the evening Falloon resigned, and again two days later during the hour of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's press conference where she announced she was dismissing Lees-Galloway.
'Scumbag', 'scandal' and quite a lot of swearing drove the latter spike, which was the hour with the highest negative rating all week.
Stuff chief political reporter Henry Cooke said the negativity had already been ramping up as official electioneering got underway. "There's just a lot of people who have a lot of time and a lot of feelings about politics."
There was a sub-group of users, mostly anonymous, who had "much more extreme venom for the side that they're not on", he said.
A tweeter since 2009, Cooke used Twitter partly for work but also because it could be "very fun" - to the point of compulsion.
"I'm not proud or happy about my Twitter use, by the way."
User Courtenay Chenery, who described herself as "mostly lurking" on the platform, said the tone had got more toxic on both sides.
"This week was the first time someone's been nasty to me on Twitter, which is weird because my jokes are pretty inoffensive, but I'd say he was angry because the political party he supports was getting a bit of a hammering that day."
Political consultant and prolific tweeter Ben Thomas, who regularly exhorts other users to "have a nice time online", said Twitter's negativity was a "feature, not a bug".
"It thrives on drip-fed, real-time, evolving scandals like we've seen in the past week".
He muted other users from time to time to preserve his own enjoyment of the platform.
"Basically, if you wouldn't pick up the phone to be abused by a stranger who hates you for no reason, why do effectively the same thing on Twitter? Muting works for everyone - they get to enjoy being mad, you get to enjoy not hearing about it."
