Newshub asked New Zealand First if it knew what prompted the random swarm of tweets or had any involvement with it. However, those questions are yet to be answered.

After Newshub contacted NZ First, Twitter - which has also not replied - and published our story, many of the tweets began to disappear. Some of the accounts have also been "suspended" for violating Twitter's rules.

Bots, which are autonomous accounts disguising themselves as real people to rapidly send out targetted messages, have become more prevalent in politics over the last few years. Posting identical messages or posts with similar keywords can help push topics up social media trending lists, therefore giving a false impression about how popular a sentiment may be. Their use in the 2016 US Presidential Election and Brexit referendum was highly criticised.

A 2017 paper published for the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media estimated that up to 15 percent of Twitter accounts were bots.

In 2018, Twitter attempted to crack down on bots by limiting the ability of users to perform "coordinated actions across multiple accounts".

"Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behaviour may result in enforcement action," Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity wrote.