Rumours originate?

tweeting for years. Most of them had racked up thousands of tweets, but some only had a few hundred.

Many of the accounts had been tweeting about the Labour camp allegations just prior to getting onto the rumours.

One of the accounts involved openly celebrated when the first story concerning the false rumours was published.

Comments were also posted on blog sites, although these often alluded to the rumours rather than stating them specifically.

One early April post on rightleaning site Kiwiblog featured a whole thread discussing the rumours as a ‘‘personal scandal’’ in the comment section, with several commenters with thousands of other comments to their name spreading them.

That thread remained up on Wednesday, but was soon deleted after Stuff contacted Kiwiblog editor David Farrar for comment.

Farrar told Stuff he deletes defamatory content when it is brought to his attention.

With two million comments and counting on the site it was difficult to keep on top of everything, and he didn’t routinely read the comments on every post.

‘‘When you get that level of comments you can’t go and read them all, you can’t go and read them all it would just take hours every day,’’ Farrar said.

‘‘I tried searching to see if I could proactively find some of it, and actually it’s really hard because people don’t necessarily use the name you would think, they sometimes use nicknames etc. It is really difficult.’’

He had suspended several users over comments concerning the Gayford rumours.

So were the anonymous accounts co-ordinated or was this just gossip that people with similar world views intentionally spread as far as they could?

It’s impossible to say for sure. But given how many differentlooking accounts were involved, it was probably more meme than master plan.