Wellington, Nov 1 (TIWN) While campaigning was underway for the October 17 New Zealand general elections, more than 200,000 abusive tweets were directed towards female candidates, including incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it was revealed on Friday.

Jacqueline Comer is the creative technologist working with Areto Labs to bring this technology to New Zealand for the first time.  Comer told Morning Report the bot detected a 'toxic' tweet by processing messages to candidates through a machine-learning model with filters.  "Once a tweet goes through one filter that says 'yes this probably toxic', it then goes through another, there's seven of them. Then once it scores 90 percent 'most likely to be toxic', the bot replies with a positive tweet to balance the negativity on Twitter.