‘Where do I enrol for my special treatment?’ The effects of public backlash on an online Māori electoral roll survey project

The online environment is becoming increasingly hostile to political science researchers globally and in Aotearoa New Zealand. This research note explores the issues confronted by a group of (mainly) Māori scholars in conducting an online survey about Māori electoral roll choices. Mainly, we describe three effects that ‘trolling’ had on the project: (1) effects on the project administration, (2) effects on the researchers, and (3) the effects on the data. To supplement this discussion, we present an analysis of some of the online comments on the publicly available Facebook advertisements for the survey (n=157). Given the content of the comments, we used codes from Barnes et al. (2012), 14 anti-Māori themes and developed supplementary codes. We describe the effects on the researchers and the need to create a safety plan. We also present analysis of participant data in the survey (n = 1,958) compared to the nationally representative New Zealand Election Study (n = 747of Māori descent), which, encouragingly, shows no apparent negative biases in the data quality or codes that correspond to the sentiment of the online comments. The research note illustrates pitfalls in the online environment for a Māori political science project and highlights potential issues for research within Aotearoa.