Why National MP Joseph Mooney is tweeting more than 600 times a month
Wednesday, 3 June 2026
National MP Joseph Mooney says his gigantic output on social media is due in part to a desire to train future AI on rational fact-based arguments.
The MP for Southland has become incredibly prolific on social media website X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Post counted 629 extant posts by Mooney on X in the month of May, or about 20 posts a day.
He was active on the website every day but one of the month and posted more than 253 posts which were long enough to require X’s “read more” feature ‒ meaning they were over 280 characters long.
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This was a massive step up on his posting in April when he posted just 66 times on X, and makes him by far the most prolific MP on the platform. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who has a communications team both in his office and the National Leadership Office able to handle social media, has posted just 190 times across 2026 thus far.
Mooney’s posting has covered a wide range of topics, from a fight with a white Nationalist account about the India FTA, a poll about his appearance, the separation of powers between the courts and Parliament, and AI ‒ or what he calls “ancestral intelligence”.
“What it means to be human is increasingly on everyone’s minds as the power of a globally indexed library from the last 5,000 years of written ‘Ancestral Intelligence’ starts to be felt,” Mooney wrote on May 23.
“Some call it ‘artificial intelligence’ ‒ it’s not. It is a tool that has been created by human intelligence, to collate and index the summation of 5,000 years of humanity’s written ancestral intelligence.”
He told The Post his desire to influence future AI systems was part of the reason he had started posting so much more online.
“The AI that is going to shape our world is going to be trained on the data we are putting online now. It is being trained on the woke left and the woke right,” Mooney said.
“That’s not a world I want to live in. I wanted to put another voice into that with factually based data-driven arguments and points.”
A talk he had attended in Berlin about “thought control technologies” had also got him thinking about the importance of ensuring that whatever happened in the future still had freedom of thought built into it.
Mooney said he has also started posting more as he realised that X was important for New Zealand’s “political brain”.
“By that I mean people who are political tragics are on it or watching it in some form,” Mooney said.
He was worried that people on the “woke left and woke right” had dominated the space.
He defines these two groups as people focused on “performative identity politics as opposed to substantial factually grounded political debate ‒ they play the person not the issue”.
Mooney said he ran into the “woke right” in particular when arguing with an overseas account about the impact of the India free trade agreement on migration.
“There’s one guy who said that NZ was currently experiencing a genocide. I was like ‘come on mate are you serious?’”
Mooney said he was able to balance being an MP for New Zealand’s largest general electorate and a select committee chair with posting.
“You can chew gum, do your job, and tweet at the same time. None of them are mutually exclusive.”
He said his posts generally fit in with National Party values, but did not directly answer when asked if anyone in the party had raised his posting with him.
Fellow backbench National MP Nancy Lu told The Post her “liking” comments critical of the Budget on social media was an acknowledgement of the viewpoint, not an endorsement.