A man has been referred to police after calling for the assassination of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

The comment was made on state-owned broadcaster Radio New Zealand’s (RNZ) Facebook page, where the comment section was enabled.

When RNZ was approached for comment, the post had been visible for over an hour and had received five ‘likes’ during that time.

Such acts fall under New Zealand’s Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, which is designed to address the impact of online abuse and threats. Under this law, making a harmful or threatening comment online, such as inciting violence, can lead to prosecution.

In a statement sent to chrislynchmedia.com, RNZ Principal Communications Advisor Kim Grade said, “Our comments are generally post-moderated which means the majority are not checked or edited by us before they appear on the site and consequently while we have a team that monitors posts, we place the onus on commenters to be mature, considered, caring and reasonable in what they write.”

Grade said, “We also encourage our audience to alert us to poor behaviour and reserve the right to remove any content and any user accounts for any reason at any time.”

“In this instance, the posts were removed as soon as you alerted us, a commenter has been banned and we have turned off comments on the particular post. We have also referred one of the comments to police,” Grade said.

“We do not tolerate harmful communications and believe neither our staff nor members of our audience should have to put up with abuse. As part of the policy we do proactively turn comments off on posts that may attract abusive comments or when we do not have the resources to monitor posts.”

RNZ has a harmful communications page it urged people to read.

The company was also asked to comment on why its comment section on a recent story relating to former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern was disabled, but comments were enabled for stories relating to Christopher Luxon. RNZ did not address this question directly, but referred to its previous statement.

Chris Lynch Media also has a ‘rules for engagement page’ for Facebook followers.