A National Party spokesperson confirmed over the weekend that Simon Bridges had been diagnosed with a chronic lack of social media clout. As no-one from the National Party was willing to confirm this as being the situation, he has been treated as a probable case. His most recent post (criticizing the government’s pandemic response) has been in a deteriorating state since last Monday, with trained social media teams monitoring the situation and describing the growth in angry reacts as ‘exponential’.
“There was nothing we could do to save it,” described Bridges’ chief social media representative Manny del Gato. “We proposed having Bridges’ post in ‘block topics’, where every two weeks he’d focus on a specific topic, but we made the mistake of announcing that on April Fools, so people thought it was a joke and we just went with it.”
In response to the recent flurry of negative responses to his boss’ posts, del Gato has opted to implement an alert level system responsive to Bridges’ social media activity. If the situation reaches Alert Level 4, Bridges gets an emergency alert telling him to step away from his phone and Amy Adams is deployed to retrieve Bridges’ personal devices. At Alert Level 3, Judith Collins claims it’s just the same thing but with KFC. “Never have we taken such drastic measures in our party’s history,” admits del Gato. “But they are necessary at such a time.”
In a leaked recording from Jamie-Lee Ross over the weekend, Bridges had been reportedly flouting the rules by Zoom conferencing Clarke Gayford about Jacinda Ardern’s social media popularity. The National Party spokesperson assures that this quickly ended, as it turned out there had been a significant error in communication on both sides when Bridges asked for tips on ‘reeling in followers’. When asked how Ross obtained the Zoom recording, he responded “Zoom? You’re telling me I haven’t been using Omegle this whole time? Is that why people keep asking me to leave?”
While we can confirm none of us reached out to him for comment, David Seymour still insisted on providing his opinion. “He should do Dancing with the Stars,” said Seymour, to himself, because we didn’t send a reporter to ask for his opinion.
The Labour Party have expressed concern on how these restrictions on Bridges’ posting might negatively impact their polling statistics.