An online petition telling the anti-mandate protesters in Wellington to go home has surpassed 122,000 signatures.
It's been two weeks since the protesters began gathering at Parliament to show their opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
In the time since then, thousands have set up tents in the area around Parliament. They've also planted gardens, put up their own road signs, and turned a war memorial into a makeshift shower and toilet.
Locals have reported being spat on, having their masks ripped off, and even assaulted if they've been in the same area as the protesters.
The Change.org petition says New Zealand is witnessing a "takeover of democracy" similar to the Capitol riots in the United States last year.
"[They are] a disparate group of conspiracy theorists, religious cult members, anti-vaxxers, anti-mandate believers and flat earthers," the petition says.
James Black - which isn't his real name - says he started the petition in the hopes to show protesters that they don't represent the majority of Kiwis.
"The goal really is to illustrate to the people protesting and the people that support those protesters that they don't have the mandate of the New Zealand public to do what they're doing and they should just simply go home," he told The Project.
"I support the right to protest. It's not about not protesting, but the protest is finished now, right now it's an occupation and right now it's dangerous."
This isn't the only thing online that people can use to express their dislike of the protest; Wellington Matthew Tukaki, who is the chair of the Māori Council, has started #EndTheProtest on Twitter.
Tukaki had abuse hurled at him from a group of protesters as he was walking to get lunch.
"It was pretty intimidating. Then they started moving towards me and if it hadn't been for the police stepping in, it could've been a completely different result," he told The Project.
He says he's had over 8400 messages from people, and from the dozen or so that he's opened, they were "pretty brutal" to read.
Tukaki says he started the hashtag after seeing what protesters were doing to the war memorial cenotaph.
"Who knew that it was going to end up trending on Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or any other of these mediums," he says.
"But that tells me that for the thousands and thousands of shares that have been going on, people genuinely out there wanted something simple and safe that they could do that they could have an outlet to have their voices heard."
Police arrested eight protesters on Monday morning during a standoff as officers blocked off streets in Wellington. At one point, human waste was thrown on police.
