Prominent petition site Change.org has denied bots were behind the surge of more than 20,000 signatures within a half-hour span in a petition of support for former education minister Maszlee Malik.

“We believe the integrity of petitions on Change.org is vitally important and we devote significant resources towards verifying the authenticity of our users’ email addresses and ensuring genuine signatures appear on petitions.

“After a review of the petition you reference (referred), we are confident that all of the signatures are genuine,” Change.org told Malaysiakini in an email reply.

Maszlee announced his resignation from the cabinet on Jan 2, which he later confirmed to be at the behest of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The online petition was started shortly after that, urging support for Maszlee, who is also Bersatu’s Simpang Renggam MP, to retain his ministerial post.

As at 8.30pm that night, it was observed that there were 78,000 signatories. However, this jumped to more than 100,000 within just half an hour.

This led Malaysiakini to contact the site to verify if the signatories were real or manufactured.

Although Mahathir has since confirmed that a new minister would be appointed in the near future, the petition continues to grow. As at the time of writing today, it had garnered 402,012 signatures.

The petition, started by Tuah Kencana and directed to the prime minister, states that Maszlee’s resignation was a huge blow to the country.

The petition also states that the former minister had achieved much during his short stint, including starting free school breakfasts, improvement for special needs education, better high-speed Internet at schools and improvements to the Tvet programme.

However, it says, these achievements were overshadowed by negative and sensationalised reports by "vested parties".

In announcing his resignation, Maszlee also blamed negative press reports and politicking, saying this view of his ministry was presented to the public, instead of its achievements.

Among the achievements he cited were the speedy completion of impoverished school projects, the zero-reject policy, schooling for undocumented children and tackling corruption within the ministry.

Yesterday, Mahathir said that although he had felt it was necessary for Maszlee to resign, not everything the latter did was wrong.