Twitter

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Who on earth does Margaret Hodge think she is?

From our UK edition

Most people, when they hear the word populist, will think of Marine Le Pen going mad about Muslim immigrants or a Ukipper saying he wouldn't want an Albanian living next door. But yesterday we witnessed a different kind of populism: the deceptively right-on variety, which aims its black-and-white moralistic fury not at cash-starved people at the bottom of society, but at wealthy individuals at the top. The purveyor of populism this time was Margaret Hodge, panto queen of the Public Accounts Committee, her target was some HSBC suits, and it made for an unedifying spectacle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdu-ueG78o Hodge has in recent years become Parliament's poundshop Robespierre, a one-woman mopper-up of moral rot in the establishment, the purifier of the political realm.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: How to save the Union; who cares for Paolozzi’s murals

From our UK edition

A disaster for unionists Sir: I share Alex Massie’s view that ‘this election is going to be a disaster’ for us unionists (‘Divided we fall’, 28 February). It is almost too painful to recall that it will mark the 60th anniversary of a great victory in May 1955 when the Tories, standing as Scottish Unionists, won more seats north of the border than their opponents and helped give Anthony Eden a secure majority. Under the baleful influence of George Osborne, who could not care less about the constitution, there seems little chance that the Tories will redeem themselves by proposing the one remaining policy that could save the Union: a new constitutional settlement for the UK based on the federal model.

Monday

Lara Prendergast

If Isis doesn’t like Twitter, it should invest in its own tech companies

From our UK edition

Isis has a new bête noir: Twitter. Employees at the social media company have received death threats, as has Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. Why? Because the site has been blocking accounts linked to the group. In retaliation, Isis members posted an image on the website JustPaste.it which warned that Dorsey and co had 'Become a target for the soldiers of the Caliphate and supporters scattered among your midst!’ The message reads: ‘You started this failed war … We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn’t get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back. But when our lions come and take your breath, you will never come back to life.'   Punchy stuff.

Thursday

Alex Krasodomski

Monitoring social media is easier said than done

From our UK edition

The three British girls who packed their bags and took a flight to Turkey have apparently crossed the border into Syria. Their intention seems to be to join the Islamic State and it looks like they may have succeeded. It emerged over the weekend that there had been contact between one of the girls and Aqsa Mahmood, a Scottish woman who travelled to Syria herself. Initially communicating through Twitter, it appears Mahmood played a role in their journey to Turkey and now into the heart of the conflict in Syria. Criticism turned on the security services: according to Aamer Anwar, the lawyer for the family of Aqsa Mahmood, they are not even doing the ‘basics’ to prevent this kind of migration.

Mary Wakefield

How do bright schoolgirls fall for jihadis? The same way they fall for Justin Bieber

From our UK edition

How could they? How could girls brought up in the wealthy West abandon their families and their own bright futures to join Isis, a gang of vicious thugs? It’s not just our girls, either, they’re sneaking off to Syria from across Europe and America too, teenagers, bright ones typically, set on becoming sex slaves in a war zone. London’s latest runaways — Shamima, Amira, Kadiza — were pupils at Bethnal Green Academy and the headmaster there, a Mr Keary, echoed most people’s reaction when he shook his head and said: ‘I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense.’ But Mr Keary’s wrong, most people are wrong. It does make sense. Let your outrage subside and it’s pitifully easy to see what draws these idiots to Islamism.

Wednesday

Alex Krasodomski

Twitter has become a barometer for the political issues of the day

From our UK edition

Twitter has never been friendly to British politicians. From MPs’ gaffes that spread across the platform like wildfire to the incessant trolling, it can't make good bedtime reading for anyone on the front benches. Most MPs would probably dismiss most of what they read on Twitter as either stupid or horrible. But as we approach the General Election, the volume of chatter is starting to get louder. Increasing numbers of people are turning to Twitter to have their say in the run up to May 2015. Much of it is neither stupid nor horrible. In work being done by the Centre for Social Media Analysis (CASM) for the Sunday Times, we have begun to analyse the million or so tweets sent to MPs and PPCs over the last three weeks.

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Identity politics has created an army of vicious, narcissistic cowards

From our UK edition

Has there ever been a more petulant mob of moaners than that which is currently hurling abuse at Peter Tatchell? On Twitter, which is where these people live, self-styled queers and gender-benders are insulting and even threatening to kill Tatchell, the man whose risk-taking and street-fighting over 40-odd years helped to secure their liberation, to create a society in which they could live and speak freely. And how do they repay him? By tweeting their fantasises about him being murdered for being a 'fucking parasite'. Tatchell’s crime in the eyes of the PC thought police was to have signed a letter in the Observer calling for greater free speech in universities.

Tuesday

Alex Krasodomski

A tip for MPs on Twitter: know the difference between social and broadcast media

From our UK edition

Entering ‘Politicians are…’ into the Google search bar brings predictable results. Well, mostly. In amongst ‘liars’, ‘scum’ and ‘all the same’, Google suggests ‘lizards’: David Icke’s reptilian illuminati are still in the spotlight. Number five on the list is predictable: politicians are ‘out of touch’. Minding the gap has been central to British politics for years. Politicians, the line goes, are out of touch with reality, and, to make things worse, spend their whole time in Westminster, only visiting their constituencies to try to hang onto the seat. Yet some canny MPs are beginning to change this impression. This is the first general election where social media will be truly pervasive.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Ha! vs Hahaha: the surprisingly subtle world of Twitter style

From our UK edition

I don’t know if you tweet — No! Don’t turn over, I’m not going to get all techie. I do not tweet, but my husband does, voluminously. I won’t betray his rather strange handle and avatar. Those are technical terms, but they are not the main point I want to make now. The handle is the username, such as @DotWordsworth. That example is not me, but one of the four Twitter accounts apparently written by Dorothy Wordsworth. The one using my name declares in her online profile ‘My bowels very bad.’ Have I ever written that here? No. The avatar is the little picture of the user that appears at the top of each account and with every tweet. Everyone knows an avatar derives from Hindu mythology.

Thursday

Andrew Watts

Send in the clowns – how comedy ate British politics

From our UK edition

Something funny is happening in this country. Our comedians are becoming politicians and our politicians are becoming comedians — and public life is turning into an endless stream of jokes. Last week, the comedian Al Murray announced that he would be standing at the next general election in the constituency of South Thanet, the same seat that Nigel Farage is contesting. Al Murray performs in the persona of ‘The Pub Landlord’. A sexist reactionary, never pictured without a beer in his hand, forever declaiming ‘common-sense’ solutions to Britain’s problems, Nigel Farage has welcomed the additional competition.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Ched Evans: law vs people power

From our UK edition

‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is no law among them, to men he gave law, which is by far the best thing’ (the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, 7th century bc). Given the hostile reaction to the convicted rapist Ched Evans’s desire to return to his job as a footballer after serving his sentence, one wonders whether the fish, beasts and birds might not be on to something. The 4th century bc statesman and orator Demosthenes pursued Hesiod’s line of thought when he said, ‘If laws are abolished and each individual is given powers to do what he likes, not only does our communal organisation vanish but our very life would be in no way different from that of animals.

James Walton

Channel 4’s Cyberbully: an unashamedly old-fashioned drama in being both well made and moral

From our UK edition

Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even if the average middle-aged viewer might have found the early scenes as baffling as Finnegans Wake. Teenage Casey Jacobs (Maisie Williams) was alone in her bedroom, although not in the way we used to be: with an LP playing and the latest NME to hand. Instead, she was skyping her friend Megan (‘Hey, bitch,’ they greeted each other cheerfully), while also tweeting, texting, instagramming and wondering who’d hacked into her Spotify playlist and replaced all the good stuff with dreary old Led Zeppelin. But then she saw a tweet from her ex-boyfriend Nathan: ‘I’m not surprised Casey Jacobs is on anti-depressants.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Some horrors are too much for Twitter. Today’s attack in Paris is one

From our UK edition

I’m not one of those purists who shun Twitter. I often find it depressingly vacuous - but hey, I'm a journalist and a tart. So I tweet. From now on, though, I'll avoid it in the hours following a terrorist attack. Facebook, too. Just look at what is now flooding the Internet, following the attack in Paris today. There is a tsunami of emoting and hashtaging about solidarity, free speech, not giving into intimidation. Everybody is saying that we must respond to this event, as if somehow it were up to them. Everybody reaches for the grand ringing truism -- 'Fear is the ally of the bully. #dontgivein'. That sort of thing .  There is something unseemly about this mass urge to express ourselves so in the immediate aftermath of a public murder.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Ukip MPs infiltrate Conservative HQ’s Twitter feed

From our UK edition

If social media is going to play a deciding role in the general election, the brains at Conservative HQ ought to take a closer look at who they promote on their Twitter account. The official Conservative Twitter feed has a Tweetminster list of Tory MPs on it which allows their 131,000 followers to catch up with the ramblings of all of their MPs at once. However, a quick inspection of the Tweetsminster list shows that Ukip defectors Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless remain on it despite abandoning the party: This means the Tory Twitter account is letting Ukip reach their audience, as these tweets show...   If the Conservatives plan to unsubscribe from the list, they may want to reconsider this image while they're at it.

Thursday

James Delingpole

What techies are actually doing when they fix your computer

From our UK edition

Just before Christmas I achieved something so totally, incredibly amazing that I think it probably ranks among the greatest things I have ever done. In terms of danger, raw physical courage and menace overcome, it was at least on a par with cage-diving with great white sharks or taking on the ‘Breastapo’ the other week over that incident in Claridge’s. As far as personal satisfaction goes, it felt like getting into Oxford, teaching my children to read, bagging a Macnab and climbing Everest blindfold on the same weekend. What I did was this: there was a problem on my computer — and I fixed it. All by myself! When I took to Twitter to broadcast the fantastic news it didn’t go quite as viral as I’d hoped.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: the barbarism of the Twitter mob

From our UK edition

Are we heading for a new barbarism? Is this the return of the 18th-century mob? Here are more questions than answers. I ask because when all the fuss about Emily Thornberry and her photo tweet from Rochester has died down, we shall be left with something more disturbing than whatever sin she may or may not have committed. We’ve just seen demonstrated the speed, the destructiveness, the sheer violence of the modern tempest that information technology can create. In the world of opinion, climate change has arrived already. As a workaday columnist, I reflect that I could equally easily write a spirited defence of Ms Thornberry; or a spirited attack; or I could attack Ed Miliband for publicly laying into her; or for privately agreeing with her.

Kate Chisholm

Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?

From our UK edition

She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of the wireless, long before Billy Graham and co. But who now has heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, the radio evangelist? Born in 1890 and raised on a farm in Canada, she was converted as a teenager by a Pentecostal preacher whom she married and joined on his missionary travels. When he died she took up preaching herself, moving to Hollywood and becoming enormously popular as a great healer of the sick and saviour of souls, dressed up for the part in a long white figure-hugging gown adorned with a huge glittering cross. Naomi Grimley told her story for the World Service’s The Documentary.

Martin Vander Weyer

Forget corporate social responsibility: just do a proper job

From our UK edition

A theme of this autumn has been conversations about corporate reputation and how it is guarded or lost. To name but three, I have kicked this around at a ‘Trust Forum’ sponsored by the lawyers DLA Piper at Oxford’s Said Business School, at a lunch hosted by the wealth managers McInroy & Wood, and in an interview with Lord (Stuart) Rose, former Marks & Spencer chief, at last week’s York Business Conference. The essence is that most big companies feel their reputations are increasingly fragile, and that public trust is now routinely and unfairly denied to them. Non-banks blame banks for letting the side down. All companies blame the media for failing to report good news, and social media for spreading false or subversive rumours.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Who used Rachel Johnson’s Twitter account to post a rude message about the PM?

From our UK edition

'Apologies everyone and especially to our Leader' tweets Rachel Johnson after a very rude word appeared on her Twitter feed about the Prime Minister: Apparently the columnist and famous sibling was 'hacked'. Mr S knows how these things are: you go out of the room for five minutes and bam! your naughty sibling has seized your computer and written all sorts of cuss words under your name about some chap he doesn't like... https://twitter.com/RachelSJohnson/status/537283459895816192 https://twitter.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

We’re all sulky toddlers now – even when launching space probes

From our UK edition

I wonder how long it will be before we actually crawl back into the womb? The average mental age of our population stands at about four. A decade or so back it was surely higher — maybe six or seven, I would guess. But we have regressed with great rapidity, as if we were characters in a Philip K. Dick short story, hurtling backwards towards zero. One day soon we will have a national nappy shortage. My wife made me watch part of a programme called The X Factor last Sunday. She said she wanted to watch this egregious shit because she was ‘tired’ and ‘there’s nothing else on’. I’m 90 per cent certain there was football on some channel somewhere, but I didn’t press the point.