“The trouble with
Twitter, the instantness of it - too many twits might make a twat," said
David Cameron, a year before becoming Prime Minister, while being interviewed
by Christian O’Connell on Absolute Radio – he has since tweeted over 2,500
times.
Five months
earlier, on 3rd February 2009, Twitter entered the consciousness of
most British people when Stephen Fry posted a message from a building at the
end of London’s Oxford Street: “Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on
the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for
hours. Arse, poo and widdle.” Fry has since quit and rejoined Twitter a few
times, including on one occasion, again in 2009, when he said there was “too
much aggression and unkindness around.”
In 2017, Twitter
is known as the social media website where there is not enough space to express
yourself. Facebook has built its reputation as the greater data aggregator,
providing acres of space through its main site, then Messenger, Instagram and
so on, to give two billion people all the space they need to display their
lives, make connections with others, and pour their souls straight into
Facebook’s servers.
Meanwhile,
Twitter may let you add a picture or a video, but the site’s origin as a way of
sending SMS-like messages to small groups, and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s
definition of the word “twitter” as “a short burst of inconsequential
information,” show that public perception, and use, of the site has outstripped
the site’s intentions. The ability to broadcast your thoughts is too compulsive
for some, and the free, easy cyberspace setting makes real-life consequences
feel, well, inconsequential.
How do I fit in
to all this? I mainly use Twitter, and Facebook – I really cannot be bothered
with any of the other sites right now – to signal I have written something new,
or to highlight something interesting. However, I have felt the need to
repudiate things a few people have said, once I realised I had the same means
they did. I have only done this with the tweets of three people, but they are
people that give the impression they could not be bothered by anything anyone
said.
The people are
Donald Trump, with his self-styled “modern-day presidential” attitude on social
media that would get any other person fired from their job, requiring both
defense and explanation from White House
Staff; Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor who writes a column for the
Daily Mail Online when not pontificating and raising his voice at people on
breakfast television; and Katie Hopkins,
a contestant on the reality TV show “The
Apprentice,” noted for her hardline
views there, which has also been turned into a career as a hardline newspaper columnist,
insisting it is the Left that made her, like a Frankenstein’s monster. These
are all very forthright people, where I wouldn’t want to agree with them, even
if I did, because of the way they force their opinion on people.
The responses I
have made on Twitter have been when I could see someone was only talking from
their own point of view. Humour had to be central – I am not trying to incite
conflict of any sort – and if I made a point at the same time, that is fine. I
like that one person described my tweets as “sassy,” because, at last, I now
have proof. Basically, all you need to do is remember that, just because someone
feels they can say what they like, they will become answerable in one way or
another, as Katie Hopkins would know, having lost a court case over libelling
the cook and blogger Jack Monroe – just because it is social media doesn’t mean
it doesn’t count.
I’m not yet
saying we should “drain the swamp” of annoying people from Twitter, but they
shouldn’t have to be completely comfortable in saying whatever they like –
there have to be consequences. We should have a backup plan - we could all
migrate back to MySpace instead. No, I didn’t know it was still going either.
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