Twitter has hit the headlines twice this week, and the collective power of Twitter uses has delivered decisive smackdowns to two very different forces of evil.
The first was delivered to sleazy oil company Trafigura, accused of the illegal fly-tipping of toxic waste in The Ivory Coast, suspected of causing more than a dozen deaths and making tens of thousands ill, then spending vast sums on expensive lawyers to try and cover the whole thing up. What bought matters to a head was when their bullying lawyers got an injunction preventing The Guardian from reporting on questions being asked in The House of Commons about the matter. This alarming comment appeared on The Guardian’s website.
“The commons order paper contained a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found”.
Since the commons order paper was available online on the official Parliament website, it didn’t take long for a few bloggers work out what this question was. Then it started spreading across Twitter. By Tuesday morning, “Trafigura” was the top trending topic, and far more people knew about the true nature of this rather unpleasant company that would ever have do so had their lawyers not tried to gag the press. The term for this is “Epic Fail”
If the first Twitter storm was about freedom of the press, the next one was about responsibility of the press. On Friday, a toxic little squit of a Daily Mail journalist wrote an disgustingly bigotted article about the death of Boyzone singer Steven Gately, on the eve of his funeral. Within hours, Twitter went nuclear again. “Jan Moir” and “Daily Mail” became top trending topics. Major advertisers including Marks and Spencer started withdrawing advertising from The Daily Mail in response.
A few hours later the hack gave a mealy-mouthed non-apology which claimed she’d been subject to an orchestrated campaign, and that her vile article “was not intended to cause offence”. This stupid woman was clearly so wrapped up in her little Daily Mail bigot-bubble that it didn’t occur to her than this was a spontaneous reaction by tens of thousands of ordinary people who were simply disgusted at what they read.
While we’ve seen two examples in the past week of the collective power of Twitter users for good, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the same thing gets used for evil.
By the way, I’m Kalyr on Twitter. You can probably find a few of my contributions to both of those smackdowns.
Oh, it’s already being used for evil, like for harassment and stalking, but that’s any social networking/communications medium for you. But look for governments to increasingly (if futilely) attempt to restrain bloggers, Tweeters, etc. They’re already passing laws in the U.S. to explicitly exempt bloggers and other online journalists from the same legal protections that “regular” journalists enjoy.
As for “not intended to cause offense,” that’s the boilerplate response now whenever someone is publicly shamed for offensive behavior. We’ve had two really, unambiguously blatant racist incidents in the U.S. in the past couple of weeks, and in both cases, the perpetrator insisted he was not a racist and did not mean to cause offense. (Apparently, there is a non-racist, inoffensive way to call President Obama a n****r…)
Hi Amadán! No heard from you for ages!
I’m of the opinion that anyone who denies that they’re a racist is a racist. Obama’s election has certainly exposed the ugly side of the American right.
“I’m of the opinion that anyone who denies that they’re a racist is a racist. ”
OK then. Tim, are you a racist?
You know what I mean.
I don’t go round denying being a racist because nobody accuses me of being one in the first place except as a purely rhetorical device.
This is not true of the characters Amadan was describing.
Nick Griffin claims he’s not a racist. Who does he think he’s kidding?
First off I’m not on twitter as I simply don’t have time to be online the way I used to.
Second, I applaud the way Twitter was used in these two ways.
Third, I don’t know the full and correct list of adjectives for Nick Griffin, but he really ought to play a few games of “Britannia” before spouting off on who counts as British and who doesn’t. Is he going to send home the Normans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Scots (who are actually Irish) and the rest of them? What would he do about the Romano-British who are only half-breed Roman and Native? And as for the Celts, well I’m told they started in Northern India and were driven West until they hit the Atlantic.