Mob Rule
Ah, Twitter. That bite-sized break from ennui, that stream of consciousness, that tool of social mobilisation… but mobilisation to what?
Twitter has played an important part in the democratisation of politics – witness the Tweets of solidarity from Iran and the recent downfall of the Carter Ruck’s Trafigura injunction against The Guardian (which was also in no small part caused by The Third Estate and others).
Twitter has been hugely effective as a mass campaigning tool for organisations such as Climate Camp, Avaaz and Greenpeace. It gets petitions signed and it publicises worthy causes more quickly than ever before. There’s no doubt it’s a great tool for quickly disseminating information.
I enjoy Twitter. As a journalist, I sometimes get leads from Twitter. It has been mostly beneficial to my life. It could also be my downfall. At the risk of sounding like a total Luddite, Twitter has great potential for evil…
The great thing about Twitter is that it’s so ‘in the moment’ – this makes it both hugely entertaining and refreshingly un-spun. However, who hasn’t said things ‘in the moment’ that they have later regretted? Twitter could prove to be the ultimate tool for large-scale Chinese whispers. For Crucible-style mass hysteria and mob rule.
Labour’s newly crowned “Twitter tsar”, MP Kerry McCarthy, has already warned MP’s that what they say in haste can come back to haunt them. David Cameron has warned against the dangers of spouting rubbish in his own inimitable way (and if anyone should know…). The difference between Twitter and journalism of the kind that you get in a blog like this one or in a broadsheet newspaper is that it is generally considered commentary.
The mobilisation of the forces of Liberal anger against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir is a warning sign. Personally, I believe Jan Moir’s article about the death of the Boyzone singer Stephen Gately was guilty of being both homophobic and incredibly insensitive. However, most of what the Daily Mail publishes is similarly offensive to me. So I don’t buy it and I don’t read it.
I did read Jan Moir’s article, I wonder how many of those who followed those links on Twitter direct to the PCC did the same? I wonder how many people read about the article on Twitter and made up their mind to complain without having seen what they were complaining about? It’s surprisingly easy to get worked up and carried away by being offended…
Seven years ago I had the pleasure of working in an extremely minor capacity on the early stages of Jerry Springer the Opera. The hate campaign that was swiftly mobilised against the production when it was later aired on the BBC was staggering. Nothing has the ability to offend people quite like comedy. What was interesting about the orchestrated mass complaints was that a very small minority of those complaining had actually seen the show. They had only heard about it. The information was disseminated with amazing effectiveness by the Christian Voice organisation (the scourge of comedians) and, thus ‘informed’ their members complained.
It’s insulting to say that because the average demographic of Twitter is young, urban and well educated this could not happen. You yourself are likely to fit all of these categories (or, like me, at least the ‘urban’ one) – how often have you allowed yourself to get all worked up about something without knowing all the facts? Now be honest. With Twitter, as in life, sometimes we should stop, count to ten and think before we pass things on.
Reader Comments
Web Traffic went up 21% to the article in question so that knocks out the ‘didn’t read it’ fallacy.
Unlike the opera/Ross/brand which you had to listen to/see at a theatre, that article was online for all to see.
Have you tried making a PCC complaint? You have to fill in quite a complex form and say what it is and why you are complaining, giving details and explanations.
The PCC said that they found most of the letters to be individually written, not templates.
This was not the same as the Mail’s orchestrated SDachsgate campaign, where fewer than 10 listeners complained and then 38,000 did after the fact, whipped up by the Mail. the pseed and fury, the breadth of the demographic and the use of social media sites liek facebook and twitter – which many peopel are on all the time during the working day – meant that this was viral, not orchestrated, and driven purely by reaction to a piece that the audience had read, and couldn’t believe they were reading.
apols for typos, written in haste, at work
I don’t normally comment on my own articles and this is not going to set a precedent
… but here goes… in response to Rachel:
1. I didn’t say no-one read it. But I’m pretty sure there’s a proportion who didn’t. A 21 per cent increase in readership of the article doesn’t knock that out – how do we know that those 21 per cent who read the article were the same people that went on to complain?
2. Yes I have submitted a PCC complaint. You could easily copy and paste something from a blog or twitter feed and not the original article.
3. I appreciate it’s not the same as Sachsgate and thus I didn’t compare the two. What I am saying is that Twitter is setting a precedent for Liberal mass-complaint – by the same Liberals (I include myself in that demographic) who complain about mob rule by Daily Mail readers.
4. I’d be interested to know what you consider the difference to be between ‘orchestrated’ and ‘viral’. Is ‘viral’ less dangerous because it’s more detached from the people from whom it originates?
Sorry for the formal and facetious ‘bullet’ point style response. It’s a nasty habit…
I think Rachel’s right that a large number of people complaining about the same thing doesn’t necessarily amount to mob rule. If the PCC complaints about Moir’s article were mostly written by people who read the article (as Rachel’s evidence implies but doesn’t prove), then to me it doesn’t seem very fair to describe it as mob rule. That’s not to say there weren’t some unpleasant elements to the campaign – I read rumours that someone had posted Moir’s home address online, for instance, though I’ve no idea if the rumours were true – but I don’t think that close an analogy can be drawn between this case and the campaigns whipped up by the Mail and Christian Voice.
With regards to Sachsgate, there was definitely a kind of herd mentality. Hardly anyone really cared at the time, but as soon as the press created a bandwagon people jumped on it and became retrospectively offended. The whole thing was ridiculous. With the case of Moir, I don’t think it amounts to mob rule, but Liz does make a key point in that what Moir wrote was actually fairly tame compared to the paper’s daiy content. That’s not to say that people jumped on a bandwagon. I think a lot of people were genuinely offended when they saw such an obviously innocent and well-liked victim becoming the target of an incensitive posthumous homophobic attack. What people need to do, however, is extend their sympathy to the other powerless targets of the Mail’s campaigns.
To be honest I think that the mass complaints were a most dissapointing culmination to what was otherwise a genuine excersize in popular power. The battle had already been won in the virtual streets and moir had been comprehensively pwned in the court of publc opinion – which after all is what fundamentally matters, given the current juncture at which the struggle for gay lib is situated. Why people then felt the need to go snivelling to a bunch of bureaucrats, asking them to step in on their behalf, and to validate their right to be offended, I do not know. Campaigning>complaining.
I think, in this case, the two complimented each other quite well. I think there is a case to be made for making press complaints. Broadcast news in this country would never be able to get away with the kind of crap and outright lies peddled by the right-wing tabloids, so they have to be held accountable. This is a separate issue to the struggle for gay rights, but the two overlap, and I think your characterisation of people snivelling to a bunch of bureaucrats is wholly unfair in this instance. Moreover, using the word pwned whilst trying to formulate an otherwise erudite argument means you lose several hit points.
I’m with Rachel here. Also, I’ve always doubted the idea that you have to have watched or read, or be *fully* conversant with something to criticise it. A fact of life in “information-rich” communities, is that we *do* rely on authorities as the epistemic basis for our original positions. These authorities may be as unspecialised as ‘following the herd’ (as often happens on the stock market, for example), to those as specialised as scientific consensus. With how much information we are bombarded with on a daily basis, it is simply unfeasible for people to do a full critique of everything they might ever complain about, before committing to a position. By that argument, most people who campaign about climate change ought to be stuck in school for several years before ever getting a placard out. Now I’m not suggesting we make uninformed complaints. Instead, I think you can have a minimal, but accurate, impression of an issue, and then complain or criticise on that basis.
In any case, that’s irrelevant in the Gately issue. A distinction can be made between issues that require factual knowledge to make a useful complaint or criticism, and issues that appeal to personal sensibilities, for which factual knowledge is often unneeded (and unlikely to be sought!). You would need very minimal information to decide that you found comments like that, offensive. Yet I think one of the goods of public debate is that when an issue raises wide and spontaneous criticism, public debate may draw out inaccuracies, allowing people to realign their initial knee-jerk position on those hot issues, as they acquire more information.