Are we getting Twittered away?

By Luke Bozier / @Luke_Bozier

There were a few big stories on Twitter last week. First, a long-running saga involving a major international mineral trading company, which is accused of dumping toxic waste in various African locations, reached Twitter prime time when the company’s UK solicitors took out an injunction against the Guardian, attempting to stop the media from covering a question put forward by a Member of Parliament regarding the accusations against their client.

Then, on Friday, the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir was one of the top “trending topics” on Twitter, after writing a caustic article about Steven Gateley’s death and her opinions on the modern celebrity culture.

Saturday’s Twitter hype surrounded the favourite biscuit of the British Prime Minister, after @DowningStreet revealed that his preferred sweet nibble is in fact “absolutely anything with a bit of chocolate on it”.

One cannot deny the positive potential that the Twitter platform holds: it brings together thousands of people who can mobilise and bring attention to an issue in a fairly short period of time. Many journalists use the network, and they can use it to test the water on a story or to find out what people are passionate about on a certain day. This works well in the political sphere, where the media is always searching for the next story, and where the news cycle is already so short.

The Trafigura case last week took it a step further by stamping out the efforts of a powerful company and their powerful solicitors to stop a Parliamentary question from being debated in the nation. Ironically if they hadn’t tried to gag the media, the issue would have gone away – indeed the Twittersphere’s moral radar didn’t pick up on the Trafigura story until the injunction, even though Newsnight and various media outlets have been covering it for months.

Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats (@nick_clegg / @libdems) was the first major politician to condemn the gagging attempt on Twitter, saying:

“Very concerned about this #trafigura / Guardian story. The @LibDems are planning to take action on this.”

This resulted in Twitter demands for urgent statements from the other two major parties, all just less than a few hours after the initial story emerged, before anybody from the Government or Opposition had half a chance to consider the facts and produce a reasoned statement. And actually, 140 characters will never be enough space to publish a nuanced, balanced political statement on any issue, let alone a complicated full of legal complexities.

Last week’s PMQs, the regular Wednesday highlight of the political week, was the first of the new Parliamentary term after the long summer recess. The mood was sombre after Gordon Brown read aloud the names of the 37 soldiers killed in action since Parliament rose for recess in July. As the camera panned around the chamber during the thirty-minute session, many MPs were seen fiddling with mobile phones, Blackberries or other smart phones as the Prime Minister answered questions. Many MPs provide a personal running commentary of PMQs via Twitter, rather than listening to the debate ensuing in the chamber.

Some people think this is healthy for democracy – Tweetminster (@tweetminster) boasted at the end of the session that “there were 94 tweets from MPs during PMQs (compared to the 66 from the previous session)”.

But do the voters who put these MPs where they are really want their representatives playing with their phones and tweeting when instead they could be listening to the debate and representing their views? The vast majority of the UK electorate isn’t even on Twitter, so the running commentary of the tweeting MPs in the chamber can really only serve the small audience that exists inside the Westminster village.

The political world, and specifically the people around the Labour Government, have long complained of the damage done by the 24-hour news cycle created by rolling news channels. The culture which encourages, or forces, journalists to constantly search for the next story – or the next embarrassment to the Prime Minister – means that the most insignificant stories, innuendoes and rumours are turned into major stories in the mainstream press and television news. As Tony Blair put it shortly before he left office, the media “In these modes [sic] is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits, but no-one dares miss out”. So are we risking taking our political debate to an even lower level, by constantly feeding and encouraging the Twitter pack that has emerged this year?

If the Twittersphere demands a political statement on every issue, and then judges the politicians who don’t react fast enough for Twitter’s standards, what does that do to a political environment which already must bend over backwards to satisfy the rapidly-moving feral beast that the mainstream media has become? What happens when the Twittersphere makes the wrong judgement, en masse, on an issue without carefully considering the matter at hand? Surely this has the potential to cause damage and needlessly destroy political reputations.

Don’t get me wrong: I have long been a proponent of more online engagement by those in power. In his last months in office, I was in a position to make Tony Blair more accessible to the electorate through platforms such as YouTube, where people had opportunities to ask questions and get answers. For years, we in the Labour party have made our ministers accessible to the public via live question & answer sessions on the web.

I do think Twitter has its place in all of this, but it certainly isn’t a panacea, and it won’t in the long-term go as far as some people think to improve relations between politics and the wider electorate. Our politicians should be careful not to spend too much of their time, which is precious and comes with democratic mandate and responsibilities, worrying about what the Twittersphere thinks.

Because at the moment, all that sphere adds up to is a large group of people who are already politically engaged, already likely to have voting intentions made up, already consume a great deal of media, and therefore don’t warrant special attention from those elected to represent everybody, not just the political elite.