People who think Twitter - with or without Russians - decided the referendum need to get out more

There is an almighty panic afoot. It seems that a vast army of trolls in fur hats with snow on their boots are ruining our democracy by doing stuff on Twitter. Yes folks, it's the Russians - even the Prime Minister was moved to say how naughty they are albeit in a wonderfully sinister way ("we know what you're doing").

Some perspective is needed here because, while it may well be the case that Russian spies sat at computers in St Petersburg are bombarding Twitter with stuff, the impact on elections ranges from pretty much zero to really not very much at all.

According to Oleksandr Talavera at Swansea University there are 150,000 accounts with "links to Russia" that Tweeted about Brexit during the campaign. Talavera is at the upper end of the spectrum of guesses about these Russian bots most other researchers give much lower figures for accounts that can be clearly linked to the folk in St Petersburg - 419 from researchers in Edinburgh, 13,493 from London University and just 54 from Oxford University.

Taking the 419, this is what they were doing:

Professor Laura Cram, director of neuropolitics research at the University of Edinburgh, told the newspaper that at least 419 of those accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times – mostly after the referendum had taken place.

Commenting on the Brexit tweets, she told The Guardian the content overall was “quite chaotic and it seems to be aimed at wider disruption. There’s not an absolutely clear thrust. We pick up a lot on refugees and immigration”.

I'm pretty sure that the same will go for the bigger numbers. For a little context, however, we should note that there were literally millions of Tweets about the referendum - the LSE, for example, looked at 7.5 million in their analysis. Those Russian tweeters represent a drop in this ocean of Tweets. Let's remember also that there are about 10 million UK Twitter accounts (this matters because they're the ones with a vote) and let's also note that 17.4 million people voted to leave - rather more than have those Twitter accounts.

Even accepting that Russia did try to interfere in - disrupt, influence - the referendum (something that probably shouldn't surprise us), the evidence presented by researchers tells us that it really didn't make much difference at all, indeed it was swamped by a vast tide of Tweets from real people about Brexit. Indeed that LSE study showed just how Brexiteers were much more engaged and active:

There is clearly a pattern in the way the referendum campaign unfolded on Twitter, with those wanting to leave communicating in greater numbers and with greater intensity. Districts with a greater share of Twitter users supporting Leave also tended to vote for leaving the EU, so that Twitter activity correlates with voting in the referendum.

We also know from that LSE blog that the same goes for Facebook, Instagram and Google search - as a senior politician (and remain voter) said to me: "Brexit voters were going to crawl over broken glass so they could vote to leave". I've been involved in politics for 40 years and have never seen ordinary voters - the sort who often don't bother - so motivated to turn up and vote. Public meetings were a thing of history in British elections, yet we held a debate in Cullingworth and filled the hall with over 250 people, most of them planning to vote leave.

This latest conspiracy theory - hot on the heels of the "it was big data" nonsense - reminds us that many of those who voted to remain are still in denial as to what the campaign outcome was down to. These inconsolable remain voters simply can't countenance that their 'business as usual' message got both barrels from an electorate that frankly didn't think that 'business as usual' was doing them any good. The result has been firstly to shout about how it was all the stupid people who did it and it's not fair, then to blame the Daily Mail followed by lots of overhyped scare stories about 'hate crime'. We then got the conspiracies - it was shadowy American billionaires, it was manipulating 'big data' and now it's the Russians.

The truth is that two-and-a-half million mostly older and working class voters who don't usually vote or vote infrequently decided on this occasion to go down to the church hall or school and stick a big firm X in the box marked "Leave the European Union". There were a pile of reasons why they did this but the main one was that the EU is a distant, unaccountable, corrupt and undemocratic institution a very long way away filled with people who have absolutely no connection with or idea about what matters in Denholme or Wyke or Scarborough. It really had absolutely nothing at all to do with Twitter, the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or whatever stupid conspiracy sobbing remainers dream up and if you think otherwise you really should get out more.

....

On those referendum Twitter bots...

It was, of course, the Russians:

The researchers also analysed the type of content the suspected bots were producing, finding this pool of accounts were eight times more likely to tweet slogans associated with Vote Leave, and tweeted more than average accounts in the run-up to the referendum – then less afterwards, before their removal from the network entirely.

There were, these researchers tell us, 13,000 of this sinister bots burst onto the social media platform spraying relentless pro-leave sentiments. And these bots - or so the MP who chairs the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee thinks - have snow on their boots.

In other news, we're told that the reason for choosing to leave was because about 2.5m mostly older, primarily working class and regional people - many of who seldom vote - toddled down to their local primary school, church hall or library to put a cross in the leave box. Just the sort of voters who use Twitter a lot!

At some point the rump of disappointed remain voters will stop trying to find some sinister external force - Russians, American data companies, Facebook - that explains why we voted to leave and recognise that, in truth, we voted to leave because the EU is a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic institution. That's it - all of it. And if you ask people a slightly different question, they'll tell you that London is also a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic place too. One run by and for people with more connection to New York or Paris than Barnsley or Stoke. Perhaps those still angst-ridden by us leaving can begin to learn this?

.....

On the manufacture of fake news

I know others have commented on this but it's pretty important that we understand that fake news is not simply something manufactured by 20 year old Macedonians or Russian spies. Throughout our media stories are created based on the flimsiest of evidence. Or indeed on evidence that really doesn't exist at all.

Here, from that impeccable establishment media source, The Economist:

The report does not say what proportion of the 53,000 sample tweets related to Ms Cox’s murder, and what share concerned Brexit more generally. When The Economist asked the authors for help, they declined to share their data with us, citing death threats they said they had received since the report’s release. So we undertook our own analysis, examining tweets from June and July that included the terms “Jo Cox” or “#JoCox”—some 341,000 unique messages. Of a random sample of 800 of these, none was celebratory, and just four seemed to be derogatory toward Ms Cox, criticising her support for Syrian refugees, for instance. From this, simple statistics suggest that the true number of tweets cheering the politician’s murder would lie between 0 and 1,500. (The Hope Not Hate report reproduces about 30.) Mr Awan notes that our sample did not include tweets that mentioned only the killer, Mr Mair; it is also likely that some tweets were deleted before our collection.

Now, as the report notes, it's terrible if even one Tweet celebrates a murder but the thrust of media coverage - driven by the original Hope Not Hate press release of this shocking study - was that such activity was commonplace when it wasn't.

We see this pattern repeated by newspapers again and again with the thread of fake news creation often going back to a press release from a worthy organisation like a charity or campaign group. From sugary drinks and booze through to vaping and fracking the misuse of evidence, even the creation of evidence simply to generate a news story, is widespread. Journalists used to challenge and question the claims made by those issuing press releases but it seems today that there's either no time or no inclination to do that basic journalistic job of checking the facts before publishing.

....

You too can join the Twitter Stasi - sign up as a volunteer 'trollhunter'!

It was only yesterday I commented on James Higham's post about die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter - the 'volunteers' who acted as eyes and ear for East German state. As James reports:

Almost every apartment building in the DDR maintained a kind of superintendent (known as a “Hausbuchbeauftragter”) who kept notes on who visited whom and when. In total, this group included around 2.1 million people, and many of them were willing to share their information. The Volkspolizei also had around 173,000 “voluntary helpers.” In addition, school directors, heads of youth organizations belonging to the “Free German Youth” (FDJ), election helpers and factory heads were also part of the army of potential informants.

My observation was that we should guard against any moves to empowering people to act as voluntary behaviour police.

This morning I awake to the news that the Metropolitan Police and Home Office have launched what the papers are calling a "trollhunter squad" with the intention of responding to 'hate speech' in social media - all part of an 'Online Hate Crime Hub'. Now this is, in one respect, just more of government wanting to control speech but this time there's another chilling aspect - die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter has arrived in England:

A team of volunteers will search out material they deem inappropriate on social networks and report it to the unit. The allegations will then be investigated and the culprits prosecuted, if caught.

That's right folks. A collection of self-appointed guardians of the web will act as informers, snitches, grasses. And any person with any sort of profile - political, business, artistic - will face constant scrutiny from these collaborators with those who want to suppress free speech. Here's a bit more:

...Twitter and Facebook will be asked to help fund a "community" element to the unit, in which volunteers "skilled in the use of social media" will "identify, report and challenge online hate material", it reports. The detectives' role will be "identifying the location of the crime" when online abuse is reported, and refer it to "the appropriate force area and social media providers".

The slow death of free speech in England continues. Just listen and you'll hear: "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" and "hate speech isn't free speech". We will see a step change in online fussbucketry as, with each passing day a new form of 'offensive speech' is discovered, reported to the authorities and punished. It's not just that £1.7m is a lot of money just to protect the sensibilities of some Twitter users but that we're licensing the worst sort of judgemental puritan as agents to enforce an attack on free speech. As I said in a Tweet - welcome to the Twitter Stasi.




....

Don't kill free speech for the sake of sensibility.

****

Somewhere - I don't know precisely as I've not been paying it all that much attention - there's a gathering calling it self "Reclaim the Internet". My Twitter timeline is filled with a steady dribble of reports from this gathering - many from Labour MPs but also photographs showing earnest folk talking about trolls, abuse and how the Internet is a horrible place stuffed with nasty people who live under bridges.

Now I've no doubt - indeed I've witnessed it - that there are plenty of thoroughly unpleasant people hiding in corners of the Internet churning out pretty vile and personal stuff. Anyone who has encountered the less intellectual parts of the 'alt-right', especially the American 'alt-right', will have enjoyed a collection of choice insults, gun-toting threats and plenty of racism. And the sort of stuff that's levelled at Jewish public figures like Luciana Berger is straight up revolting.

So I get the idea of 'reclaiming the Internet'  presumably drawing on the experience of 'reclaim the night' marches that have been a feature of feminist campaigns down the years. Indeed the use of moral suasion and solidarity to sway public opinion is pretty valuable - the fact of saying 'you're not going to stop us, this is our space too' is powerful.

What worries me is that we get - especially when there are politicians involved - a sense of 'something must be done' where that something is almost certainly some form of further constraint on free speech. It's fine for organisations - in the real world or online - to have rules and to enforce those rules (my local Conservative Club is pretty tough on bad language, for example) but when this becomes a means by which the difficult, the challenging and, yes, the unpleasant can be shut down warning bells should go off.

It's even worse if the result of these campaigns is that governments take 'something must be done' as permission for creating a policing system allowing argument to be closed down by reporting the 'abuser' to the authorities. Don't get me wrong here, there are times when this is absolutely right, but too often the opportunity is taken to close down real debate and, worse, to conduct a political attack using reporting.

The, now thankfully neutralised, 'standards' process in local government tells me that having a quasi-legal process driven by reports of supposed wrongdoing presents less scrupulous politicians with the opportunity to undermine opponents, to destroy careers simply through reporting someone to the beak. And it doesn't matter much whether the person reported actually did much wrong, the fact of the reporting is sufficient.

So when you see someone Tweeting "I've blocked and reported @pigeonpost for being a vile troll", what you are seeing is something that is an attack on @pigeonpost - by all means block and report but waving this fact around the Internet is pretty poor behaviour when it might be that the worst @pigeonpost has done is lost his or her rag (and it's not your call whether the medium's terms and conditions were breached). It's also indulging in the same trolling behaviour you're accusing @pigeonpost of using.

In the end the price of free speech is that people can be - and often are - pretty vile. This isn't just true online (as any visit to a city centre pub late on a Saturday night will tell you) but clearly causes some consternation online. So complain and protect, encourage good manners, insist that terms and conditions of social media are adhered to, but please don't use abuse as a reason for restricting speech, for giving to politicians, public officials and campaigners the tools to shut up those whose only offence is to be rude or inarticulate in their opposition to such folks' agendas.

Free speech matters. It is one of the protections - too few of them - we have from the worst of government. Governments don't like free speech and will find ways to limit it. Ways to stop you from saying what you want to say. Too often I pick up little whispers - "I know I'm not supposed to say this but..."  And yes, sometimes this is racist, sexist, anti-gay but I can challenge that, explain why it's wrong - if they can't say it and take that challenge will they not remain racist, sexist or anti-gay? And won't that speech become hidden and in doing so become more extreme by developing only with affirmation and never challenge?

So, in reclaiming the Internet do remember that you're reclaiming a place of free speech, filled with the jokes, opinions, stupidity and rudeness humanity churns out. It's mostly ephemeral, often thin in thought, but for many people it's the way they get to sound off, to explode with fury, to celebrate, to share joy. Don't kill this because there's a few who think it grand to swear and cuss, to issue threats and to parade their nastiness for all to experience. Don't do in free speech for the sake of sensibility.

PS There probably is a Twitter user called @pigeonpost and I'm sure they're not remotely offensive - it was just slung down as an anonymous name, hopefully no-one's upset!
....

Quote of the day - on teachers who blog and tweet

****

A quite superb little article from Andrew Old contains this gem of a paragraph:

But, of course, there are many reasons why teachers on social media might be worth listening to. Teachers work in actual schools, not theoretical ones. Some educationalists have not tried to teach a child in decades (sometimes never) and their ideas about how it should be done are pure fantasy. Teachers don’t have to follow an ideological line. Educationalists, by contrast, have a habit of signing up to doctrinal statements like this one. Teachers on social media are often actually trying to communicate a clear message. Educationalists are often just trying to prove how clever they are, even if it means saying things that are not understood. But most of all, teachers on social media have little reason to lie about educational issues. They are speaking to other teachers about things both they, and their audiences, encounter. By contrast, educationalists don’t even unanimously agree that telling the truth is a good thing even in principle. And don’t get me started on educationalists who claim to speak for teachers, claim that criticism of them is criticism of teachers, or who insist that they should have a place in a professional body for teachers.

The whole article is a brilliant challenge to the arrogance of academia. As such, it is a delight and relevant way beyond the field of education.

....

In defence of anonymity...

***

Writing at Conservative Home, Charlie Elphicke the MP for Dover and Deal has called for the banning of anonymity on social media:

We should target the anonymity hate-tweeters use to harass people online. At the moment it’s just too easy to set up a bogus account and viciously stab at people from behind the curtain. Ensuring people can’t set up anonymous accounts would mean hate-tweeters would be forced to be responsible for the hate they spew.

Elphicke goes on somewhat egregiously to suggest that wanting to ban anonymity isn't a free speech issue arguing this point by creating a new definition of free speech that no-one had used until he dreamt it up:

There are some who will claim this undermines the principle of free speech. They are wrong. It’s an insult to all those who fought for our right to speak out. Free speech is not there to protect people who spread hate while hiding their identity.  The whole point of free speech is the right to speak freely in your own name.  There is also a big difference between the privacy of surfing the internet and claiming “privacy” in aid of anonymity to launch attacks on people. There should be no hiding place for the trolls.

Unlike Mr Elphicke I think this is absolutely a free speech issue and the right to speak anonymously - whether offline or online - is an essential element of that liberty that, in the MP's words people "fought for". And there are very good reasons why we should allow anonymity. Here's one:

A blogger who used the user name, "Miut3" was kidnapped and killed in Reynosa Tamaulipas. She was a "Tuitera" with the over 41k followers on her popular twitter page, that sent out situations of risk, and narco news tweets.

This women - a 'citizen journalist' in a place where the mainstream media and government is coerced by violent criminals - used anonymity to protect herself and to allow the brave resistance to the Mexican borderland's dysfunctional society. If the price of allowing this woman and others like her to challenge and question criminal conspiracy, corruption and murder is that some people use anonymity to post abuse then it's a price I'll take.

Now I can hear Mr Elphicke saying that the UK isn't Mexico and that things are different here. But imagine some other situations - perhaps someone wants to expose wrongdoing within their industry. Do you think that posting under their own name would enhance their career prospects? People simply won't take the risk.

Look at the great blogs exposing some of the management problems in the police - closed down because the blogger got identified. We'd be worse as a society without blogs like Night Jack. And there are tweeters and bloggers who use anonymity to catalogue their struggles with drug addiction or alcoholism safe knowing that anonymity protects their life from intrusion and attack.

Look also at the lengths to which public authorities will pursue bloggers who challenge and criticise them - local councils such as Bexley, South Tyneside, Carmathen and Barnet have all expended council taxpayers money pursuing bloggers (with differing degrees of success). Anonymity facilitates challenge and criticism and this is one of the reasons why public authorities are so keen to see it stopped.

It isn't pleasant to be abused online anymore than it's pleasant to be abused in the street, the pub or at work. But most of the time we walk away, a little upset maybe but not otherwise harmed. The same applies online - switch off the computer, go and make yourself a cup of tea and read a book or watch the telly. The abusers will soon go away if they don't get a response. And don't - unless you're a troll yourself - play the silly game of broadcasting on Twitter, Facebook or your blog that you're being 'trolled'. All that does is make you even more of a target - you've responded so the trolls know they'll get a rise from you.


So I say to Charlie Elphicke, get a thicker skin, stop claiming it's all "for the children" when it's not and read and remember the final tweet from Miut3 - posted by her murderers:

Friends and Family, my real name is Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, I am a doctor, now my life has met it's end.

....

On the popularity of politics

****

Us politicians like to think that what we do is grabbing the attention of the masses. We kid ourselves that people are actually interested in out rants, ramblings and petty spats. The truth is that people aren't interested - only about 1% of the population joins a political party and perhaps less than 10% is actually interested in politics.

An illustration of this comes from election news aggregator, Electionista, who tweeted the top seven most followed political parties in Europe:

Most followed parties in the EU: 1. @mov5stelle 2. @PPopular 3. @PSOE 4. @UKLabour 5. @EELV 6. @pdnetwork 7. @conservatives #EP2014
— electionista (@electionista) March 5, 2014

What is interesting here isn't the order but the number of followers - the 'Five Star' movement in Italy is the most followed with 270,000 followers, not surprising for a web-savvy populist movement. For the UK, the two big parties have far fewer - 125,000 for Labour and 104,000 for the Conservatives. To put this in a bit of context here are the seven most followed premier league football teams:

Arsenal 3.56m

Chelsea 3.46m

Liverpool 2.40m

Man United 2.01m

Man City 1.55m

Spurs 775k

Everton 376k

Only two premier league teams have fewer followers than the Conservatives (Crystal Palace and Hull since you ask) add Cardiff City and you have the three teams with fewer followers than Labour. This might not be an entirely fair comparison but it does suggest politics has something of a problem. Or maybe we are a mature enough society not to be all that fussed about the antics of us politicians?

 ....

A local take on arresting boozers...

****

West Yorkshire Police plan on finding the time to tweet all the alcohol-related incidents over a 12 hour period - clearly they're at a loose end.

However, they've reported the number of arrests for drunk and disorderly:

"In the twelve months leading to August 2013 there have been a total of 3071 arrests for those who are drunk and disorderly."

Which is eight a day. Across West Yorkshire's two million or so population that's hardly an epidemic of drunks.

The campaign - called 'In Focus' (compelte with its own hashtag, #infocus) is part of ACPO's 'let's go on about drinking rather than address the real problems facing police forces in England' campaign.

All a little sad really.

....

The excitable crowd...

This is a hard post to write for I understand - more than I care to analyse - the power of words to wound and the ability of other people's lies to destroy a man. Those who wave "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" probably haven't experienced the agony - the torture - of incessant verbal abuse. Not the shouting sort but the quietly whispered version; the drip, drip, drip of nastiness, the exclusion, the endless pointing to flaws and failings.

So, yes folks, words can - and do - drive people to the point of no return. And we should respect that fact and act accordingly. But we talk here of persistent, deliberate, directed, personal attacks not the generality of criticising a place or a people. Such things do not wound, do not destroy and are designed more to irritate, to generate a response.

I recall the first time I was attacked on the basis of a stereotype - it was the north/south thing. This fellow student told me I was a rich, posh southerner who wouldn't understand real life because...well because I was from "The South". I was surprised mostly by the 'all southerners are posh' line since I'd never thought of myself as anything but perfectly ordinary, as far removed from poshness as most folk. What shocked me though was the realisation that this man saw the world through a prism of stereotyped prejudice - his 'rich posh southerner' line was little different objectively than the view of black people as good at sports but not much else.

I say all this to provide some context, to point out that there's a difference between tribal allegiance and personal feelings. There's a big difference between calling someone fat and ugly and saying that everyone from Denholme is an inbred. Both these comments are rude but only the first is personal. And those folk from Denholme revel in their slightly redneck image (although heaven knows how they got to be called Frogboilers).

Which brings me to the excitable crowd, the mobile vulgus - the mob. For it is in this monster and its exploitation by a savvy few that the real danger lies. Step back to the distinction between the personal and the general - the mob takes offence (or is directed to that fake offence) at the latter and, in doing so, uses the former to prosecute its case. In times past this resulted in some rows, maybe a fight.

Today - because the government wishes to control speech - it results in someone being arrested for being rude on Twitter.

It seems that the mob can issue any kind of threat once its dander is up - from whining, self-righteous victim-mongering to actual death threats. But the target of that mob's anger - whatever their initial words - is hounded, chased, attacked and threatened. And the men of the law - with their shiny police vehicles and politically-correct masters - do the bidding (as they ever did) of the mob.

These laws - the ones that get people arrested for joking about blowing up a snow-bound airport, making snippy comments about Olympic divers or making unpleasant remarks about people from Liverpool.

These laws are the real offence.

....

In which George Galloway wants Twitter banned...

****

I'm not joking:

"[This House] believes that this failure to cooperate with the detection of the sources of criminal behaviour is reprehensible," it adds "and calls on the Government to impose sanctions on Twitter until it agrees to fully cooperate with the UK authorities and police in the detection of crime."

And the crime? This is 'being rude to George', or so it seems:

"Twitter is now used for a variety of criminal activities including sending malicious communications,"

Oh dear George, oh dear! Nannying fussbucket doesn't fully capture the sheer fascism of this proposal!

....

More on the death of journalism

****

With our breath bated we waited, What could it be? What terrible act would bring down the minister - departmental failure, corruption or...what's this? Ah, Twitter!

The newspaper that likes to think of itself as that little bit more right-on than all the others has chosen as its lead story - emblazoned across its front page - a sad little tale about Twitter:

An anonymous Twitter account called @toryeducation* is regularly used to attack critical stories about both Gove and his department. It is often abreast of imminent Tory policies, suggesting it is coming from close to the centre of government. However, it is also used to rubbish journalists and Labour politicians while promoting Gove's policies and career. 

There was a time when newspapers reported news, when journalists wrote about wars, dug into real scandal and investigated actual corruption.  For sure there was plenty of gossip and, to serve the market for this stuff, the newspaper would have a diary column tucked away somewhere in its bowels. Now, it seems, stories that merit a couple of lines in that diary now run on the front page.

We are, I fear, watching the death throes of journalism. It is being killed by two things - firstly the economics of publishing newspapers means that real story-finding is too expensive and secondly, political journalists now see themselves as players rather than observers and reporters. Newspapers are filled with a mix of rewarmed press releases and tittle-tattle. The comments of other journalists are reported creating a  purposeless and news-free circus.

Is it any wonder that each year fewer people bother to buy newspapers when they don't report on the real world  but on the land of pine-scrubbed kitchen table make-believe that these London-based "journalists" occupy. While there are wars, terrorist attacks, banking crises and much else besides, The Observer deems that a snarky little Twitter spat is more important.

....

Is Lord Leveson stupid?

****

He's certainly giving a good impression:

The competition from bloggers and tweeters, "may encourage unethical and potentially unlawful practices to get a story"

This is providing crap journalists (who are remunerated for their work) with an excuse: "it was those nasty bloggers, m'lud, they made me do it".

And what on earth makes m'lud think that bloggers don't know we're:

...subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.

(Although some like Eoin Clarke only find out the hard way).

The problem is that Lord Leveson wants to introduce laws that only apply to journalists and the newspapers they work for - not tweeters, facebookers or bloggers: just journalists in traditional newspapers. Stupid.

....

"Reining in Twitter..."

****

....seems to be the big challenge for Leveson today - and what a challenge!

Senior MPs have said that Lord Justice Leveson must find a way to stop people from wrongly identifying people using social media channels, after Lord McAlpine was falsely accused of being a paedophile.

And what a silly "senior MP" - one Conor Burns:

"We are going to have to bring Facebook and Twitter under the same laws as libels committed by newspapers or television channels.”

Er, Mr Burns. Facebook and Twitter - as well as this blog and your secretary - are already subject to the same libel laws.

We elect these people but who selects them?

....

The Internet is corrupting our youth!

****

Or so says celebrity brain expert, Baroness Greenfield. After all it has been a few weeks since her last national news headline! Children are being damaged by Twitter she says:

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

She criticised the “unhealthy” addiction to Twitter among some users who resort to increasingly nasty outbursts under the “sanitised and often anonymous guise of the web”. 

Did someone have a go at the Baroness on Twitter? Or is she merely surfing on the Twitter brand - after all, her main beef is about the social development of children. And Twitter is full of children!

Baroness Greenfield quoted figures showing that more than half of 13- to 17-year-olds now spend more than 30 hours a week using video games, computers, e-readers, mobile phones and other screen-based technology. 

Apparently all this stuff is making children less well-behaved, is turning them into a bunch of narcissists and creating a generation of cyber-bullies. Doubtless something must be done!
 

“To have this ultimate beauty contest showing how much better you are than everyone else can only lead to sadness because there will always be someone who scores higher than you," she said. "It means you are constantly lacking in self-esteem, over narcissistic and, at the same time, in constant anxiety.”

Baroness Greenfield also warned that social networking websites were fuelling bullying, adding: “The anonymity of the web can make it easier to do and also removes the constraints that would normally apply for what one might regard as human nature.” 

The good Baroness presents no evidence at all to support her contentions - not a single study, nothing that has been through that pesky peer review process. This is just comment made in an interview ahead of Baroness Greenfield presenting her "findings" (also known as her "opinion"). The only piece of "evidence" is a report of an opinion survey of English teachers who think kids have shorter attention spans. Now I love opinion polls but this isn't evidence of anything other than the informed prejudice of one set of teachers.

What seems to be bothering the Baroness is that children are less likely to sit like supine sheep awaiting the latest dollop of whatever their elders and betters believe they should be fed. The choice and liberty that "screen-based technology" provides makes it harder to socialise young people into a particular set of behaviours. It seems to me that young people can (and do) pay attention but that having alternatives to hand means that they are less tolerant of boring lectures.

Finally, Baroness greenfield seems to think that children are spending the sixty-odd hours of the week when they aren't looking at a screen or sleeping doing absolutely nothing. Perhaps gazing blankly into space or wandering zombie-like round the house. Funnily enough those children are spending that time in a social environment surrounded by and interacting with their peers, their parents and their teachers.

The Internet  - whether its Twitter, Facebook or something with penguins - isn't corrupting our youth. In fact it might just be liberating them!

....

I'm not sure social media do 'nuance'...

****

How on earth can we include uncertainty, conditionality and nuance in an instant gratification medium built around popping 140 characters into a box on the Internet? Twitter isn’t an equivocal medium, it is a place for the definite, the certain.

Even those who have managed to order the system so as to create doubt and an open-ness to other positions cannot buck the medium. The reader – or most of the readers – arrive perceiving twitter as a place of absolute certainty: “god is dead”, “abortion is wrong”, “Tories are scum”, “Arsenal are shit”. A veritable cacophony of conviction, a place where “I’m not so sure about that can you explain” doesn’t really have a place.

This soup of competing but equally unconditional truths worried some folk. Here’s Peter Beaumont writing in The Guardian:

Because of the measures of success in the new online world, including how many comments are attracted and the number of page views, it has been inevitable, some argue, that the loudest and most partisan voices seem attractive. Which leaves a burning question unanswered. How to quantify what all this means for those engaging in public debate, including bloggers, writers, journalists and commenters.

Part of Patrick Ness's argument was that the often brutal nature of the online world has started to impose a culture of self-censorship as some have sought to avoid inevitable flame wars. Other writers have remarked the opposite to me, describing how, in reviewing his writing, he had gradually used fewer qualification in his arguments.

We see here two competing responses: “I don’t like the game in that sandpit, so I’m not going to play there any more” and “I don’t like the game in that sandpit but everyone I want to play with is there so here goes”. Both are correct but define the person – there is no requirement to ping out tweets all the live long day, to record every last second of your life on Facebook or to scribe angry little pieces on a blog read by seventy people (on a good day). Yet in the discourse about the Internet – or more specifically the social aspect of the Internet – no-one states the obvious: you don’t have to be there.

At the same time, we should be able to distinguish between styles of communication and how places (if we can truly call Twitter and so forth: ‘places’) change the nature of our speech. The way I talk to a bunch of mates down the pub will be very different from the manner in which we talk at work. How often have friends and family rung you at work and been surprised by your ‘posh work voice’? And have you ever been shocked at bad language from someone (like a teacher or local councillor) you’ve only ever heard in a formal context?

Places like twitter are growing up as the users get to understand them. The etiquette, the behaviours and the language evolve. Not from some heavy-handed set of rules but from the manner in which that community polices its own behaviour and defines its own boundaries. Indeed, when heavy-handed rules crash into social media we get the nonsense of the ‘twitter joke trial’ or the lunacy of arresting some kid because he offended a celebrity.

The other part of Peter Beaumont’s worry is equally confused – sectarianism. By this he means, I guess, the tendency of humans to cluster into idea-reinforcing and like-minded groups rather than Orange Order marches or Glaswegian football violence. Beaumont suggests – in referring to the work of US academic, Cass Sunstein:

...while the internet was efficient in bringing together virtual communities of interest, it also encouraged participants "to isolate themselves from competing views... [creating a] breeding ground for polarisation, potentially dangerous for both democracy and social peace".

In other words, virtual communities, unlike physical communities that are under constant pressure to compromise, are at risk of a tendency to organise around confirmatory bias.

It seems to me that this is perfectly normal human behaviour. For sure, the Internet provides more opportunities for that ‘confirmatory bias’ but we have always sought out places and things that confirm our position, that affirm our world view. Perhaps the liberation lies in the fact that a young conservative in Grimethorpe (there may be one) or the budding Marxist in Steppingley can engage with respectively other young Tories and emerging Marxists. The assumption that on-line engagement means a new universalist idea evolving from some primeval internet soup may indeed appeal but surely it is nonsense?

Finally – and this really is important – there are more people on-line who prefer chatting about the X-Factor, football or the simple minutiae of an ordinary life. Perhaps Beaumont’s assumption that on-line activity is all about politics and media is simply his own form of confirmation bias?  While there was plenty of robust debate around Julian Assange on assorted social media channels, I’m prepared to bet that there were more pictures of cute puppies and kittens posted on various social media sites than coruscatingly insightful remarks about wikileaks. And this is how the world should be.

....

How we'd snigger at the Very Proper Gander!

We would. Snigger that is. After all we're so much more sophisticated than in times past.

Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, “There is a very proper gander.”

An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost.

“They said something about propaganda,” she said.

“I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander’s clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. “They were up to no good,“ she said.

A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. “He said to hell with the flag, too,“ said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb.

Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander’s house. He was strutting in
his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. “There he is!“ everybody cried. “Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flaghater! Bomb-thrower!“ So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

Yesterday, a twitter fury erupted because the on-line, human equivalent of that old hen misread or misheard the word "snigger" turning it into a terrible racist slur. And I guess that the only thing is for us to take the 'moral' from Thurber's modern fable to heart - having told the Very Proper Gander's tale, our James concludes:

Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Or off twitter!

....

So Diane's a little bit bigoted and a lot hypocritical - why the fuss?

****

I missed much of the twitter entertainment following Diane Abbott's tweet:

@bimadew White people love playing "divide & rule" We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Let's be clear then - this is racist (I would prefer to say 'mildly racist' but I guess these days racism is an absolute - one either is or isn't racist). And it's ignorant (but then Diane is a Labour MP so ignorance is to be expected).

The comment shows Diane to be a hypocrite - first onto every anti-racist bandwagon, paraded as a paragon of political correctness yet ready to apply different standards to herself from others.

And, you know, all this is fine by me. The tweet displays both her deep prejudice and historical ignorance but we all come with a little bigotry and a lack of historical knowledge is perhaps excusable. Plus of course - from the moment she chose a private school for her child - we already knew Diane was a hypocrite, one of the "one rule for the leaders, another for the proles" school of socialist.

There are calls for her sacking - but if Ed Miliband were to remove every hypocrite and every bigot from his front bench team, he probably wouldn't have one left. And I can't see why Diane should be punished for something that, in her ignorant bigotry, she really believes.

And, quite bluntly, as a white person who thinks our colonialism did more good than evil, I'm not in the slightest bit offended by Diane's outburst. I just think she's bigoted and wrong - like most of her colleagues on the Labour left.

....

Twitter and recruitment - an interesting observation

***

From HR.com's Geoff Newman:

Many companies - particularly those involved in the media - are putting a premium on candidates with strong social media footprints when it comes to the recruitment of new staff.

The case has been highlighted by the recent poaching of the BBC's popular chief political correspondent - and avid Twitterer - Laura Kuenssberg by ITV. Kuenssberg has a 60,000-strong army of loyal Twitter followers, and executives at ITV said that it had been a noted "additional benefit" when they were looking at recruiting her.  

Bosses at the commercial broadcaster said that her strong harnessing of Twitter as a means of engaging with her viewers was an excellent example of how they were trying to get their correspondents to engage with social media.

Very interesting.

....

Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

....