Twitter Logo

My first post should have been one that I thought would show off my better qualities. It should have been a humorous piece that showed I was the sort of person who was able to reflect on the lighter side of life, it should have shown how cool I was and entertained at the same time. Maybe it should have been a piece on one of my passions in life, something on pub quizzes or my relatively recent obsession with running, which has been shrinking my belly at a fantastic rate but seems to be knackering every other part of my body at a similar rate. I am not starting with any of these, I have chosen a much more serious topic for my first real blog post. Although it is on activity I am involved in that risks becoming an obsession, Twitter.

As no one really knows that this site is ‘doing business’ yet I imagine that you got here by clicking a link on a tweet I posted promising free chocolate or biscuits or a cat on a treadmill, I lied – live with it.  I joined Twitter ages ago but only started tweeting recently really. I started with the usual things, clicking links to funny videos of cats, tweeting comments about the latest reality show – obviously I was watching in an ironical way – and how vile the contestants/judges were, or posting pictures of things I thought were funny, such as the sheep with massive testicles.

A Sheep With Massive Testicles

I was a twitter user but only in the same way that someone who only uses their PC to play Minesweeper and Hearts is a PC user. Then along came the Referendum on AV and the Scottish Parliamentary Elections and everything changed. I tweeted about why we should #VoteYes or vote #SNP and tried to add as much humour as 140 characters would allow me to without compromising my views. Before I knew it I was picking up followers I had never met. I started following people who tweeted interesting things and not just my friends and some random celebrities, and I debated with those people.

Before I knew it I was getting involved in hashtag debates, commenting on Question Time and revelling in the fact that Twitter brought me news that the TV could not like commentary from Tahrir Square during the protests in Egypt, or the name of the latest Welsh footballer with a superinjunction.

The phone hacking scandal is still raging at the time of writing this blog. I do not need to go over the disgust that News International has created and if I did then you would give up reading by page 10. I may have been disgusted at News International but I was happy that my tweets may have played a very small part in keeping the story alive and helping to bring down the News of the World. Especially my Rebekah Brooks/Ross Kemp Tweet which is my most retweeted tweet ever.

Everyone from News International who is involved in the scandal is a vile person who will never be welcome in my company. The organisation as a whole is too powerful and evil. But something happened to one of the key players that made me change the way I viewed Twitter.  LulzSec hacked The Sun website and redirected traffic to a fake news article about how Rupert Murdoch had killed himself.

LulzSec Logo

This was ‘good hacking’ surely? Hacking that had the public interest at heart? Twitter said it was good, and Twitter was always good, it brought about regime change in Egypt so it had to be. My timeline was filling up with people retweeting pictures of the hacked page, laughing at the fact that Murdoch was getting a taste of his own medicine and that he deserved everything that he got. No one seemed to consider that the page could be read as a death threat – whether that was the intention or not. And little was said about the true intentions of the hackers either, just because they chose the same target as us did that make their actions right?

Maybe the guilty do deserve to suffer but we are not the people who should be administering that suffering. The more I looked at it the more I realised that we were becoming a lynch mob. Buoyed by recent displays of power surrounding the Middle East and superinjunctions Twitter thought it was unbeatable, but more worryingly Twitter thought it was right. Tweeters were being encouraged by multitudes of opinionated celebrities, many of whom have an influence that far outweighs their qualifications or intellect, the mob started sharpening the points on their pitchforks and oiling their torches. No one seemed to contemplate that we have a system of justice in this country that had barely started, no one worried that this man’s grandchildren may have read of the death of their grandfather and thought it to be true. No one cared that there were people involved because once Twitter chooses a side and attacks it cannot be stopped.

This was brought home to many Tweeters when Jonnie Marbles came along. Jonnie Marbles is a member of Twitter and a self professed political activist, he is also the guy who managed to transform the most hated man in the world into a poor octogenarian with one poorly aimed ‘custard pie’. Rupert Murdoch was giving evidence before a Commons Select Committee when Marbles attacked and just before he did he posted the following tweet:

It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat

The world gasped and then thought ‘poor Rupert’ and suddenly Marbles’ crime was overshadowing the far more serious crimes of News International. Would he have done this if the reaction to the LulzSec hacking was different? If we had all condemned them then would Marbles have remained home and tweeted about vile media baron like the rest of us? Who knows? What  I do know is that the LulzSec hacking and Jonnie Marbles pie incident made me realise that members of Twitter have more in common with the News of the World readers than we would like to admit.

Also what gives us the right to know who Ryan Giggs is shagging even if we do not agree with superinjunctions?

You can still find me on Twitter –  @bigkenny1975

Give me a minute I have only just installed this blog!