General election social media: a good week for breweries and cupcakes …
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Version 0 of 1. Over the centuries, plenty of people have managed to get into an argument in a pub. Fewer have managed to get into an argument with a pub. But George Galloway is no ordinary politician – who can forget his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother? – and he was unamused when a brewery tweeted him last weekend to ask whether he was “still a thing”. The Respect candidate intimated that being rude to him on Twitter could have consequences for @BradfordBrewery, but it didn’t seem to care: it responded by suggesting that being #BlockedByGalloway was a badge of honour. Elsewhere, it was a time for fresh starts. Twitter’s new video livestreaming app, Periscope, is already full of political reporters mugging for the camera. Sky’s Kay Burley showed us her chickens, while her colleague Paul Harrison kept it businesslike by live-streaming Ed Miliband’s education press conference. The BBC’s Jeremy Vine even began a Periscope segment by reading out a lot of viewers’ names, a bit like the old days of Ceefax or late-night music television. “Of course this is crazy, it’s 2015,” he told one viewer. Shabba! Over on Instagram, Miliband’s wife, Justine, launched her new account with a mixture of doorstep pictures and more traditional shots of cupcakes (albeit ones with “Vote Labour” iced on the top). And this wasn’t even the most partisan patisserie on that social network last week – Nick Clegg posted a picture in which he was holding a cupcake with his face on it. (Luckily, he has fewer than 400 followers so the therapy bill shouldn’t be too large.) Poor David Cameron, meanwhile, suffers from the ultimate curse in the SEO age – a very common name. He didn’t manage to score @DavidCameron on Twitter and “DavidCameron” on Instagram turns out to be a young man from Wisconsin who recently bought an iPhone 6. On Twitter, there was the usual pollgasm as people rushed to tweet the news that Miliband’s personal ratings had pulled ahead of Cameron’s for the first time. But the main events were the two Scottish leaders’ debates and the activity of the Cybernats (a derogatory nickname given to obsessive nationalist tweeters). The previous weekend, BBC Scotland had had to ask social media users to stop hounding its reporters for doing their job. “Our journalists are entitled to carry out their work without the threat of unwarranted personal attacks online,” the corporation noted. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon rebuked any of her supporters who were harassing the BBC’s James Cook for his reporting of the “Nickileaks” story; on Thursday she had to step in again after a young woman who asked a question at the debates was accused of being a “Labour plant”. “You were great on Tuesday night – strong & articulate,” she tweeted. “We need more young women like you in politics – regardless of party.” See, sometimes even politicians do the right thing. Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman |