no one who knows me knows that once in a while I sit down and browse a dozen happy hours (or something like that) Twitter. I’ve lost many a mindless Sunday afternoon wandering through memeholes and climbing Mount Hashtag. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how it feels like a small number of screaming voices on Twitter’s endless stream is starting to affect us all… and not in a good way.
Recently Richard Madeley was on Good Morning Britain interviewing Alessia Russo, one of our beautiful Lionesses (double Damehoods for all by the way, and a week of holidays to boot).
‘How do you feel? It is now three days later,’ said the delightful Richard. “If I were your father and you asked that and said, ‘How are you feeling, honey?” what would you say?”
This pleasant question seemed to resonate with a few tweeters… they went online to announce that Madeley was being “patronized” and “inappropriate”. I saw that interview and he 100 percent wasn’t (and Russo didn’t seem offended at all), but by then it was too late – the story started to form, a ridiculous Twitter beast fashioned from fake outrage and bad emojis. Then – riding in on his slippery back, the papers came, and a series of headlines were published saying things like “Madeley BLASTED for patronizing Lioness”.
So a handful of tweets became a news story — and people take news stories much more seriously. It’s bleak, and it’s worrying.
Presenting on the GMB bench next week, already feeling the presence of the worst of the tweeting warriors. I can almost hear their trembling fingers hovering over laptops. If they approve, all is well – folks with handles like Snapmybreadstick574 and SqueezyMaster824 can even send out some tweets saying “We LOVE Rob! #substitutes”. If those get picked up by a bored journalist, I might even get a nice one kop (“Nation DEMANDS Rinder!”) But I might as well be in the same boat as Madeley.
Of course I don’t care what they think, but no doubt many in the public eye feel a tremendous pressure to edit themselves. Why? Because no one wants to be wrong with tweets that end up as a “story” pretending to be about “the national vote”.
Certainly, with a cost of living crisis, looming recessions, wars and pandemics, it’s more important than ever to be a little more nuanced and thoughtful.
News should be based on real facts – not what Kingbumface2022 and Earsnifferxxx cracked on the screen. We can’t let their voices drown out what really matters.