Anyone who knows me is aware that, every so often, I’ll sit down and spend a dozen happy hours (or so) browsing Twitter. I’ve lost many a mindless Sunday afternoon wandering down meme holes and scaling Mount Hashtag. But recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how it feels like a small number of shouty voices on Twitter’s endless stream are starting to impact us all… and not in a good way.
The other day Richard Madeley was on Good Morning Britain interviewing Alessia Russo, one of our magnificent Lionesses (double Damehoods for them all, by the way, and a week of Bank Holidays to boot).
“How’re you feeling? It’s three days on now,” said delightful Richard. “If I was your dad and asked you that and said, ‘how are you feeling, love?’ what would you say?”
This pleasant query seemingly rubbed a few tweeters up the wrong way… they went online to announce that Madeley was being “patronising” and “inappropriate”. I’ve watched that interview and he 100 per cent wasn’t (and Russo definitely didn’t look the least bit offended) but it was too late by then — the narrative had begun to form, a ridiculous Twitter-beast formed of bogus outrage and bad emojis. Then — riding in on its slippery back, came the newspapers, and a clutch of headlines got published saying things like “Madeley BLASTED for patronising Lioness”.
So a handful of tweets became a news story — and people take news stories that much more seriously. It’s dismal, and it’s worrying.
I’m actually presenting on the GMB sofa next week and can already feel the presence of the worst of the tweeting warriors. I can almost hear their twitchy fingers hovering over laptops. If they approve then everything’s fine — people with handles like Snapmybreadstick574 and SqueezyMaster824 might even push out some tweets saying “We LOVE Rob! #replacepiers”. If those get picked up by a bored journalist I might even get a nice headline (“Nation DEMANDS Rinder!”). But I could as easily could end up in the same boat as Madeley.
Of course I don’t care what they think, but doubtless many in the public eye feel enormous pressure to self-edit. Why? Because nobody wants to be on the wrong end of tweets that finish up as a “story” pretending to be about “the national mood”.
Surely, with a cost-of-living crisis, impending recessions, wars and pandemics, it’s more important than ever to be just a little more nuanced and thoughtful.
News should be based on real facts — not whatever Kingbumface2022 and Earsnifferxxx have barfed onto the screen. We can’t let their voices drown out what’s truly important.
