"Too many twits might make a twat," said David Cameron in 2009 in a live radio interview when asked whether or not he was on Twitter. It wasn't his finest rhetorical hour, and ironically he later found himself apologizing for not picking his words carefully (though not for saying "twit" rather than "tweet" which is arguably the greater crime). But the interview was actually more notable for what he said outside of that memorable soundbite:
"I'm not on Twitter. I think that... that politicians should have to think about what we say and the trouble of Twitter is the instantness of it..."
Four years later, he and 450 other serving MPs use Twitter: 67 percent of Labour, 56 percent of Conservative, and 79 percent of Liberal Democrat MPs have profiles at the time of writing. Despite this, Cameron does raise a difficult disconnect between political survival and microblogging. Elected representatives are deft hands at speaking exclusively in carefully rehearsed soundbites and avoiding direct questions. Blandness becomes an effective character trait as politicians try to deflect negative media attention and to alienate as few people as possible by sticking resolutely to the party approved script. Twitter, with its instant communication and unwritten rule of authenticity, isn't built for this kind of tactical approach. As Cameron predicted, that has already led to a number of high profile gaffes. The majority of these have been deleted, but with thousands of followers each, the damage is often done with screengrabs and retweets long before the delete button can be hit. These blunders can be divided into two categories, the "too personal" and the "accidental tweet."
In the former, we've had Aidan Burley badly misjudging the public mood and calling the Olympic Opening ceremony "lefty multi-cultural crap," Diane Abbott facing accusations of racism for stating that "white people love to play divide and rule," Jesse Norman retweeting a tasteless joke about Reeva Steenkamp's death, Michael Fabricant speculating on the etymology of oral sex, and although she's not an MP, Speaker's Wife and 2010 Labour candidate Sally Bercow's recent Twitter libel case.
Then there are the accidental tweets. We have Brighton's Green Party council naively discussing a planned coup in Direct Messages that went public, Rob Wilson pasting a link to a porn site, and of course Ed Balls' mistaking the tweet box for the search field, simultaneously launching a meme and making himself look like an insane narcissist. Perhaps most amusing of all was Gavin Barwell inadvertently revealing a little about his browsing habits when he publicly scolded the Labour Party for a "Date Arab Girls" advert on their website without realizing it was behaviorally targeted specifically to his computer. There's even evidence to suggest that some MPs have found the time to go through their archives and delete tweets that have later been proven wrong, which is very much not in the spirit of Twitter.
It's so common for politicians to get cold feet about their latest 140 character missive that an international website has opened up to keep track. Politiwoops operates in 25 countries at the moment and has racked up 24,580 deleted tweets from MPs in the UK since May 2011. The site's lead developer, Breyten Ernsting, tells me that just 78 of the 451 tweeting MPs have never deleted a tweet—but that's not as sinister as it sounds. For the most part, it's common, garden-variety typos that quickly get taken down (and few as high-profile as Ed Miliband eulogizing Bob Holness for his work on "Blackbusters.") At the time of writing, Andrew Percy, the Conservative member for Brigg and Goole, is the most delete-happy with 1,685 deleted tweets.
You might think that a website covering exclusively what high-profile figures have tried to hide would be inundated with legal threats, but Ernsting says that's not the case: "So far this hasn't happened... I was recently contacted by an MP who accused me of showing his deleted tweets when he was sure he didn't delete them by hand. Turns out he was using a program to do so, so after I told (and showed) one of his staffers how it worked, everything was alright." Studying the data from the 25 countries being tracked, the UK doesn't seem to stand out particularly and has around the same record as the other nations surveyed—roughly one in 30 tweets is deleted.
Considering this, the number of high-profile gaffes is relatively low, but the more mundane truth is that much of the day-to-day tweeting is on message and bland as the public professes to dislike. As I wrote last year, the public quite likes it when politicians show a human side and veer off script while it distrusts politicians who are overtly partisan and don't answer direct questions. Yet if you follow more than one MP from the same party on Twitter, you're likely to see a number of suspiciously similar phrases coming through at the same time as the party machine distributes the message to distill through social media. This is about as far from Twitter's spontaneous nature as it's possible to get, and ironically it means that when MPs are using the service the "right" way according to party guidelines, they're actually more disconnected from their constituents than ever. Engagement requires relatability, and 140 character manifesto soundbites or digs at the opposition aren't so likable, safe as they've proven to be outside of the Web.
As a rule of thumb, the more senior political figures have the highest follower count (though there have been rumors of dodgy tactics for some), with all three party leaders clearing the 100,000 follower mark with ease and taking William Hague, George Galloway, and Tom Watson with them. Filling out the top 10 are Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Conservative Chairman Grant Shapps, Shadow Business Secretary Chukka Umana, and Chancellor George Osborne. The majority of the remaining politicians have follower counts in the low thousands, with a number of notable exceptions such as Nadine Dorries (25,402) and Louise Mensch (77,729)—no longer an MP since standing down from her Corby seat. These figures, along with the likes of John Prescott and Alastair Campbell, may not have ideology in common but they do share an important trait for social media: they're often outspoken and their tweets feel infinitely more genuine and personal as a result. Appearing as real people rather than 140 character manifestos, they pass the Twitter authenticity test with ease and are significantly more effective at getting their message out. Even if the message isn't always the polished and refined copy that the party's press office would like, nobody would argue that these figures haven't hit the ground running on the social Web, enhancing their profile and reaching parts of the UK voting public that few politicians could before Twitter opened in 2006.
Twitter has only seen one general election in its short life time, and it seems that for the time being MPs will continue to have an uneven relationship with the service, learning lessons the hard way. As recently as March, Respect MP George Galloway was calling for sanctions on Twitter, echoing his ideological opposite Louise Mensch's call for blackouts during the London riots two years earlier. Such censorship won't help gaffe-prone social media novice MPs, of course, but there's a paradox between the traditional media management of politicians' press releases and the openness of social media that has to resolve itself one way or another. The parties may find that showing the true face of their candidates to the general public, social media warts and all, is more of a vote winner than traditional means, no matter how prescient David Cameron's prediction had proved to be. The real test will come in 2015 when we see how many of the social media savvy politicians keep their seats when the UK goes to the polls again.
If you want to keep track of the tweets that MPs delete, there's an unofficial Politiwoops Twitter feed you can follow here.
This story originally appeared on Wired UK.
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