As a very heavy Twitter user, for years I was a fan of Tweetbot on iOS, an independent Twitter app made by Tapbots. Using an independent app made sense as I could configure how everything would display according to my needs, rather than Twitter chose that for the sake of […]
For years now Twitter has been my main professional social network. It is (or has been?) the way to keep in touch with what is going on in politics, and to seek to influence it in some way. I have also written a lot about it – all gathered here. […]
I am not sure this answer to a troll by Jean-Claude Piris this morning will change the guy’s mind. But “I have written a good part [of it]” when it comes to understanding the Treaty of Lisbon is a tremendous put down. That’s not all though. I am followed by […]
One of my nagging worries about political communication online, and through social media, is the inequality of it. We are still stuck with the idea that social media gives everyone a voice and, to an extent, that is true. But when everyone has a voice, how do you separate the […]
A couple of months ago I had a conversation with two academic friends of mine about why they refused to use any messenger other than WhatsApp. “We just want it to work!” they said. “Well, Volkswagen cars work” I hit back. “That’s different,” they said. But then what about fairly […]
Just under 48 hours ago I spotted a tweet from the BBC’s well known political journalist Andrew Neil – someone retweeted it into my timeline: Germany tonight in its biggest political crisis since late 1940s. Bigger even than UK’s current ongoing political crisis. — Andrew Neil (@afneil) November 20, 2017 […]
In the last 24 hours I’ve encountered a gentleman called Ian Dickinson on Twitter. He tweets with the username @iandicko73. He did not follow me, and I do not follow him. This was our first interaction: "EU citizen with a UK passport"Anyone RTing this fool will be blocked. https://t.co/IziXcf7LYz — […]
Every one in a while a Brussels media outlet or public affairs firm tries to show they are digital-aware by publishing a kind of league table of something to do with social media in the EU bubble. Yesterday it was Euractiv and ZN’s turn – they held an event called […]
NOTE: due to disk space requirements, the files mentioned in this blog post have been removed from the web. If you have any questions about these files, or this issue, please contact me. Dominic Cummings was Campaign Director of Vote Leave. His tweets from his account @odysseanproject became strangely compelling, […]
(Note: this is not a story about BBC bias, but more how journalists can get caught up amongst the bias propagated by others) This tweet by the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg caught my eye the other day – retweeted more than 3000 times, so it was all over my […]
Last week’s printed edition of Focus had a piece about how Germany’s politicians are using social media. It made the dubious claim that 61% of Green top candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt’s Twitter followers could have been bought (JPG of that part of the Focus piece here). Let’s actually instead try to get […]
In mid January I was more or less offline for a fortnight as my laptop had a serious problem (more about that here). Yes, of course I have a smartphone, but I tend to access social media the old way through a web browser, and Twitter through Tweetbot on my Mac. […]