Entertainment For Lively Minds
The worst of twitter
Last night Jerry Seinfeld retweeted a tweet sent directly to him from a certain "proud_scouser" who puts his name down as Stevie Dunn. The tweet (in capital letters) stated that Jerry was an unfunny jew who should have been gassed. Jerry made a couple of remarks, retweeted a few quips from followers and then left it. A quick look down scousers timeline gives you more anti-semetic stuff a direct tweet at colin jackson calling him a "gay twat" and a line of defence for the Seinfeld tweet along the lines of "I'm not more evil than mugabe, I only tweet"
If that chap had to go to court over his robin hood airport tweet, can Mr Dunn expect a visit from the boys in blue? This stuff is probably par for the course for public figures belonging to groups that inspire a handful of nutjob morons to hate but if you follow a few celebs on twitter you do get exposed fairly regularly to this kind of directly delivered unpleasantness. I suppose its pointless and impossible for twitter to police this kind of stuff but when it elevates from "you /your work is shit" to "you should have been gassed" someone has to step in surely?
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I saw that
and was wondering the same thing.
Vile person. Scouser? Let's wait and see.
Yep.
My money's on it being a WUM.
V. unpleasant
I guess some people just relish the opportunity to gratuitously insult celebrites whilst under the cloak of pseudonimity. It's pathetic really.
Unfortunately
it's the price you pay for free speech.
"Someone has to step in"
I guess they have - his twitter account appears to have been suspended.
I've seen similar feeds
One where the guy was targeting female celebs, calling them slags/sluts etc., while simultaneously giggling about it with a fellow twitterer. Clearly their sport for the night. He was as pleased as punch when Katie Price traded blows with him. I thought she should know better than to feed the troll.
Still, yes, despite being a user I'm yet to be convinced about Twitter as being this great global force for good. I blog about a niche sort of Techno, so I use it mainly for that, as well as for getting updates on the music. But looking at what's 'trending' it generally seems to be what film is on Channel Four at that moment or who's on Daybreak, not to mention the hundreds of tweets from people asking, 'Why is Carol Vorderman trending? Is she dead? LoL.' (No, she's on Daybreak is usually the answer.) It seems to promote a scramble to reach some kind of cutting edge -- a destination surely in the mind of the user -- and I find the sight of normally intelligent folk such as Grace Dent talking about being 'addicted' to it faintly embarrassing to be honest.
Recently, David Hepworth wrote a blog about the mainstream media now having to play catch-up with Twitter, which is true to an extent. But even so it's really no more than a rumour mill, a kind of global pub, and it's wrong as often as it's right. You don't 'know' that Amy Winehouse has died fifteen minutes before everybody else just because the subject's trending on Twitter. You still need it confirmed by the BBC.
I can't help but feel that in common with other forms of social media (including this site at times), its users take it too seriously and afford it more importance that it really deserves. It's not the Messiah, it's really not. It's a place where Ian Beale and Sooty are currently trending -- no doubt because one or the other is on Daybreak.
Brilliant. Do you mind if I tweet that?
Splendid post, an up arrow isn't nearly quite enough for it. My favourite Modern Toss cartoon is one of an office character asking "Can I borrow your stapler?", to which the reply is "Brilliant! Do you mind if I tweet that?". Well, possibly after the one with the guy on the phone saying "I can't come in to work today, so fuck off".
Twitter is the same as every computer thing.
Put garbage in, get garbage out.
Airport tweet bloke
That was (and is) a travesty of justice, and should never have gone to court.
Anti-Semitic abusers? Deeply unplesant, but best treated with the contempt they deserve - unless, of course, they go beyond name-calling into incitement, etc.
'Airport tweet bloke'...
...*did* make a bomb threat which the authorities were obliged to treat seriously (can you imagine the fallout if they'd thought 'it's only a humorous tweet' and then the bomb turned out to be real?), so it's neither a surprise or an outrage that he was prosecuted.
I'd've also forcibly sterilised him for being a twat.
But...
from what I've read:
(a) the "threat" was very clearly signposted as humorous;
(b) this came out very clearly at the subsequent trial;
(c) the judge in effect ignored the possibility that the "threat" might have been flippant - this seemed to me at the time to be entirely wrong.
The decision has continued to cause problems for him since, and that seems to me to be fundamentally unjust.
The authorities are certainly obliged to take a potential terrorist threat seriously at the outset, but it should have become very obvious, very quickly, that the apparent threat in this case wasn't substantial.
BTW - "being a twat" may not yet be illegal.
And did you read about *this* threat?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/04/duncan-bannatyne-soc...
Twitter...
Am I the only person who doesn't use it? Seems like a place for people who think that the minutiae of their day is of interest to anyone else.
Mind you I'd also rather shoot myself than have a facebook page so perhaps I'm just out of touch.
I thought that...
about Twitter and Facebook, mind you I was also very anti-mobile phones for years too. I worked in London and commuted on trains full of people chattering inanely, and very loudly, about nothing in particular. It took me a while to realise it wasn't the phone that annoyed me but the people who mis-used them.
Same with Twitter and Facebook, I wasn't bothered at all until I checked them out and discovered there actually was a way I could use them that were both useful and interesting to me.