Tweet, tweet, repeat: a day in the life of a social media outrider | thearticle

In an era of warfare fought on plains beyond the military and diplomatic, are we all drawn into the fighting via our smartphones? Add propaganda bots and computer viruses to the more

traditional areas of sanctions and freezing assets and it’s easy to see how. “Amplify, amplify, amplify!” came the clarion call from Seumas Milne, Labour’s director of communications. It was

a “response strategy” to counter the fallout from BBC Panorama’s exposé into the leaders office meddling in cases of party antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn’s coterie of influencers led by Ash

Sarkar and Owen Jones were about to inject some whataboutery into the system. They were instructed to point to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Islamophobia in the Conservative Party to

deflect and bid to create a moral equivalence. Within hours, Sarkar of hard-left Novara Media had tweeted that UK media wasn’t upholding “equal standards for Muslims” while Jones referred to

“rampant Tory Islamophobia”, blaming the mainly Conservative supporting press for the bias. Corbyn’s outriders were in full swing with the aim of subverting the debate. “The revolution will

not be televised” sung Gil Scott Heron in 1974, but in the digital age, maybe the tech’s overtaken him. Social media provides what politicians are loathe to do, offer a running commentary.

But outriders aren’t an elite. Sure, Jones and Sarkar with a million followers between them have a cavernous echo-chamber to bounce their contrarianism into, but observing my own Facebook

friends and Twitter followers, it seems we’re all outriders for something. The fight against anti-Semitism, feminist equality and the neverendum of Brexit to name three examples. But being a

social media outrider is not an arbiter of moral equivalence. The resistance and the attack fight on a level playing field with the thumb as lone resource. Not even the brain behind it is

always properly engaged, and that’s why the fight never abates. There’s rank and badge of honour too. #GTTO (Get The Tories Out) #FBPE, (Follow Back Pro EU) and the triple parentheses around

a Twitter handle started by the alt-right to identify Jewish people online, now added by those in solidarity with Jews as if to don a digital kipah. As soon as one declares a cause,

“friends” and new followers swarm in. Buoyed by a timeline of ever narrowing subject matter, one gets funnelled into yet more tweeting and replying and before you know it a narrowing

hinterland forms. Tweet, tweet, repeat. Once upon a time there was no platform to publish one’s innermost feelings. There was a medium called private thought. A still tongue made a wise

head, remember that? One could actually navigate life at the bus stop or coffee machine with the most rudimentary of English chats about the weather or the cricket. Yes, we used to have

humanity in common. Now connected to that person online one’s a party to their family, holiday snaps – and unwarranted political rants. A number of well-known media personalities have

emerged from BBC impartiality to chisel out new identities in the unchartered waters of the twittosphere. Paul Mason and Gavin Esler are two examples. Some argue the BBC favours a diversity

of colour over diversity of opinion. Those two didn’t wait round to ponder it. So where does the virtual world end and real world begin? Not easy to answer when a smartphone can prompt the

most outlandish behaviour. Police used to patrol mass crowds, not dance and gyrate in front of them like frustrated kissograms. Eventually the technology will settle down. Social media, as

with every other kind of media in history, will corporatise and become much less open source, then the wagons will roll to the next craze. In the meantime, inner peace will be encroached by

the consumption of social media, guaranteeing a reaction whether the audience is 1 or 1 million. What your mum said about going too near the screen to risk goggle eyes proved right. Can we

disengage online or in this moment of heightened political uncertainty? Or is it just the curse of our time that we must fight on?