This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/05/michael-gove-tweets-election
The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Previous version
1
Next version
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Gove’s bumbling tweets have set the tone for this extremely online election | Gove’s bumbling tweets have set the tone for this extremely online election |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| Every election needs a theme. I’m betting on ‘public figures embarrassing themselves on the internet’ , says author Joel Golby | Every election needs a theme. I’m betting on ‘public figures embarrassing themselves on the internet’ , says author Joel Golby |
| One thing that separates 90s kids (me) from the shallow and terrifying TikTok generation, who know how the wifi works on their iPad without having to Google it on their phone first (anyone born this millennium), is that they don’t have the same inbuilt expectation that America is always exactly one season ahead of where we are. | One thing that separates 90s kids (me) from the shallow and terrifying TikTok generation, who know how the wifi works on their iPad without having to Google it on their phone first (anyone born this millennium), is that they don’t have the same inbuilt expectation that America is always exactly one season ahead of where we are. |
| Take Friends, for instance. Americans, with their two-litre cans of soda and lurid neon corn snacks, knew about Joey and Rachel kissing months before we knew about Joey and Rachel kissing; they went through the boom-and-bust cycle of loving then hating the Ross’s pet monkey storyline a full half-year before we did. And it wasn’t just TV: they were ahead on trends and fashions, and cool phrases and new kinds of inline skates and limited edition Pogs. America, we thought, was the future and Britain, we figured, was the slow-moving past. | Take Friends, for instance. Americans, with their two-litre cans of soda and lurid neon corn snacks, knew about Joey and Rachel kissing months before we knew about Joey and Rachel kissing; they went through the boom-and-bust cycle of loving then hating the Ross’s pet monkey storyline a full half-year before we did. And it wasn’t just TV: they were ahead on trends and fashions, and cool phrases and new kinds of inline skates and limited edition Pogs. America, we thought, was the future and Britain, we figured, was the slow-moving past. |
| This has changed. Thanks to streaming and always-on digital culture and slickly maintained piracy websites and 24-hour news and Twitter, we know things at the same time that America knows things, we watch things concurrently with them, and we all got disappointed by the Game of Thrones finale at the exact same time. Where America once trendsat, we now straddle alongside, tucked up in the nook between the neck and the shoulder, nuzzling in. | This has changed. Thanks to streaming and always-on digital culture and slickly maintained piracy websites and 24-hour news and Twitter, we know things at the same time that America knows things, we watch things concurrently with them, and we all got disappointed by the Game of Thrones finale at the exact same time. Where America once trendsat, we now straddle alongside, tucked up in the nook between the neck and the shoulder, nuzzling in. |
| So now we’ve caught up it’s high time for our first yee-haw, hometown-style America-inflected election, and by that I mean we are ripe for a too-online campaign dominated by brief flashes of trending topics, banana-skin troll accounts slipping up previously unknown elected officials, probably some accusations of Russian interference – and, most importantly, outlandishly brash lies being tweeted out in earnest then rigorously fact-checked in seconds by dedicated teams of reply guys. And, obviously, Michael Gove was first to kick things off. | So now we’ve caught up it’s high time for our first yee-haw, hometown-style America-inflected election, and by that I mean we are ripe for a too-online campaign dominated by brief flashes of trending topics, banana-skin troll accounts slipping up previously unknown elected officials, probably some accusations of Russian interference – and, most importantly, outlandishly brash lies being tweeted out in earnest then rigorously fact-checked in seconds by dedicated teams of reply guys. And, obviously, Michael Gove was first to kick things off. |
| If you don’t spend the several hours of last weekend looking at Michael Gove’s Twitter account, I’ll catch you up: on Sunday night Gove got drawn in by what looked, smelled and tasted a lot like a troll account claiming to be a Momentum member (100 or so followers, inexplicable string of random numbers in the account name, Palestine flag emoji, display name that didn’t quite match the actual name, that sort of thing) that was blasting out antisemitism under a #JC4PM hashtag, using the name “Joe Woods”. Gove saw the tweet and called out leading members of the vocal left, imploring them to root out antisemitism in their party and using the Joe Woods account as an exemplar. They all pointed out that Joe Woods almost certainly didn’t exist; Momentum itself confirmed Joe Woods didn’t have a membership. Gove doubled down once, then doubled down again somehow and demanded they solve antisemitism by, ironically, quote-tweeting antisemitism and blasting it out to the 133,000 or so followers he has on Twitter. Can someone stop this antisemitism I keep spreading, please? Would be really good if that could get that looked at cheers. | If you don’t spend the several hours of last weekend looking at Michael Gove’s Twitter account, I’ll catch you up: on Sunday night Gove got drawn in by what looked, smelled and tasted a lot like a troll account claiming to be a Momentum member (100 or so followers, inexplicable string of random numbers in the account name, Palestine flag emoji, display name that didn’t quite match the actual name, that sort of thing) that was blasting out antisemitism under a #JC4PM hashtag, using the name “Joe Woods”. Gove saw the tweet and called out leading members of the vocal left, imploring them to root out antisemitism in their party and using the Joe Woods account as an exemplar. They all pointed out that Joe Woods almost certainly didn’t exist; Momentum itself confirmed Joe Woods didn’t have a membership. Gove doubled down once, then doubled down again somehow and demanded they solve antisemitism by, ironically, quote-tweeting antisemitism and blasting it out to the 133,000 or so followers he has on Twitter. Can someone stop this antisemitism I keep spreading, please? Would be really good if that could get that looked at cheers. |
| Debacles like this are bad (obviously) but good (bear with me) for setting the overall tone of the election to come, which I think we all admit, much like a New Years’ Eve party, needs a theme to really get going. Previous elections have had themes, or at least an rough idea: Brexit for the last one, debates for the one before that, tuition fees and bigoted women before that, &c, &c, &c. The theme for the big bad election of 2019 is, at this early stage, leaning towards “theatrical misinformation”, and a lot of that is to do with how the internet has turned into a beautiful precision tool to make high-profile figures embarrass themselves by not really knowing how to use it – but persistently using it anyway. | Debacles like this are bad (obviously) but good (bear with me) for setting the overall tone of the election to come, which I think we all admit, much like a New Years’ Eve party, needs a theme to really get going. Previous elections have had themes, or at least an rough idea: Brexit for the last one, debates for the one before that, tuition fees and bigoted women before that, &c, &c, &c. The theme for the big bad election of 2019 is, at this early stage, leaning towards “theatrical misinformation”, and a lot of that is to do with how the internet has turned into a beautiful precision tool to make high-profile figures embarrass themselves by not really knowing how to use it – but persistently using it anyway. |
| Gove isn’t the first one to get suckered in, at a point, I must remind you, that is barely a week into the election cycle.The Change UK MP Mike Gapes, a man with the defeated air of a coach driver having his keys tossed round by laughing teenagers at a motorway service station, somehow got conned into endorsing a mock tactical voting website that recommended voting for Mike Gapes in every constituency. | |
| Meanwhile – and I barely know how to explain this – the BBC politics live editor Rob Burley and many of his too-online blue-tick friends got suckered in by an #FBPE parody account that accused him of manufacturing an audience plant on Question Time which included cutting a young Tory fox hunter’s hair “to make him look like a regular working-class youngster” – a claim so bizarre and amazing it was bound to go viral. The fallout was predictable: Burley firmly asserting that he didn’t work on Question Time; suggestions that he take legal action against the parody account; some legitimate hand-wringing from ultra-ironic leftwing shitposters about the fine grey line between wilful misinformation, lighthearted joking that becomes serious the second someone falls for it, and the constant need to be sincere in case we get carried away and accidentally vote for Brexit. When it’s day two of an election and BBC staff are already having to deny forcibly giving haircuts, you know we’re in for a good one. | Meanwhile – and I barely know how to explain this – the BBC politics live editor Rob Burley and many of his too-online blue-tick friends got suckered in by an #FBPE parody account that accused him of manufacturing an audience plant on Question Time which included cutting a young Tory fox hunter’s hair “to make him look like a regular working-class youngster” – a claim so bizarre and amazing it was bound to go viral. The fallout was predictable: Burley firmly asserting that he didn’t work on Question Time; suggestions that he take legal action against the parody account; some legitimate hand-wringing from ultra-ironic leftwing shitposters about the fine grey line between wilful misinformation, lighthearted joking that becomes serious the second someone falls for it, and the constant need to be sincere in case we get carried away and accidentally vote for Brexit. When it’s day two of an election and BBC staff are already having to deny forcibly giving haircuts, you know we’re in for a good one. |
| This was a tone-setting week in leading figures falling for things online, and frankly a banner one, too. Thought it was bad when we were all getting tricked by that big red bus, didn’t we? But three years later, and somehow everything is worse. There will be – and mark my words as if I were a witch on a moor making a blood promise that you will be king – mark my words: there will be much, much, much more of this to come. | This was a tone-setting week in leading figures falling for things online, and frankly a banner one, too. Thought it was bad when we were all getting tricked by that big red bus, didn’t we? But three years later, and somehow everything is worse. There will be – and mark my words as if I were a witch on a moor making a blood promise that you will be king – mark my words: there will be much, much, much more of this to come. |
| Other things to hate or enjoy – delete as appropriate | Other things to hate or enjoy – delete as appropriate |
| A running theme in The Discourse so far is the classic “should 16-year-olds be allowed to vote Y/N?” – which seems more pertinent then ever, when such a vast swath of the Brexit voting public has conspired to die of old age before it even got delivered. It’s the same back and forth as ever, really: on one side, people pointing out that 16-year-olds can marry, work, leave home and join the army, so why not vote; on the other hand, furious parents pointing out that their son is still asleep at 2pm, that’s why. I don’t personally think that drinking a Red Bull for breakfast and having an Xbox Gold account should preclude anyone from voting, but I am enjoying parents very literally selling their own children out as idiots for Twitter clout, so it’s hard to say really which side is good or bad. | A running theme in The Discourse so far is the classic “should 16-year-olds be allowed to vote Y/N?” – which seems more pertinent then ever, when such a vast swath of the Brexit voting public has conspired to die of old age before it even got delivered. It’s the same back and forth as ever, really: on one side, people pointing out that 16-year-olds can marry, work, leave home and join the army, so why not vote; on the other hand, furious parents pointing out that their son is still asleep at 2pm, that’s why. I don’t personally think that drinking a Red Bull for breakfast and having an Xbox Gold account should preclude anyone from voting, but I am enjoying parents very literally selling their own children out as idiots for Twitter clout, so it’s hard to say really which side is good or bad. |
| Football and politics have always intersected. Nothing inspires laser-focused patriotism like international tournaments or domestic elections, and both top-level football and political empowerment are things that used to embrace the working class – but then Sky got involved. Been a good week for it, then: CSKA Sofia striker Tony Watt and Charlton forward Lyle Taylor got into one on Twitter that ended up as a back and forth about who’s historically paid more UK tax (fight-wise I’d say Watts edged it, but nobody really wins because once you pull out the P11D forms …). Meanwhile Fulham and Bournemouth midfielder Harry Arter managed to confuse Jeremy Corbyn with Nigel Farage (and somehow, simultaneously Boris Johnson) (“The same corbyn that openly admitted he lied through the whole campaign the day after brexit about what he was planning to invest in the nhs [thinking-face emoji]”), had it pointed out to him, pretended he was trolling all along then promptly deleted his whole account. It was the technical equivalent of rounding the opposition defence, running through on goal, getting down on both knees to cheekily head the ball over the line then accidentally sproinging it off the post 110 metres in the opposite direction and ricocheting it past your own goalkeeper. All it really needed was Danny Baker running in, hands on head, screaming “THAT’S A HOWLER”, and you could give it to your dad on video for Christmas. More of this, please, football. More of this. | Football and politics have always intersected. Nothing inspires laser-focused patriotism like international tournaments or domestic elections, and both top-level football and political empowerment are things that used to embrace the working class – but then Sky got involved. Been a good week for it, then: CSKA Sofia striker Tony Watt and Charlton forward Lyle Taylor got into one on Twitter that ended up as a back and forth about who’s historically paid more UK tax (fight-wise I’d say Watts edged it, but nobody really wins because once you pull out the P11D forms …). Meanwhile Fulham and Bournemouth midfielder Harry Arter managed to confuse Jeremy Corbyn with Nigel Farage (and somehow, simultaneously Boris Johnson) (“The same corbyn that openly admitted he lied through the whole campaign the day after brexit about what he was planning to invest in the nhs [thinking-face emoji]”), had it pointed out to him, pretended he was trolling all along then promptly deleted his whole account. It was the technical equivalent of rounding the opposition defence, running through on goal, getting down on both knees to cheekily head the ball over the line then accidentally sproinging it off the post 110 metres in the opposite direction and ricocheting it past your own goalkeeper. All it really needed was Danny Baker running in, hands on head, screaming “THAT’S A HOWLER”, and you could give it to your dad on video for Christmas. More of this, please, football. More of this. |
| • Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant. He will be writing a regular column during the election campaign | • Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant. He will be writing a regular column during the election campaign |
Previous version
1
Next version