The Guardian has been busy digging into three internet episodes revolving around the new Conservative party chairman, Grant Shapps:
1. Google blacklists websites run by family of Grant Shapps
Google has blacklisted a network of websites run by the family of the newly promoted Tory party co-chairman, Grant Shapps, for breaching its rules on copyright infringement. A string of at least 19 sites run by the wife, sister or 75-year-old mother of Shapps have been banned from carrying Google’s adverts and been relegated to the bottom of its search results.
2. Grant Shapps altered school performance entry on Wikipedia
The internet activities of the new Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps, were under renewed scrutiny after it emerged that he secretly altered his Wikipedia biography to edit out references to his performance at school, political gaffes and the identity of donors to his private office.
3. The rise and fall of Grant Shapps’ Twitter followers
The ubiquitous and social media savvy new Conservative chairman Grant Shapps appears to have found a technique to boost his Twitter followers to more than 55,000.
It appears that Shapps, at regular intervals, increases the number of people he follows by as many as 5,000 and if they do not follow him back, he unfollows them.
LDV readers with long memories will find some of these internet machinations all too reminiscent of a little episode in 2007 related by the Times:
Not a good day for Grant Shapps, MP (Welwyn Hatfield, C). Shapps, presently helping the Tory effort in the Ealing Southall by-election, appeared to have logged on to the Liberal Democrats’ local YouTube page and pretended to be one of them, commiserating on their impending defeat, and seemingly forgetting that he was logged in under his own usual YouTube account, under the login name “GrantShapps”. Following much ridicule, Conservative Central Office now insists that Shapps was innocent and his account was hacked.
Iain Dale asked the great man about this and wrote afterwards:
I went to the horse’s mouth and have got a categoric denial that Grant did anything of the sort. It appears that he had a very easily guessable password on his Youtube account (it was 1234 !!!) and someone hacked into it…
Lib Dem jokes about Grant Shapps and “1,2,3,4” have been legion ever since.
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8 Comments
Dear Newshound
I have just noticed a remarkabe resemblance between this post and one that appeared on Liberal England yesterday.
I wonder if they are related?
Not the sharpest tool in the box, he may be the next but one leader of the Tory party.
Jonathan
I can honestly say that I had not read or noticed your article on Liberal England yesterday (sorry) until I read your comment here at 16:00 today, Monday.
So it really is a case of “great minds think alike” or, perhaps, “Liberals have long memories…”
Newshound (PW on this occasion).
Phew! I was afraid you were going to claim that your account had been hacked. 🙂
“It appears that Shapps, at regular intervals, increases the number of people he follows by as many as 5,000 and if they do not follow him back, he unfollows them.”
This is all rather baffling to the non-Twit.
Could it be explained in layman’s terms what Mr Shapps has done wrong here? Would it have been all right for him to start following all these people if only he had continued to do so?
What should he do about it now? Should he refollow them, or would it be acceptable just to disunfollow them?
Chris – if somoene follows you on YouTube it is usually because they are interested in what you say. If someone interesting follows you , such as an MP, you’re quite likely to follow them back. Also if you’re interested in building your own following you’re quite likely to follow people who follow you back whoever they are.
So it seems what Shapps has been doing is randomly following 5000 new people who he has no interest. Now if you do much of that it’s going to be very obvious that you are following far more people than are following you so you look a bit sad and desperate. But if you’ve got lots of wonga you could pay someone to systematically then delist all the people who didn’t follow you back, so you’re back in balance and don’t look likely you’re sad and desperate for friends or heavily marketing yourself, and then go through the same process again and again and again.
I would make you look interesting, popular and credible when in fact you weren’t. Pointing out what’ you’re doing makes you look sad, deceptive, rich (with more money than sense) and a bit of a twit.
Rebecca
Thank you. With the benefit of a bit more reading, I think I’ve worked out what he did wrong. If only he had carried out this process gradually and continuously rather than adding and removing large numbers of people at once, no one would have noticed what was happening and everyone would still be convinced he was “interesting, popular and credible.”
Not everyone. 🙂