Tag Archives: facebook

On 27th August, LDV will be 10 years old. In that time, we’ve brought you over 24,000 posts and published over 337,000 comments. Over the Summer holidays, we’ll take you on a nostalgic meander through a decade of Liberal Democrat history, seen through the eyes of our editors and contributors. We hope you enjoy our choices.

LDV was actually set up before Facebook became a thing. Or at least before it became a thing outside universities.

The first mention I can find came back in February 2007 when Mark Pack spied Liberal Democrat MPs flocking to the New Big Thing.

There’s been a flurry of Liberal Democrat MPs starting to use the social networking site Facebook in the last few weeks – including party leader Ming Campbell (the first UK party leader to do so, just as he was the first on Google Video and YouTube), Jo Swinson, Steve Webb, Stephen Williams and Lynne Featherstone.

Facebook used to only be open to students – and so there is a strong Lib Dem Youth and Student presence on it – but has recently been opened up to anyone.

If you are a Facebook user yourself or you become one after reading this post and wondering what on earth it is all about, don’t forget to join the Liberal Democrat group (currently 561 members, rather more than Labour’s 490).

Five months later, Mark charted how the parties were using Facebook in parliamentary by-elections, complete with 3D bar charts.

Facebook provided some early mysteries, such as the time someone set up a fake profile of Norman Lamb which mentioned his opponent more than you would expect.

The plot got very much thicker and Mark turned detective to try to unmask the culprit.

Amongst the Wikipedia edits is a plug for this anti-Liberal Democrat film which tries to pass itself off as an official pro-Liberal Democrat film (e.g. in the YouTube description: “Watch the video to find out why you should re-elect the Liberal Democrat run North Norfolk district council.” and the start of the film, which says it is “the Liberal Democrats broadcast for the local elections”).

The same username as that used on YouTube to upload the film – daisydukew – has also been used to make pro-Conservative comments elsewhere online: here and here.

d.The same IP address has also been used to make – deep breath – eleven different comments over four days on Liberal Democrat Voice claiming to be from seven different people (plus a couple of anonymous ones). .

It must be like Piccadilly Circus at that computer!

All of the names given are names that haven’t been used before to post on this site. One thing they all have in common is that where they try to place responsibility for the faking on anyone, it is always someone other than the Conservatives.

Then there was the final descent into farce.

Mark will probably kill me for unearthing this one, where he sings the praises of Lib Dem ACT. Remember that? I thought I’d give ACT the benefit of the doubt at the time but it seemed to be daft when everyone was on Facebook. Mark said: