Tag Archives: twitter

Caron Lindsay

Jo Swinson tells Trump to delete his Twitter account

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 29th November 2017 - 8:40 pm

I’m sure most of us will have had slightly awkward conversations with friends and relatives who, say, saw a nice picture of a field of poppies and a union jack and shared it on Facebook not realising that they were sharing the work of the horribly racist and islamophobic Britain First.

I always point it out to people and most of the time they are utterly mortified and swear to be more vigilant next time.

There is no such embarrassment from the President of the US. No pretending he was hacked. No apology. No regret. This isn’t your auntie sharing something inadvertently. …

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Caron Lindsay

Donald Trump, Twitter and distraction

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 18th February 2017 - 11:27 am

Compare and contrast:

Less than a month ago, on 20th January, Donald Trump took this very solemn oath:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States

That constitution enshrines the rights of a free press and democracy.

Last night, 4 weeks after he took above oath of office, the President of the United States, the so-called leader of the free world, someone with more power than most others on this planet of ours, tweeted this:

What had got his goat this time was coverage of his bizarre press conference when he attacked the media. It’s a pity that the media claims can’t be verified with video footage of the entire 76 minute extravaganza.

The media is there to be a pain in the backside to those in power. Part of our problem here at the moment is that much of the media is cheerleading for the government rather than putting it under pressure. The rich, Brexiteer owners of our media, in whose interests it is to be out of the scope of EU regulations, are not sufficiently challenged.

What is worrying is that anyone who challenges the wishes of the powerful is denounced as an enemy of the people. Over here, we had the Daily Fail disgracefully demonise Supreme Court judges upholding the law in that fashion. Now we have Trump dismissing any media outlet that disagrees with him in the same fashion.

Who does he think he is? Vladimir Putin?

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The Voice

Caroline Pidgeon taking Twitter questions this afternoon #AskCaroline

By The Voice | Wed 6th April 2016 - 11:45 am

Liberal Democrat London Mayoral candidate Caroline Pidgeon will be answering questions on Twitter this afternoon:

This comes the day after her manifesto launch and a successful mayoral debate last night where her performance attracted widespread praise.

Yesterday, she launched her manifesto, which you can read here.

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Caron Lindsay

Paddy Ashdown gets stuck into EU Referendum debate

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 3rd April 2016 - 6:41 pm

There are few people who understand how the world works better than our Paddy. He really gets how global power structures are changing and how vital it is that countries with liberal values work together, so it’s no surprise that he really wants us to vote to stay in the EU for our own and for international good.

I’m not quite sure why he’s chosen a Sunday afternoon in the Easter holidays to wade into the fray afresh with a cheeky tweet, but you can’t really argue with him on this.

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Mary Reid

Tim Farron tweets once every 36 minutes (according to the Mirror)

By Mary Reid | Thu 10th March 2016 - 10:18 am

 

Now I don’t often link to the Mirror, but Tim Farron has made a slightly unusual appearance (for a party Leader) as a prolific tweeter.

Apparently, the Labour MP Wes Streeting is the Twitter parliamentary champion, having tweeted 68,800 times in the last seven years. That is an average of one tweet every 36 minutes during waking hours. The Mirror reckons that he has written over one million words, which is half a million more than can be found in ‘War and Peace’.

Tim is very close behind Wes Streeting with 67,600 tweets since he started in February 2009, making his tweet- rate the same, at one every 36 minutes.  Of course, a high proportion of those were retweets, rather than original tweets, but it is still pretty impressive.

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The Voice

Tweets from the campaign trail: Snow edition

By The Voice | Sat 16th January 2016 - 7:53 pm

All over the country, Liberal Democrats have been campaigning today, some of them in the snow. Here are some of the icy tweets. Thankfully, the reception on the doorsteps was much warmer.

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Caron Lindsay

Tim Farron speaks in Syria debate: We’ll be learning wrong lessons from history if we don’t stand with refugees & eradicate Daesh

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 2nd December 2015 - 5:13 pm

Here is Tim Farron’s speech in full from today’s debate on Syria from Hansard:

As has been mentioned already, the spectre of the 2003 Iraq war hangs over the debate in this House and in the whole country. In 2003, the late and very great Charles Kennedy led the opposition to the Iraq war and he did so proudly. That was a counterproductive and illegal war, and Daesh is a consequence of the foolish decision taken then. Charles Kennedy was also right, however, in calling, in the 1990s, for military intervention in Bosnia to end a genocide there. I am proud of Charles on both counts.

My instincts, like those of others, are always to be anti-war and anti-conflict. In many cases, the automatic instinct will be that we should react straightaway and go straight in. Others will say that under no terms, and not in my name, should there ever be intervention. It is right to look at this through the prism of what is humanitarian, what is internationalist, what is liberal, what is right and what will be effective. I set out five principles that I have put to the Prime Minister. I will not go into all of them here, with the time I have available, but they are available on the website and people can go and have a look at them. My very clear sense is that any reasonable person would judge them to have been broadly met.

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The Voice

Leadership News: The Tweets

By The Voice | Sat 30th May 2015 - 3:15 pm

We thought we’d take an occasional look through the Twitter feeds of leadership hopefuls Norman Lamb and Tim Farron. Today they are united, marching for human rights.

…

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The Voice

Just when we thought we didn’t have to worry about David Ward’s tweets any more…

By The Voice | Thu 28th May 2015 - 10:25 am

Delightful!

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Eddie Sammon

Opinion: The right is winning on Facebook and votes, but the left on Twitter

By Eddie Sammon | Wed 20th May 2015 - 1:18 pm

facebook and twitterI have been thinking why it seems that right wing parties are more toxic than left wing parties. Is this true? Or is it simply my prejudices? Is there anything in the “shy Tory” phenomenon?

It does seem that popular culture is more left leaning, but I thought some numbers would help us understand society better and also help Liberal Democrats decide who to vote for in the upcoming leadership election.

For this analysis I have used the Facebook likes, Twitter followers and 2015 General Election votes for the following parties: Conservatives, UKIP, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Liberal Democrats, Labour, the SNP, The Green Party of England and Wales, the Scottish Green Party and Plaid Cymru. I didn’t use Sinn Fein because they campaign throughout the whole of Ireland and I didn’t use any other parties that I deemed to be “minor”.

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Newspuppy

LDVideo: Naomi Long reads out and responds to mean tweets

By Newspuppy | Sun 29th March 2015 - 4:28 pm

Twitter abuse is an occupational hazard for anyone who has an opinion, especially if they happen to be female. If you are a woman, it’s not only what you say but how you look that is fair game for the trolls.

Alliance MP Naomi Long had a bit of Friday fun this week as she read out some of the abuse she’d received over the years and get her own back with some witty retorts. I think my personal favourite was her response to the one about the size of her backside – a subject on which Alistair Carmichael waded in with support for Naomi.

Anyway, watch and enjoy:

You might also be interested in one of Jo Swinson’s favourite antidotes to the haters. Thank you, haters, by Clever Pie and Isabel Fay is very funny.

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Caron Lindsay

Clegg launches Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 25th March 2015 - 11:27 am

I think it’s fair to say that Nick Clegg may not exactly rock the tracksuit look, but he did do something very valuable today. In one of his last engagements as Deputy Prime Minister before the election campaign, he launched the Charter for Mental Health in Sport and Recreation aimed at kicking the mental health stigma out of sport. The video explains why:

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Caron Lindsay

Jenny Willott on the Twitter abuse she got after Inside the Commons

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 3rd March 2015 - 1:25 pm

A couple of weeks ago, Ruth Bright wrote of her admiration for Jenny Willott after seeing her and her family on the Inside the Commons series. I can only echo her sentiments after finally catching up with the programme late last night. What I saw was a happy family eating together, making a difficult work/life balance situation work in a way that suited them. Of course, I did wonder why Parliament couldn’t schedule its votes in a more family friendly manner and, why, in the 21st century, casting a vote requires running across your workplace then standing in a lobby for quarter of an hour, but that’s hardly Jenny’s fault.

I was appalled to see, from her speech to Welsh Liberal Democrat conference, that she’d taken some Twitter abuse after the programme was shown, as WalesOnline reports. 

The Liberal Democrat MP jokingly described herself to party activists as “the one with the child who screamed the place down when I left him in the whips office and went to vote”.

She said: “I’m also the one who got completely vilified on social media for daring to be a woman who wants to both work and have children. It’s absolutely amazing how many people thought it was okay to tell me my children would turn into delinquents, that I wasn’t up to the task of being an MP if I was also thinking about my children, that my children should be taken into social services care… that I was letting down my children and my constituents etc.”

She continued: “It’s extraordinary to think that even in 2015 there are plenty of people out there who think that women can’t be both MPs and have children successfully – I don’t hear any of them suggesting that men can’t be both MPs and have children.”

Ms Willott said her experiences made her “even more determined to show them how wrong they are,” adding: “It also proves to me that we need to get more women elected overall to change attitudes.”

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Caron Lindsay

What does the Twitter “sarcasm detector” tell us?

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 28th February 2015 - 12:55 pm

They Say sarcasm detectorJohn Rentoul told us in yesterday’s Independent that he had found a tool which analysed what was being said about party leaders on Twitter, taking into account whether the comment was sarcastic or not.

I spoke to Karo Moilanen at the company about how “sentiment analysis” works. He told me the algorithm detects positive and negative sentiments associated with the leaders, and can even recognise a double negative as a positive, for example, “kill bacteria”.

What about sarcasm, I asked, thinking about how Twitter works. “We have a rudimentary sarcasm detector,” he said. “There are patterns which tend to correlate with sarcasm.” But how accurate is it? “Sarcasm is hard for people to detect. Human accuracy can be as low as 40 per cent.”

TheySay “trains” its computer programme by feeding it texts that humans have marked as being sarcastic. “Algorithms can hence learn that sarcasm tends to involve cases in which someone likes something negative,” said Moilanen, “or conflicting or abrupt changes of sentiment between strongly positive and negative words and phrases.” He said that computer algorithms can detect sarcasm between 55 and 95 per cent of the time, depending on the study, with an average of 77 per cent.

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Newspuppy

The tale of Taylor Swift, Twitter and the Liberal Democrat MP

By Newspuppy | Tue 6th January 2015 - 11:20 pm

 

This has to be the strangest Twitter conversation involving a Liberal Democrat MP this year.

Lib Dem conference rally and party political broadcast superstar Kavya Kaushik asked Jeremy Browne on Twitter:

Hi @JeremyBrowneMP do you like Taylor Swift? Do you like Libertarian Fans of Taylor Swift on Facebook? Did you create the movement?

His reply:

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Caron Lindsay

Liberal Democrat Lucy Care answers questions from NUS students

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 18th October 2014 - 9:22 am

The National Union of Students is questioning candidates across the country via the medium of Twitter as part of its build up to next year’s General Election.

The idea is that they will take one marginal seat at a time and ask each of its candidates a series of ten questions. The  candidates will then tweet their replies. The first such event took place last Wednesday involving the candidates from Derby North, including our own Lucy Care. Tackling the subject of tuition fees in 140 characters and doing it justice was quite a challenge but Lucy managed it.

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Caron Lindsay

Nick Clegg “surprisingly good at Twitter”

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 28th July 2014 - 3:30 pm

Whether it’s posting a selfie from a football match, posing with a Princess mug, mocking the Daily Mail or looking like the perfect domestic goddess before admitting that it was Miriam who had made the very nice looking pie (for which we still need the recipe), Nick Clegg certainly has a quirky way with Twitter that. Over at the i, they’ve recognised that today by posting these highlights, commenting that:

 He seamlessly blends being part of the liberal establishment and looks genuinely happy to be at a football match.

They added that a scene with children could look very awkward if …

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The Voice

Ryland’s story – and why it’s important

By The Voice | Wed 4th June 2014 - 9:43 pm

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Caron Lindsay

LibLink: Mark Pack: There’s rather more to the story of “Police call on someone who tweeted criticism of UKIP”

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 15th May 2014 - 2:00 pm

There’s been a fair bit of discussion online about the incident last weekend when two Cambridgeshire Police Officers visited Green Party member Michael Abberton over a tweet which contained his edited, fact checked version of an anti-UKIP poster designed by someone else.

He told the whole story on his Axe of Reason blog.

Julian Huppert, as you can imagine, expressed concern about the and …

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The Voice

Nick Clegg to host live Twitter Q & A at 2:30 pm today

By The Voice | Thu 1st May 2014 - 12:30 pm

Nick Clegg will be taking to his keyboard for what he described as a “Twitter Town Hall” at 2:30 pm this afternoon.

We’ll bring you the highlights later, but if you want to ask him something, it couldn’t be simpler. Why not take a few minutes out of your lunch hour to send him a question?

 

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The Voice

Jeremy Browne responds on Twitter to Times’s ‘pointless’ front page headline

By The Voice | Sat 12th April 2014 - 10:00 am

Three weeks ago, Lib Dem MP Jeremy Browne joined Twitter. He’s been putting it to use this morning to refute The Times’s front page headline that claims he said the Lib Dems are ‘pointless’:

As for those imagining that he’s about jump ships, Jeremy couldn’t be clearer:

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The Voice

#NickvNigel Pre-match fun: Pick of the Tweets

By The Voice | Wed 26th March 2014 - 6:26 pm

In just over half an hour, the #NickvNigel debate will be on. There have been many amusing tweets throughout the day. Here are some of the best:

…

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Stephen Tall

Jeremy Browne joins Twitter. In unrelated news, his new book’s out next month

By Stephen Tall | Mon 24th March 2014 - 8:13 pm

I published the complete and utter list of Lib Dem MPs’ first tweets last week, so it seems only fitting to include the latest first tweet – from Taunton MP Jeremy Browne (updating David Penhaligon‘s famous injunction):

jeremy browne_Reform_Race_plan_coverWe can expect to hear a lot more from Jeremy in the coming weeks. He’ll shortly be publishing a book, Race Plan An …

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Caron Lindsay

First tweets: the Liberal Democrat Voice team

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 22nd March 2014 - 8:35 am

License Some rights reserved by shareskiThis is a blatant rip-off of my co-editor Stephen Tall’s piece yesterday giving all our MPs’ first tweets. It must have taken him ages to embed them all. I’ve seen the list described as “adorable” and it is a really useful trip down Memory Lane.

I have much less to do in my shameless copy, but I thought it would be interesting to see what first utterings came from the Liberal Democrat Voice team. The first thing I noticed is that we were all pretty early adopters. It was the much missed Andrew Reeves who got me into it way back when you did it by text message.

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Mark Valladares

The ten most active MPs on Twitter are…

By Mark Valladares | Fri 20th December 2013 - 11:40 am

Courtesy of John Rentoul, news reaches us of a list of the ten most active MPs on Twitter in 2013.

top tweeters

Yes, it’s our Tim and our Julian at the top of the list, with an honourable mention for Greg Mulholland.

Tim has managed an incredible fifty tweets a day this year, and probably should avoid piers for a while. And for anyone out there who wonders, it is him, and not a staffer, as those of us who have discovered that, by mentioning Tim in a tweet, you …

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Caron Lindsay

Jo Swinson: “About to get on tube. Seat offers welcome….but I was happier standing yesterday”

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 17th October 2013 - 9:37 pm

The febrile world of Twitter has been a little obsessed with the fact that Liberal Democrat minister Jo Swinson, who is 7 months’ pregnant, was standing throughout Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, with concerned political correspondents expressing outrage that nobody had offered her a seat.

Then the Daily Mail got in on the act.  Their attitude to women generally can be summed up as patriarchal nonsense. That’s not the word, I confess, I used earlier in a private LDV team discussion, but this is a family site.  I’ve written before about that awful phrase they tend to use about any pregnant …

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Caron Lindsay

How to do Twitter, Home Office style

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 22nd August 2013 - 10:25 am

Oh, they have been busy bees at the Home Office this Summer.  The Go Home vans, immigration checks at tube stations, not telling Nick Clegg what they’re up to, it’s amazing they’ve found time for anything else.

On Tuesday they published their Twitter policy. While I’d like to think it was hastily drawn up in response to criticism of the way its account was used during the immigration spot checks, with statistics of how many people had been arrested were given along with disturbing photographs of people being bundled into vans, I’m not sure the wheels of …

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Marie Jenkins

Opinion: Forget #twittersilence, we need to be #shoutingback

By Marie Jenkins | Mon 5th August 2013 - 3:23 pm

I read Kelly-Marie’s article about her ‘#twittersilence’ yesterday with great interest, and not just because I couldn’t believe that a Dr Who fan would be able to stay out of the twitter discussions on ‘Number 12’!

As a feminist, social-media addict and aspiring MP too, Kelly-Marie and I have much in common. However, it was for exactly those reasons that I decided to be part of the ‘#shoutingback’ crowd yesterday – those users who refuse to be intimidated by nasty people hiding behind their keyboards, spouting bile because they think that they can get away with it.

I’ve been utterly …

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Kelly-Marie Blundell

Opinion: Why I stayed off Twitter on Sunday (despite Doctor Who)

By Kelly-Marie Blundell | Mon 5th August 2013 - 12:59 pm

Lots of discussion was had about “#twittersilence” this weekend.

The premise is clear. Following the diabolical harassment of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, threats included the most heinous debasement, the threat of rape; feminists around the world pledged to go silent on Twitter for National Friendship Day.

As a feminist and social media user myself, as well as being an aspiring politician, I’ve experienced my fair share of offensive behaviour, comments and abuse. Indeed the downside of social media in society seems to be that it creates a form of mask through which people can hide in order to persecute and …

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Stephen Tall

Today’s #TwitterSilence – are you in or out?

By Stephen Tall | Sun 4th August 2013 - 9:30 am

For those of you who don’t inhabit the Twittersphere, many people today are taking part in a #TwitterSilence (that’s its hashtag).

It was the idea of Times columnist Caitlin Moran as “a symbolic act of solidarity” intended to shame Twitter into taking more seriously the rape/bomb threats and other abuse being targeted against women. You can read her blog about it here.

I’m not taking part. I summarised my reasons here:

My Co-Editor Caron Lindsay wrote an excellent piece on the topic here last week. And Index on Censorship’s Padraig Reidy has written an excellent response to Caitlin Moran, highlighting how the well-intentioned desire to limit the free speech of people who abuse it can have damaging consequences:

A lot of time spent defending free speech is not actually about defending what people say, but defending the space in which they can say it (I’ll refrain from misquoting Voltaire here). It may be idealistic, but we genuinely believe that given the space and the opportunity to discuss ideas openly, without fear of retribution, we’ll figure out how to do things better. Censorship holds society back. In fact, it’s the litmus test of a society being held back.

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