Tag Archives: twitter

Elon Musk shows Lib Dems the way

By Tom Reeve | Mon 24th July 2023 - 8:44 pm

Elon Musk, in his finite wisdom, is axing the Twitter bird logo in favour of the letter X. This follows his recent decision to rebadge the company as X Corp.

‘What’s this got to do with me?’ I hear you say. ‘I’m a Lib Dem and I’ve got leaflets to deliver.’ Yes, you do have leaflets to deliver, but stay with me – this could be a golden opportunity for the Lib Dems, but only if we have the courage to seize it.

In the infinite reaches of his multidimensional consciousness, Musk has realised the truth about birds: they’re boring. (In fact, they probably don’t even exist )

It’s visionary stuff, right? I mean, what do birds do for us, apart from inspire us with their majestic soaring and melodious tunes? Birds may be the descendants of the dinosaurs and have colonised every continent on Earth including Antarctica, but can they make a cheese sandwich or send a Tweet? No, they opted for beautiful plumage rather than hands – that was their choice, now they have to live with it.

So, he’s going to axe the blue bird of acrimony and replace it with – surprise, surprise – an X. As letters go, there are so many reasons to use X. It’s a structurally sound letter, it’s associated with mystery, it’s the 24th letter in the alphabet. Pirates use it on maps, mathematicians use it in equations, and Musk names all his bloomin’ companies after it.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged elon musk, featured, humour and party strategy | 8 Comments

Has Elon Musk broken Twitter?

By Andy Boddington | Sat 19th November 2022 - 10:31 am

When I want to know what politicians are saying, including Lib Dem MPs and peers, I turn to Twitter. When I want to get a message out to a broader community than my town (for which I use Facebook), I use Twitter.

But Twitter is in trouble. Serious trouble. That trouble goes by the name of Elon Musk.

True, Twitter was languishing. Failing to effectively monetise its product. Too many staff. Not enough innovation.

But Elon Musk’s shock and awe approach to managing a company he wasn’t that interested in running is weakening the Twitter brand and weakening its credibility. Mass sackings. Mass resignations. Mass closure of accounts. Defections to Mastodon. Record Twitter use but much of that criticising Musk and bemoaning what Twitter is becoming.

Will I join the mass movement and leave Twitter? Not yet. But I don’t rule it out.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged elon musk, football and qatar | 2 Comments

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 1st May 2022 - 10:20 am

Elon Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur and the world’s richest man. He also has a gargantuan ego, mercurial personality and thinks big. Tesla was developed to create a carbon-free planet. Space X is designed to give humanity a Martian bolthole in case we fail on Earth. His takeover of Twitter is, in his words, the result of a “strong intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important for the future of civilisation.”

Musk is a free speech absolutist. He is opposed to Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump but would be likely to countenance suspension. This brings the mercurial Musk into conflict with most of the EU governments, Britain and India. They have either introduced or are planning legislation to force social media to police their sites to prevent hate speech, conspiracy theories and outright lies such as Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. How this will resolve itself will be watched very carefully by all the other social media players because, based on past performance, Musk is not the sort of person to quietly accept government interference.

With the French presidential elections and the war of Ukraine grabbing the headlines you might have missed an important election result in the Balkan state of Slovenia. It was billed as a “referendum on democracy” and democracy won. On one side of the political ring was incumbent Prime Minister Janez Jansa. He is a Trump-loving ally of Hungary’s right-wing populist leader Viktor Orban. According to Freedom House his latest two-year tenure (he had been elected PM twice before), has been marked by Slovenia suffering the sharpest decline in Democratic institutions and values of any country in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Jansa repeatedly attacked the judiciary and the media whom he called “liars” and “presstitutes”.

Facing Jansa was 55-year-old former Fulbright scholar Robert Golob. He is businessman who created the state-owned energy company GEN-1 and has limited political experience as a city councillor and former State Secretary at the Ministry of Economics. In January he created the Freedom Party to contest the April elections. The result was a resounding victory. The Freedom Party won 34.5 percent of the vote compared to 23.6 percent for Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party. The turnout was also encouraging. 71 percent of Slovenia’s 1.7m voters cast their ballots compared to 51 percent in elections two years ago. The increase in voter turnout has been attributed to Golob persuading young people to vote – a possible lesson for other politicians seeking to remove far right populists from elected office.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged elon musk, northern ireland, slovenia and United states of America | 13 Comments

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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Posted in News | Also tagged donald trump and Jo Swinson | 11 Comments

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:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged donald trump and usa | 12 Comments

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:

I'll be @TwitterUK later today answering questions. Tweet with #AskCaroline and I'll be responding this afternoon https://t.co/72sEXfkB3a

— Caroline Pidgeon (@CarolinePidgeon) April 6, 2016

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.

.@CarolinePidgeon launching positive @LondonLibDems manifesto www.@londonlibdems.org.uk pic.twitter.com/o0vZB0E46D

— Rob Blackie (@robblackie) April 5, 2016

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Posted in News | Also tagged Caroline Pidgeon and london | Leave a comment

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.

Britain's friends for BRIN: Obama & all leaders of NATO, Commonwealth, and EU plus China etc.etc. "Friends" supporting BREXIT? er… Putin?

— Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) April 3, 2016

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Posted in News | Also tagged eu referendum, paddy ashdown and vladimir putin | 8 Comments

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

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

Embed from Getty Images

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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Posted in News | Also tagged tim farron | 2 Comments

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.

And thank you to the man on the street who saw us trying to take a selfie and took this photo for us! @scotlibdems pic.twitter.com/kYeyzQv8w9

— James Harrison (@JamesWHarrison) January 16, 2016

Exhausting but fun day campaigning across West region with lovely activists and even lovelier voters! @scotlibdems pic.twitter.com/MpSgGA4gQ2

— Katy Gordon (@katygordon) January 16, 2016

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged campaigning, eu, eu referendum and Scotland | Leave a comment

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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Posted in News | Also tagged speeches, syria and tim farron | 25 Comments

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.

Delighted to be marching & speaking up for the Lib Dems on the Human Rights Act today. These rights are integral for a free & fair society

— Tim Farron (@timfarron) May 30, 2015

On way to Lib Dem Human Rights Act protest in London – Rule of law and protection of human rights: foundation stone of civilised society

— Norman Lamb

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged liberal democrat leadership, norman lamb and tim farron | 2 Comments

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

If I lived in #OrkneyandShetlands would I fire a rocket at #AlistairCarmichael? – probably yes

— David Ward (@DWard) May 27, 2015

Delightful!

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Posted in News | Also tagged Alistair Carmichael and david ward | 34 Comments

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

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

I 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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged facebook | 22 Comments

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:

@myshowallalong @sportrectweets #SportMinds pic.twitter.com/8xJEFEdifa

— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) March 25, 2015

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Posted in News | Also tagged featured, mental health, nick clegg and sport | Leave a comment

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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Posted in News | Also tagged inside the commons, jenny willott and social media | 54 Comments

What does the Twitter “sarcasm detector” tell us?

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

John 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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Posted in News | Also tagged john rental, the independent and they say | 1 Comment

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

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

View image | gettyimages.com

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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged humour, jeremy browne, kavya kaushik and taylor swift | 11 Comments

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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Posted in News | Also tagged derby north, general election 2015, lucy care and nus | 2 Comments

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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged nick clegg | 5 Comments

Ryland’s story – and why it’s important

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

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Posted in News | Also tagged LGBT and rylands story | 53 Comments

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.

10 Great Reasons to vote #UKIP. I don’t know who made it – so I referenced it from official #UKIP websites pic.twitter.com/GXnikZ3Blg

— Michael Abberton (@MichaelAbberton) May 5, 2014

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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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged axe of reason, digital campaigning, electoral law, julian huppert, Mark Pack and michael abberton | 8 Comments

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?

Euro elections now 3 weeks away. I’m hosting a live twitter Q&A today at 14:30. Tweet your Europe questions to @nick_clegg

— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) May 1, 2014

Posted in News | Also tagged nick clegg | 1 Comment

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’:

Read The Times interview, which is what I think, rather than The Times headline, which I didn't say and don't believe.

— Jeremy Browne (@JeremyBrowneMP) April 11, 2014

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

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Posted in News | Also tagged jeremy browne | 37 Comments

#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:

No hyperbole here as The Times anticipates #NickVNigel > "This is Godzilla versus King Kong." http://t.co/K7KCz4ve7b

— Stephen Tall (@stephentall) March 26, 2014

Won't be listening to #NickvNigel tonight because I am a ball of nerves.

— Tim Oliver (@Aremay) March 26, 2014

soooooooo excited for #NickvNigel tonight on Sky – may even get myself some popcorn. #sadandlonely

— Lizzy

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged nickvnigel and nigel farage | 3 Comments

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):

If you've got something to say, stick it in a tweet and post it on the twittosphere.

— Jeremy Browne (@JeremyBrowneMP) March 24, 2014

We 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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Posted in News | Also tagged global race and jeremy browne | 2 Comments

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