BLOGPOST: Moir and the tweet-frenzy

Posted on October 20, 2009

More has been written in the last few days about Jan Moir’s spiteful homophobic ranting than I have been able to keep track of. While the original article provoked an immediate wave of 140-character anger, the response has also included follow-up articles from the likes of (on the side of all that’s good and right) Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry, Dave Gorman and (on the side of the Ms Moir herself) Ms Moir herself, Christian Voice and… er… approximately no-one else.

Now a few people may have been surprised that the Daily Mail should print a streak of bigotry like this, but anyone who’s actually picked up a copy from time to time would surely know better. At the Mark Thomas show in Edinburgh at this year’s fringe, the audience were initially very warm to a proposal that the Mail should be legally required to print “The newspaper that supported Hitler” under its masthead each day, but in the end settled for “This is a fictional representation of the news. Any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental.”

My own experience of them is typical – denounced as “Green Threat to the Family” in big black letters on the front page just after entering Parliament, I was described as a “militant gay activist turned MSP”. Not elected of course. Turned. A few years later in the run-up to the 2007 election, I was described in their pages as the “voice of the irresponsible, left-led, anti-family, anti-Christian, gay whales against the bomb coalition”. Proudly, I memorised this on the day. Sadly I’ve never yet found a plaque long enough to have it inscribed, so I’ve had to make do with putting on my Twitter bio.

This is by no means the most hurtful that the homophobic and prurient elements in the British press see fit to print. Many people have experienced far worse, more personally targeted and painful coverage, the kind of thing which can literally wreck lives for the sake of a cheap headline or a columnist’s ego.

But what to do, what to do? The online response had a powerful and assertive mood; the more so because it was spontaneous, not orchestrated as the clearly startled Moir tried to claim. There can be no doubt about it – like the previous week’s tweet-frenzy against Trafigura, it felt good!

But what will it change? The online discussion has now broadened to consider the role of the Press Complaints Commission. But I doubt that a stonger or independent PCC would change the Mail’s overall ethos. Hatemongering hacks are given power partly by the fear-of-the-other which they deliberately engender, and partly by the readiness of many in public life to capitulate or hide from them, as in the case of Glasgow City Council and countless other examples. Either way, it’s a vicious circle.

And when we score these occasional victories against them, we quickly find ourselves drawn into another debate altogether, as those who would seek to defend bigotry do so on the basis of free speech.

It’s a spurious argument of course. If I (and a few hundred thousand other people) hear someone say something stupid and bigoted, and we point at them and should “look at the stupid bigot!”, nobody has lost their right to free speech. Quite the reverse, we have all exercised it. But I’ve found myself on the receiving end of this argument frequently, especially when pointing out specific examples of stupidity and bigotry which happen to emerge from the orifice of a member of the religious hierarchy. How dare I deny their right to free speech? Well I wouldn’t. I simply call what they said witless, or irrational, or hateful, or worse.

Yet even Channel 4 News brought these two issues together – the right to challenge bigotry and the right to free speech – when they arranged a single studio discussion to consider both the online response to Moir and the BBC’s decision to invite a Nazi onto Question Time.

In each of these three cases – Trafigura, Moir, and the BNP – we can see the interface between institutional decision makers and the public changing. The institutions, the BBC, the courts and the PCC, are different of course and each has a different degree of power and form of governance. But in each case a common challenge is going to have to be faced, whether we like the results or not.

Technology has made it possible for people to collaborate ever more easily. Now the widespread broadband and mobile internet connections which millions enjoy make it possible to collaborate with an immediacy that’s still startling in its power. Institutions which resist that change will find themselves overtaken, but those which genuinely explore the possibilities may find real advantages.

A few years ago, Demos published their ideas on the application of open source principles and methods to public policy, and to ideas like media regulation. As Eben Moglen and others have argued, the democratic collaboration which the Free and Open Source communities have demonstrated could even be applied to the legislative process.

The high uptake of instant online communication was of course initially widespread among communities of people who used the technology in their work. While they have been pioneers, I don’t expect Geek Power to take over the world (well not quite all of it) but as more and more people engage with the world around them in this instant, collaborative and dynamic way, they will increasingly expect systems of decision making to operate accordingly - and if their expectations are not met they will simply work around them and find ways to exercise their own power.

Many of the ideas the Demos paper discussed couldn’t have been realised at the time. Perhaps we’re still not ready. But something very much like them is on the way, and like a new trending topic we’ll barely even recognise it till it’s happened.

With Trafigua and Jan Moir, Twitter has shown what it can already do. I can’t wait to see what #bbcqt looks like on Thursday night.

1 Comment

1. A selection of quotes from Kate Foster’s attack on Patrick Harvie in The Scottish Daily Mail: -
   http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/articles2.cfm?ID=129

   Comment by Garry Otton — October 23, 2009 @ 4:05 pm