All of a Twitter

I tweet – rarely wisely and definitely too much. I first got a Twitter account in 2008 but couldn’t see the point of it, so I rarely used it.  Prolonged unemployment has led to me having far too much time on my hands and so the 1,000 tweet hurdle that I was so amazed to reach became 6,000 without blinking.    Being unemployed and living alone, I like engaging in banter with people– even those I hardly know. These are, for the most part, people with whom I have something in common other than just faffing about on Twitter.  Like all social medium, it has its good points and bad points.  It also has its good and bad users.  I am nowhere near either extreme, plodding along in the middle tweeting drivel which goes largely unread.

Topping the list of bad users are “trolls”.   Wikipedia (link to article) defines internet trolls as those seeking to ‘sow discord’ on the internet by posting inflammatory remarks on social sites.  In recent weeks this has been taken to extremes when a number of individuals, most hiding behind anonymous accounts, sent insulting and threatening tweets to a feminist campaigner and several female MPs who had supported a campaign for at least one woman to appear on banknotes by virtue of merit rather than merely that of birth (link to related article).  The resulting outcry against trolling called for Twitter to review its approach and response to dealing with such abusive tweets and to cooperate fully with subsequent police investigations.

 

For the most part, however, Twitter chunters along with its mish-mash of news, politics, weather, recipes, cute kitten pictures – always cute kitten pictures, and the constant drip drip drip of individuals posting inane comments– that is obviously where I come in!   The odd comment is so revered or reviled that within minutes it may ‘go viral’, with the original author helpless to stop it spreading amongst the twitter community at speeds the UK’s highly publicised, highly priced HS1 rail could only fantasise about.  The Canadian poplet, Justin Bieber, has over 43 million followers.  43  million!!  That is about 8 million more than the entire population of Canada.  If only we could find a nice little corner of the globe to put Justin and his army of fans in.  His following means that any inanity his PR crew post on little Justin’s behalf automatically goes viral.   But when the comment comes from an unsuspecting member of the public with considerably fewer followers, the backlash of such viral publicity may be hard to take and an invididual’s life can become a misery within an hour, even affecting their employability. 

In the last two days there have been a couple of such Twitter storms in the UK.  One was caused by a website and twitter account run by a small and somewhat odd organisation who hold that straight, white men are victimised by society.  A glance at the gender and ethnicity of much of the West’s ruling and wealthy classes is enough to suggest they may be a bit off target.  Twitter ridiculed them, they first responded by threatening police action, increasing both the derision and the publicity for the initial piece they were trying to suppress, they then retreated to locked accounts, defeated for the moment at least.  This phenomenon, by the way, is known as the ‘Streisand Effect’.  Aerial photos, unmarked, of Babs’ mansion were publicly available along with thousands of others along the Californian coastline.  Babs and her team launched into a legal action to supress publication of the photos.  Ironically, prior to the legal action, the photo had only received 6 views, and two of those were from her own legal team.  Following the unsuccessful suppression, the photo had 420,000 hits in one month – hence the term ‘Streisand Effect’. Apologies for digressing at length, but the fact that there was such a phenomenon and its history entertained me greatly, so I thought I would share.

The other storm was started by a 26 year old woman boasting on Twitter of her power to deprive benefits claimants of their benefits as part of her new job.  She works for a resourcing company which liaises with JobCentres to place the long-term unemployed in ‘Work Programmes’ with Amazon.  As if it wasn’t tough enough, being unemployed and on benefits, you are then subjected to the likes of Our Lady of Diets – for this young tweeter employs the moniker ‘DietQueen’.  One of her comments read  “in my new job, if people from the JC (jobcentre) don’t turn up to an appointment with me I stop their benefits for 13 weeks … suckers”.   She followed this with “I get so much pleasure knowing what I can do if the (sic) mess me around”.  Further comments along similar lines followed, including a boast of how a claimant was deprived of all his benefits following a meeting with her.  Within an hour of posting, her remarks were being retweeted and commented upon.  She shut down her account – but retweeting and screenshots means that she would be unable to take back the comments.  They are still on the internet, and still being retweeted and commented on two days later.  The morning after her comments, she was suspended by her employer, pending an investigation into the comments (link to article here). 

Two months ago I had an appointment with my MP to discuss this type of behaviour.  I asked him  to ask that the government reconsider the way in which it portrays benefits claimants, and the language that central and local government employs in its communications concering and addressed to benefits claimants, both mass communications and direct mail.  I wrote to him again after Our Lady of Diets now infamous comments. That may seem overkill to most people, but it matters to me because the unemployed are increasingly being portrayed in a negative light.  Unemployment is not a common lifestyle choice, despite what some members of the House of Commons and the media would have us believe.  Benefits are a safety net - the vast majority of those who get them, need them and do not get more than they actually need - in many cases they get far less.  It is much over-looked that for some benefits are from their own earned income, by virtue of National Insurance paid during working lives in contribution towards pensions, credits and other benefits payments.  Furthermore, many in work are on benefits, because salaries are so low in some areas and industries.  For those whose benefits are not based on their contributions, that doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled and don’t need benefits.  Unemployment is a result of the economy, it is not the result of a workshy cult who have, en masse, chosen benefits as permanent career path.  Where you do find more than one generation of a family on benefits you will also find poor education, limited life choices, poor diet and a dearth of opportunities.  The effects on morale and motivation by long-term unemployment are also much overlooked. 

Yet increasingly the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is widened by attitudes such as those witnessed in Transline’s employee of the moment.  From the top down, this country is taking a more and more negative view of the unemployed.  MPs couch it in slightly nicer terms, but the implication is clear – people in work are ‘hard-working’, have ‘values’, ‘workers not shirkers’, ‘deserving’. Those out of work have to ‘learn’ and ‘contribute’.  The onus is all on us as individuals, and is down to something within us.  Obviously the more each individual does to find a job, they more likely they will succeed, but couldn't it be better seen as a joint venture in which the more the government also does to get people into work – not just off benefits, but actually in permanent employment, the better for everyone.   The media take the disdain further, reporting with glee on heinous crimes committed by people on benefits – as if there were a clear positive correlation.  In fact in several instances, MPs and the press have cited cause and effect between benefits and crime, for example when George Osborne linked the death of 6 children who died in a deliberately started housefire with the perpetrator’s lifestyle, stating that a debate was required over ‘lifestyles like that’ (link here).  The Soham murderer was a school caretaker; the Yorkshire Ripper was a lorry driver;  I don’t remember a massive outcry against the trades in their entirety.
  

The benefit itself is called jobseekers’ allowance.  As Archbishop Welby noted in a recent radio interview, recipients are more often called scroungers (link here).    He is spot on.  Occasionally a friend or neighbour will launch into a tirade against such ‘scroungers’, then rush to assure me that they don’t mean me.   But actually, albeit unwittingly, of course they mean me, because most people on jobseekers allowance are exactly like me.  Not getting enough to live on, struggling to find work, struggling to keep motivated and look for jobs and battling this widely held myth that we are the undeserving poor.  When you complete an insurance claim, the insurance companies may pay out as little as they can get away with, but they don’t call claimants ‘scroungers’.  Jobseekers Allowance is a form of insurance claim.  Why does the general population view it so very differently from contacting Admiral or Direct Line for compensation after a car crash?

Language is a very powerful tool, as I am sure anyone who has found themselves on the receiving end of a Twitter backlash knows only too well.  They may have been idly bragging or just used a throwaway remark in jest which was ill-thought out, taken out of context or meant for one person but posted on a public site.  Twitter is not like chatting to your mates in a pub.  It is like standing in a huge stadium, taking the microphone and chatting to your mates via that.  For most of the time what you say goes unheard – even by your friends and followers.  Occasionally the lull dies down as you are about to speak and your voice is heard by a wider audience.  If it is very funny or viewed as horrendously crass and insensitive, before you know it people are standing up all over the stadium, pointing at you and shouting out your words to a wider and wider audience. 

It is an equally powerful tool when wielded against the unfortunate.  You are trying to fight your way through a similar stadium, full of people, millions of people.   You are looking for a vacancy, when you find it, you have to apply by, figuratively, trying to shout over the person standing next to the employer, shouting in his/her ear that ‘this person hasn’t worked for months, there must be something wrong’ (it’s called the economy!).  What you don’t need whilst you are battling all this is your government, the media and half the people you meet braying at you that you are a scrounger.  You particularly don't need the very person who may get you a job to see her role as validating her own self-worthy by taking the opportunity to remove your benefits.  

I would put money on it that, should Our Lady of Diets return to twitter or any other social media site, she will be wording her comments more carefully and protecting her profile more diligently. Ironically, she may herself soon be swelling the ranks of the unemployed.  The internet being what it is, cached copies of her tweets remain.  Any future potential employer is not going to have to look far to find out why she may be seeking work.  She may be lucky and find an employer who agrees with her that all benefits claimants are scroungers.  But if she is less fortunate, I hope for her sake that the DWP advisors, the outsourced recruiting agencies and the future employers aren’t as harsh on her as she has been on 2.5 million people who would actually much rather be in work.  It matters because she isn’t a lone voice and the voices are getting louder and I hear it everywhere, so I keep banging on about it.  It matters because, for most of us at least, it is widely accepted as wrong to show prejudice due to an individual's gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, so why can’t we accept such prejudice is wrong when it comes to employment status.