Cameron’s Twitter edicts
According to Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times last weekend, David Cameron is insisting on vetting all Tory party tweets before they are published. He’s running scared that someone might tweet about something which would be off message and cause controversy.
If the story is true, I can understand Cameron’s concerns. However, it is disappointing that the political parties are not appearing to make more of an effort to engage with people through social media in order to discuss ideas.
I watched an interesting BBC programme over the weekend called The Virtual Revolution which looked at how social media is challenging repressive political regimes. Commentators suggested that new models of democracy could emerge through the use of social media tools. Access to new ideas through social media could act as a catalyst for political change, some suggested.
It is a shame that Cameron is not embracing social media in a more fundamental way to engage with people to discuss ideas about the kind of society we want to have and how it could best be governed, rather than focusing too much on a few potentially rogue Tory MPs and their tweets.
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