How should Politicians use Twitter?

I have been somewhat fascinated by the whole Diane Abbott affaire over the last 24 hours or so. A brief history - Diane is a black, female UK MP whose roots are in the Old Left Labour party of the 1980's, and she was having a debate over Twitter with Grauniad journo Bim Adewunmi, who has summed it up as follows:

In the course of tweeting the events around the trial, conviction and sentencing of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, I wrote: "I do wish everyone would stop saying 'the black community' though." I expanded in a followup: "Clarifying my 'black community' tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for 'black community leaders'. This led to a reply from my local MP Diane Abbott, in which she said: "I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda."

We went back and forth for a few tweets more and then Abbott sent out the tweet that caused the furore: "White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism." Nothing much happened, until late night, when I began to get a flurry of replies from non-followers. On Thursday morning, MP Louise Mensch retweeted it with her addendum: "you what? <~~~ #racism". Abbott has since apologised and Thursday afternoon deleted the tweet. The remainder of our conversation is still on Twitter.

I had a look at what she actually said on Twitter (given that it was clear that opinions on what she said were polarising along various party lines) and it was:

@bimadew I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda.

@bimadew Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

@StephanieBusari @bimadew I am not talking cultural differences. I am talking political tactics. #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism (This was the one that was accused of being racist and was deleted)

Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters.

The racist accusation was when she used the term "white people", or rather when it was taken (expurgated of the #tacticasoldascolonialism) out of context by her opponents. As you can see from the overall context, the discussion is more nuanced, and its fairly clear what she is getting at. But it has caused a massive hue and cry, and sadly for Diane, as she has pulled exactly this sort of trick before herself, so her opponents have been queueing up to take revenge shots at her. IMO the best summary as to the "why" is the New Statesman:

Let's call this what it is. It's pretending. It's not genuinely being offended. It's artifice, completely made up in order to get a bit of publicity for people's vexatiously contrarian columns and to get their godawful faces on television. If you're genuinely wounded by Diane Abbott's comments, I pity you. You're beyond saving. It's a wonder we white people manage to stay in control of everything in the world ever if we're so bloody sensitive -- we should be sitting in a cupboard crying all day about what the nasty lady said about us. But it's not genuine hurt; it's the sensing of a mistake by a political rival, and the careful depiction of a representation of what these woeful human beings think being offended actually is, in order to capitalise on that.

That one's political opponents should be so cynical as to pull one down and then kick while one is down is so upsetting....in calmer momenets Diane may reflect on this being a karma moment

Labour Party boss Ed Milliband made her apologise, but then stepped on a landmine himself when he tweeted

"Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters."

The message was hastily deleted, and re-written to correctly refer to the 1980s trivia quiz as "Blockbusters", but there is now a #blackbusters hashtagfussfest deriding poor Mr Milliband.

To me, the lessons here are 4-fold:

Firstly, Twitter is a very bad tool to have any nuanced discussion on.

Secondly, Your opponents will gleefully seize on any phrase and edit it to suit their purposes of attacking you (that's par for the curse), but it is so much easier not to see (deliberately or no) the nuances of an argument of a few twts, compared to something with more words in it - even an interview transcript on TV would have more opportunity for Ms Abbott to argue she was misunderstood.

Thirdly, a slip (freudian or otherwise) can undo weeks, if not months of careful PR image building and lead to a story out of nothing like #blackbusters

Fourthly, once out the story metamorphoses into a metastory - no one is taking about what Ms Abbott or Mr Milliband actually said now, its all about being racist or foolish, so no amount of Spin Doctoring can put these back in their boxes, they will just have to wait out the storm

There is no doubt that Twitter is a great tool for a politician to reach their audience, but the lesson here is that it has asymmetric risks (ie a small slip can cause a huge fall) when dealing with anything nuanced or sensitive, and Twitter - in my opinion - is better used as a means to point to something more nuanced elsewhere' like on a blog post, Facebook page or similar.

I am reminded of Nicholas Taleb's term Black Swan - the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology - in this case. The downside of one unfortunate slip like this undoes a lot of good work. And when a Black swan falls, the vultures will always circle.....