Fianna Failure on Twitter
by Sinéad
Twitter is a great place to share and receive information about all sorts of things and each of the users are entitled to control who sees their tweets. This is why you are able to either have a public account or private one. You are also able to block users that you don’t want seeing your tweets. However, this doesn’t work very well with public accounts because all the user has to do is sign out of Twitter and then visit your profile page to read all of your tweets, but I suppose this is pretty inconvenient, even annoying.
Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.
This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.
Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.
Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?
Comments
I’ve not had any political party block me but I have had someone claim that reading their public twitter account and commenting to others about it constituted harassing them. They went private for a while in a blaze of outrage after which they farcically claimed this reading had a political dimension before retracting that claim (when it was shown up to be baseless nonsense) in a very mealy mouthed fashion. And all this from a person that would claim some element of knowledge in this area and who is lauded as a leading light of the new media elite. So FF are really only playing catch up with some folks.
Blocking people? Seriously? They might as well nuke their account.
They really should drop the fada and go by the name Fianna FAIL. Maybe change the green to red too, with flashing red lights and an accompanying siren. I still can’t believe 1/5 of the population support these muppets.
Apparently they’ve also blocked @Paul__Duggan Who has suggested to me it was because he was @ replying them criticisms. Bad form.
Did they really think that blocking David would work? Did they think that they were sending him to some virtual Coventry where we would all ignore him? Did they actually think or is there anyone in Fianna Failure capable of thinking?
I don’t have a huge amount to add here, I just wanted to say how admirable it is that you have taken the time to do this. It’s crazy that Fianna Fáil should try to stop anyone from reading their public information, and it’s good that the interweb has the Sinéads needed to put things to rights.
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