Andrew Bolt - I Don't Know How Twitter Works, But Its Freedom Scares Me

 Oh yes, you do.

(quick backgrounder : Andrew Bolt is Australia's most heavily promoted Rupert Mudoch columnist. While never having used Twitter, it was decided that the #AskBolt Twitter hashtag should be used to stir up and "take on the Twitterati", and almost every Murdoch media held Twitter account began pumping out his challenge to Twitter users worldwide. In short, Bolt picked a fight with Twitter, and then hijacked the Usain Bolt #AskBolt hashtag in order to do so).

He can deny it all he wants. But The Bolt Report is an Andrew Bolt Twitter account. And it's official.

It's all a bit sad to see a once innovative political blogger so utterly lost amongst the trees when it comes to Twitter.

Boo Twitter, even though it's where a good slab of his daily blog traffic comes from these days, thanks to regular spammy-link tweeting by numerous NewsCorp automated Twitter accounts. He even has the 'Tweet Me' button on every blog post, along wth the official account for his TV show. He doesn't seem to know about that, either.

#AskBolt was an idiotic idea to begin with, promoting someone who doesn't use Twitter on Twitter, with 'Come And Get Me!' tweets like "Bolt Takes On The Twitterati!"

#AskBolt was a Fukushima-scale social media disaster.

There's no way around it. Even people who had previously used the #AskBolt hashtag to say hello to the incredible sprinter Usain Bolt joined in when they discovered some idiot from Australia  had hijacked their hero's hashtag.

#AskBolt made Andrew Bolt a Twitter pinnata. People who had never even heard of this goose from down under were weeping with laughter at the constant stream of 98% inane, and more the point, non-abusive, tweets that swept #AskBolt into the Top Trending Topics in a host of countries around the world.

Nobody on Twitter had seen anything like it.

For the love of FailWhale, you don't hijack established hashtags. Particularly when you don't use Twitter in the first place.

Mindblowing. What the hell were they thinking?

But Andrew Bolt knows what's going on.

It was all a big Australian Labor Conspiracy.

Really. Hard Leftists, you see, control the Twitternets.

Bolt also seems completely unaware that the Daily Telegraph tried to promote #AskBolt on Facebook as well. Hundreds of people mocked him in commemts and shares. Whether the Daily Telegraph Facebook moderator was laughing too hard to delete any, or whether nobody actually moderates the page, who knows? But the ridicule came thick and fast there, too.

Andrew Bolt doesn't use Facebook either.

 


Hard Leftists control Facebook, too, presumably.

Here he is having a spit after discovering just how much of a social media disaster, and wider public spectacle, #AskBot was becoming.



This is how he reported on himself in the Herald Sun:



Just fantastic the way the link for tweeting Andrew Bolt's column onto Twitter lines up perfectly with this:

"I took a dip in Twitter this week, and understand even better how Labor got flushed away in a sewer of hate.

"How could Labor - and many journalists - disastrously mistake Twitter for the real world?"

The real world, you see, isn't millions of people in more than 100 hundred countries around the world communicating freely and sharing information, ideas and quality knowledge, without paywalls.

The Raal World, apparently, is Andrew Bolt's BlogWorld, where you have to register to "join in the debate" and where he bans commenters who hit to close the bone.

"(#AskBolt) electrified the Twittersphere. For hours the topic trended as Leftists, many anonymous, competed to ask me - the Great Satan of Conservatism - the worst, silliest or most abusive questions on the #askbolt hashtag.

"Fairfax newspapers thought this was sensational news."

It wasn't sensational, but it was idiotic enough a move to warrant media attention.

After all, Andrew Bolt is constantly demanding the rest of the media and the general Australian public pay attention to him, and exercise their right to free speech.

Clearly Bolt now has his limits, on both

"Gosh, hold the presses. No, wait, they're slowing already at Fairfax and no wonder, if recycling playground taunts by anonymous tweeters now passes for news reporting."

Miaow. Poor Andrew. He doesn't even know Murdoch's newspaper operation has lost more recently than Fairfax.

"In fact, to be attacked on Twitter is no news to a conservative.

"Twitter skews hard to the Left..."

 Twitter refused to take him seriously. 

"Twitter also seems to bring out the worst in users."

 Twitter isn't a bubble.

"Maybe it's the relative youth of tweeters, and the anonymity of many. Maybe it's because hate tends to sell best in the look-at-me Twittersphere."

He has his own TV show. About His Opinions.

"Or maybe it's because Twitter appeals to the impulsive sensation junkies eager to instantly broadcast their most idle thought..."

This a person who has often published more than a dozen blog posts in a single day.

Now onto the Great Australian Labor Twitter Conspiracy.

"But here's the bizarre thing: this is the audience Labor thought could save it.

"This is the crowd Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to impress by tweeting a picture of his shaving cut to his 1.4 million followers, thus confusing the magpie attention of tweeters with respect from very real and unimpressed voters.

"But Julia Gillard as prime minister had an even more fatal attraction to Twitter.

"Her infamous misogyny speech last year - falsely branding Abbott a woman-hater - was rightly seen at first by most commentators as a hate-filled rant that would appal many Australians."

What was Bolt saying before about people ranting like arseholes?

"But Gillard's communications director, John McTernan, eventually convinced press gallery journalists it was a success because it had gone viral on social media, including Twitter."

Gillard's speech was viewed by millions across the planet, within days. A political speech. Viewed by millions. That wasn't JFK, Obama or MLK.

That's pretty fucking viral. 

"And so Gillard, convinced by tweets and blog posts, doubled down on her politics of division, pitting women against men, workers against bosses."

Oh Twitter, is there nothing you can't do?

"Stirring hatred may indeed light up the Twittersphere but it makes the world outside your window feel sick."

Eh?

"But it's no surprise if Twitter's culture has spilled out of the internet sewers and now floods media offices.

"No surprise, when Channel 10's Paul Bongiorno retweets Mike Carlton who retweets Rudd's daughter, Jessica, who retweets Channel 10's Charlie Pickering who retweets blogger Mia Freedman who retweets the ABC's Leigh Sales who retweets her boss, Mark Scott, who retweets his presenter, Jonathan Green, who retweets John McTernan who retweets the ABC's Mark Colvin who retweets Marieke Hardy who retweets Mike Carlton who . . .

"And on it flows, a steady stream of hate, flushing the feckless with it. Labor, too."

Andrew Bolt doesn't mention, of course, the numerous automated Twitter accounts operated by NewsCorp retweeting his every blog post intro, around the clock.

You see, mere mortal journalists have to tweet links to their own stories themselves, and try and get people to read their work. Pumping their stories on social media is expected of almost every working journalist today.

But not the Mighty Bolt.

He wouldn't lower himself to using Twitter.

He has others to do it for him.

One of the last of Murdoch's protected species.

 
And just because it's funny, here's Bolt flipping out at others doing what he does almost daily, taking someone's gaffe or misspeak and using it over and over and over again.



He's just so precious.

ENCORE: Andrew Bolt didn't always think Twitter was a sewer. When Rupert Murdoch dived into Twitter, Bolt called it the "coolest new medium."

The Tinfoil Is Causing The Microphone To Feedback

Over the past few weeks, Andrew Bolt on Twitter has been undergoing what can only be described as a rapid descent into utter paranoia. Signs of trouble began a month ago, and have culminated in the past few days with an obsessive focus on the allegedly Pagan Lefty-Infiltrated national broadcaster he is forced to pay for :

"I am weeping tears of patriotism."

"Racism only exists towards oppressed white men like me."

"The ABC took my chair. What next? Are they going to take my pants?"

"There's a black van over the road from my house. The ABC are spying on me! This tinfoil headgear will protect my thoughts."

"Bet you don't know what I'm thinking now, Tony Jones. Kerry O'Brien, go and invade someone else's mind."

"Pulled down office blinds so ABC helicopters can't spy. Turned off lights. Kerry O'Brien has X-ray vision...."

"Protection from thought control is doubled if I wrap my body in tinfoil..."

I tried to explain to him the claims that tinfoil can protect against remote mind surveillance are actually part of the mind control conspiracy, and that tin foil instead helps to focus and increase the power of mind-invading psychotronic weapons.

But he didn't listen.

So naturally, seeing as he's now clad from head to toe in tinfoil, totally beset by conspiracies about Pagan Lefty Warminista Globalist World Government and ranting paranoidly about the ABC, Andrew Bolt On Twitter wins himself an invitation to speak at the Young Liberal Nationals of Queensland convention.




Invitation Accepted


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We Have To Know Who You Are

By Darryl Mason

There was a can of Dulux paint on a white rectangle stand in the Museum of Contemporary Art. It looked like it had been left there by whoever rolled on the wall's most recent coat of paint. But no.

The Can was Art.

It had a guard.

The crowd gathered in a wing of the MCA to hear, because most couldn't see, a seated debate on Blogging Versus Journalism, with mandatory humming microphone, were hardly likely to start kicking over artworks and trashing installations, but the Can of Paint had its own security guard. Apparently they were worried about the exhibit being "Jostled".

As the afternoon debate wore on, more guards arrived to erect a little security zone around the Can of Paint.

It was hard to concentrate on the debate itself. The action around the Can of Paint was fascinating, sometimes downright hypnotic.

As debater Margo Kingston explained how she had been "broken" by her correspondent work covering the first rise of Pauline Hanson, a gaggle of Japanese tourists walked past the debate and headed for the Can.

They drawn to it, like I was.

One of the younger tourists couldn't resist. He reached for the Can. Two security guards intervened, silently. The tourists left.

The debate continued. Margo Kingston revealed that the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeogh had either got her into journalism or got her into blogging, it might have been both. She said McGeogh was in the room. Which one is he? There's easy a dozen aging men in the room who could pass for McGeogh. I depleted the targets in a visual search of the crowd by only looking for McGeoghs who looked like they seen some of the most goddawful fucking shit no-one could ever imagine in some foreign hell war zone, but there were at least six who could have passed for...there was more action at the Can of Paint.

Another clutter of tourists who were also totally ignorant of the hundred or so people and five debaters they were all quietly listening to, headed for the Dulux. This is the problem of holding a debate in an open, functioning wing of a popular museum dead centre in a major tourist zone.

The atmosphere was all wrong. It was too clinical, the room was too white, all the bloggers should have been standing, it would have been better in a pub, you needed at least one big drink to get through 90 minutes of it. Maybe it needed an element of bingo or something. Every time a debater finished a statement, they called out a number.

And it was all so polite. The heated argument count was zero. Debaters Tim Blair and Antony Lowenstein met before the debate and greeted each other pleasantly.

What? No chair throwing?

I thought there was supposed to be at least half-a-bogan amongst the debaters to get some trouble started, to fire it all up. Alas, no.

It grew increasingly difficult to concentrate on the quiet debate.

I kept getting distracted thinking about what would have happened if Channel Nine and the Murdoch media already had a pay-per-story or video viewing debit system in place, as their owners dream they one day will, all through the hilarious Chk Chk Boom! Suckers!' fakery.

What would happen now the story has been revealed as fake if hundreds of thousands of paying users had coughed about four or five digital dollars each to watch a couple of Clare "Two Wogs Fighting" videos and read a half dozen stories over a few days?

The story wasn't real. Consumers would have paid for fictitious news. How would the media companies repay all they had cheated with this fluff? How often could they get away with it? Would a future where fake news stories are more popular than real ones, and more essentially profitable, come into reality?

If they sell you news and it turns out to be fake, or worse, it turns out they knew at some point before they stopped selling it that the story was not what it seemed, or what was originally pitched through headlines, will everyone who paid actually want a refund, even if its offered? Will they care if the fluff is entertaining and distracting enough?

Debater Tim Blair, of the Daily Telegraph, raised the intensity level of the debate to just above tepid when he took a ridiculous blog killing idea out for a bit of a spin in front of whoever all those people were.

He sounded enthusiastic about the day when all comments on blogs will herald the name of the person who posted it.

In short, the age of anonymous commenting comes to an end, on all blogs, not just his own.

It's a strange thing for someone working at a media organisation that is now relying on the thousands of mostly anonymous-posted comments that appear each day across its blogs, its news stories, to keep the online business model healthy to come out and champion. Online news sites needs comments, lots of them, and most of them are anonymous.

And it was slightly surreal that someone already caught up in a dodgy blog comments-related controversy was actually saying doing away with anonymous commenting would solve many of the problems bloggers face with the comments that sometimes pour into, or out of, their blogs.

Some problems might be solved for Blair with mandatory online ID.

Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

If there was an online equivalent of the photo ID, at a guess, I'd say there'd be about 60% less comments on news stories at all of Murdoch's online media. About the same across most of its blogs, probably 80% less comments overall at Andrew Bolt's, and that's not good news. Heavy comment volumes help pay the bills.

Imagine if all those Liberal Party staffers had to hail Peter Costello and rail against Malcolm Turnbull under their real names?

People thoroughly enjoy anonymous commenting. Obviously. It's why it's so popular.

People love making up a fake online identity and calling themselves a twisted moniker of a childhood superhero or their pet's name, or something ordinary like WB, for example, or something weird but catchy like Startled Rabbit In The Headlights. There usually is no consequence for comments made that are not under your own name.

It becomes a different game altogether in a reality of mandatory online ID when every time you read something at 1am, hammered, and you cut loose at some blog about it, go off, your full name permanently imprinted in online archives above some crazed screed, mostly regrettable virtriol, demented thoughts and nerve-shredding opinions, occasional but plentiful abuse. All of it under your own name, accessible by Google.

Commenting at blogs, and now commenting under certain news stories, is popular because it can be done anonymously, without leaving too much of a trace behind. Take away the anonymity, and the comment counts will plunge, instantly.

Every blogger with a healthy roll call of anonymous commenters knows that.

Anonymity sparks not only creativity, but honesty. People lose passion when what they've got to say has to be said under their own name, forever.

And mandatory online ID would mean that holding fake online identities for the purpose of commenting regularly across blogs you love, and those that really make you swear, out loud, but you can't stop reading, that would no longer be legal.

But why should a thought, a bunch of fascinating facts, a torrent of grinding aggro, or a brain steaming opinion, have to be attached to a person's name or identity anyway?

I'm not sure that most people over 40 comprehend how many in the generation growing up online view the ability to comment anonymously, under an alias, or a festival of fictitious avatars.

They're not hiding. It doesn't matter.

It's not who said That Great Thing that is important anymore, if it ever was at all. The identity can never be fully trusted anyway, so it doesn't matter who posted the comment that makes a hundred other regular commenters at a blog or forum flip out and go nuts..

The only thing that matters is what has been said.

The most wild, but true, fact wins.

The funniest line wins.

The most spectacular leaking of explosive secret government documents wins.

The sharpest observation wins.

The clearest 30 word explanation of the most complex news stories or world events wins.

The most apoplectic but hilarious tirade of abuse wins.

Ideas win.

Not personalities, or even a person, certainly not a name.

It's the words, the ideas, that matter.

Nothing more.

All of that, most of that, it goes when mandatory ID is required to step into blog clubs to air your views, or to even add a mild voice of dissent to the online groupthink roar about the latest shocking news event.

Killing Anonymity Kills Comments.

It's that simple.

Before I left the museum I decided to try and get a photo of the Can of Paint on a White Stand with a Security Guard.

But the Security Guard said no.

I left, I didn't want any trouble.

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