Twitter

This feature is a preview from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow: I am sure we’re all in agreement that watching videos of adults abusing children is wrong. At least outside the halls of BBC light entertainment (historically speaking) such a consensus must exist. So how has it become not just right, but seemingly virtuous, to watch and then promote pictures of big bearded men chopping off children’s heads? The proliferation of torture and beheading porn is one of the social media horrors of our day. Every minute millions of people around the world send links to videos and photographs. And as world news gets darker, even if you don’t seek

Feminism in modern Britain is not for the faint-hearted. Only the smartest, mouthiest girls on the social media scene dare join the fray — in print, in blogs, on Twitter — where they yell silently at each other in front of a mute but poisonous audience. It often seems not so much a fight for ladies’ rights as for territory: Caitlin Moran, Lily Allen, Laurie Penny, all jostling to own each particular piece of feminist turf. So it pleases me, secretly, that quite unnoticed by the Twitter girls, another woman’s voice, one that speaks aloud to millions every day, has done more (I suspect) to advance equality than the whole

Oh come on internet. Pull yourself together. Michael Fabricant has tweeted about punching a woman and people are going mad. It’s a silly thing to tweet, but does anyone doubt that? It’s simply hyperbole, flounce, floridity. That’s sometimes what it takes to get noticed on Twitter. Plenty of people are guilty of this trope. Let’s not pay them too much attention. But let’s not also drag this out into a discussion about violence against women. Victims of abuse must find this sort of storm very frustrating – I imagine most men who actually punch women probably don’t tweet about it.

The social media exchanges of British jihadis in Syria and Iraq, as just revealed, are perfectly riveting, don’t you think? Fancy worrying about things like where to leave your luggage and internet connections when you’re a jihadi. There’s scope here for TripAdviser. But when it comes to jihadists from Britain, I’d rather like a bit more pertinent information about them than their currency exchange problems. I rather get the impression it’s BBC policy to describe the Brits fighting for ISIS and similar just as British citizens, or Britons, presumably on the basis that to describe them as being something like ‘of Pakistani/Nigerian/Syrian origin’ would invidiously distinguish between one citizen and

I expect all of us have said something we regret at one time or another, but not everyone does so in front of 1.5 million people. That was my misfortune when I was caught off guard by an interviewer for ITN on my way out of a television studio in Westminster on Sunday. I’d just done a review of the morning’s papers on Murnaghan and was feeling rather chipper on account of the exchange I’d just had with Diane Abbott about Labour’s electoral chances. Live on air, I offered to bet her £100 that Ed Miliband wouldn’t win the election and, to my delight, she refused to take it. ‘I

The other day, I got an email advertising ‘miracle’ weight loss. You know the sort: English as defined by Boggle and no way on earth that anyone would ever buy the product in question. I opened it without thinking, and was redirected to a blank page. Within minutes, my Hotmail, Twitter and WordPress accounts had gone haywire; I stared at my computer screen as the original message replicated itself and fired off to every single one of my contacts. My groan lasted about 20 minutes: why, I asked myself, would anyone bother doing this to me? It turned out I’d been hacked on a convenient anniversary. In April 1994, two

‘I am ceasing to tweet’ wrote Matthew Parris in The Times this morning. ‘Life’s too short,’ he said. ‘Reluctantly last year I was persuaded to venture into the twittersphere; and built a herd of followers; but (as Milton might have tweeted) the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.’ So what happened? It seems that Parris objects to the colonisation of Twitter by the global PR machine: ‘If you’re commissioned to write something these days, or perform in a debate, or whatever, the client emails asking you to tweet that you’ll be doing it, or have done it, or re-tweet someone else’s reference to it, or tweet positively about

There are two major schools of technology investing. The first believes that all investments these days are fundamentally technology investments. Every big company relies to a greater or lesser degree on the innovations and efficiencies of technology to replace the high costs and laggardly habits of human beings. The faster they do this, the higher their returns. The second school covets the pop and fizz of the new. It rejects the tedium of earnings-based valuations in favour of the helium of potential. It piles into the latest new share offerings and regards Twitter as the future of mobile advertising, not a punchline. One school feels like traditional, copper-bottomed investing, the

Shortly after Bob Crow’s death was announced on Tuesday, Nigel Farage sent the following tweet: ‘Sad at the death of Bob Crow. I liked him and he also realised working-class people were having their chances damaged by the EU.’ Cue a predictable storm of Twitter outrage. Farage was attacked for trying to make political capital out of Crow’s death. The following tweet, from the ex-FT journalist Ben Fenton, was typical: ‘Bit off-key for @Nigel_Farage to link a tribute to Bob Crow to his own anti-EU rhetoric, I think.’ Now, some of those criticising Farage had a political axe to grind. They were claiming Farage had broken an unwritten rule that

With regard to modern technology, I find that people of around my age — by which I mean people in their seventies or over — are divided into two camps. There are those who have embraced the digital revolution with embarrassing enthusiasm, knowing much more about it than it is decent to know; and then there are those who, almost as embarrassingly, take pride in knowing nothing about it whatsoever. The former seem determined to show that they are not past it, that they are in tune with the modern world, and, like teenagers, are never parted from their computers, emailing and tweeting as the day is long. The latter

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of

It’s amusing to see serious journalists and authors struggling to use Twitter under instruction from their newspapers and publishers. They realise they lose dignity by condensing their great thoughts into a mere 140 characters: it is inevitable, whoever you are. Imagine Jesus had been obliged by his Father to tweet. It just wouldn’t have been the same: ‘Might be a bit short of loaves and fishes on the mt today. Take a miracle to feed everyone!’ or ‘Great supper with the lads tonight — worried that tomoro might not go so well. #nastyfeeling’ This year the referendum on Scottish independence takes place at last. Oh, please, may the Scots vote

It’s become a given: we are all stalkers now. Thanks to Google, Twitter, Facebook and the fact that absolutely nobody seems to have the faintest idea about privacy settings, it is easier to keep track of people on the other side of the world than ever it was to snoop on a village neighbour from behind the safety of a lace curtain. But a strange and sinister new phenomenon has begun to emerge. Call it secondary stalking. Even the stalkers are being stalked now. This was brought home to me the other night when I was having dinner with one of my closest friends, who I will call Andrew (gay,

Are the police wasting too much time on Twitter instead of catching criminals? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick Cohen looks at what Britain’s fall in crime has done to policing methods. Is the fall responsible for the police’s heightened in what people say on social media? What does this mean for our civil liberties and freedom of speech? Consultant NHS surgeon J. Meirion Thomas also joins to explain how The Spectator helped blow the whistle on health tourism abuses. Will the government’s plans to tackle systematic abuses by migrants work? How much effect will the levy on students and temporary visitors have? Are the figures quoted by the Department of