It was the best of time and the worst of times for Twitter. Anzac Day, our most sacred day, was when ABC regular Catherine Deveny decided it would be a good idea to post a message to her 25,000 followers that alleged in language I will not repeat that Anzac Day is a celebration of a country that chose to ‘go to war. Kill, rape and invade. Then glorify it.’ In case that was too subtle, she decided to make her views clearer a little later by telling her followers to ‘Read your history. No war Australia has ever fought has resulted in our “freedom” or “opportunities”.’ Apparently freedom and opportunity would have abounded had Hitler won the second world war. I’m not sure which history books Deveny has been reading, but they must be pretty warped. It is hard to imagine a more offensive or inaccurate view of this day of national remembrance. Presumably Deveny thinks that the hundreds of thousands of men and women who were cut down in the prime of their lives so that people like herself here and elsewhere can say whatever they damn well like should not be commemorated and remembered by the generations that follow. The personal abuse directed at Deveny on the social networking site cannot be condoned, but her ridiculous and provocative statement was hardly going to be welcomed by thinking Australians who understand that Anzac Day is something uniquely Australasian in a very good way, and she gave back as good as she got. Like, I am sure, all readers of The Spectator Australia, I believe in free speech, and Deveny is perfectly entitled to be wrong. But she is a serial offender when it comes to causing outrage on Twitter, and maybe it is time for the ABC to recognise she brings very little to public debate except a desire to gain attention by offending as many people as possible.
It would be easy to use this disappointing incident to point out all the flaws in social media and lament the rise of Twitter as a form of communication. But Twitter shouldn’t be blamed for Deveny’s lack of class. There were hundreds of thousands of tweets from ordinary Australians as well as community- and opinion-leaders taking the opportunity to pay their respects through this most modern of means. For my part, I took a snap (and a good one, if I say so myself) of the sun rising over the wreath-covered memorial at St Mary’s RSL’s dawn service in Western Sydney so that my 13,000 followers could share in what I could see from my privileged front row position at the service. Both the Channel Nine and Channel Seven breakfast TV Shows were good enough to re-tweet the photo to their thousands of followers. RSL Clubs and service organisations were able to publicise the details of the services and commemorations to younger generations who get most of their information from places like Facebook and Twitter.
For us politicians, Twitter presents a conundrum. It is an opportunity for all sorts of people with strong views to publicise their full and frank character assessments of our political leaders. Many of the things said about your columnist on Twitter, particularly when he held the non-controversial immigration portfolio, are not printable in a family magazine. When you are a politician, it is not always good for your mental health to pay too much attention to what people are saying about you on Twitter. (Although one lady from Tasmania recently declared that she fancies your columnist, I cannot attest as to whether she is visually impaired.) It always amuses me that the most aggressive and offensive tweets are usually from anonymous accounts which have very few followers. The respected and thorough Leigh Sales also experienced an unacceptable Twitter tirade after a recent interview with Tony Abbott in which she was seen not to be tough enough with the Opposition leader.
Yet Twitter and other forms of social media are, all in all, a valuable addition to our democratic process. They enable people who wouldn’t normally have much access to their elected representatives to ask genuine questions or make a legitimate point. Twitter can actually be good for the quality of policy debate. Although messages are limited to 140 characters, this is enough to make a point if you are concise. Of course, links to much wordier documents can also be tweeted. It is a way for politicians and opinion-leaders of all persuasions to communicate about topics that a crowded mainstream media simply won’t cover. It can generate interesting ping-poll style debates between public figures which can be good for the public discourse. In a body politic in which voters cry out for authenticity from our political leaders, it gives politicians the chance to lighten up a little and talk about what’s on their mind in a way that they can’t in a set form interview on television, on radio or in print.
Twitter revolution is here to stay, whether we like it or not. For all its faults and its ability to offend, it still has the capacity to be a healthy development for democracy. It would be a good thing for even more politicians, commentators and thinkers to join the Twitterverse. If nothing else, it would see more contributions of a higher calibre than those of Ms Deveny.
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