Sock Puppet Sarah Spins the Twittersphere
We’ve all heard the story; the tempting internet advances of a pretty 19 year old student called Tiffany who is open minded and very horny, but who turns out to be some morbidly obese, sweaty, cheese poof munching shut-in from Alabama…
Or was that just me? As a 39 year old IT professional I should have known better but I’m ashamed to say, I was almost taken in, almost. Her name was Sarah…
Maybe not so young and liberal minded, but famous, successful, well connected in the corridors of power, and coming to me on an oh so intimate and sincere level via her ‘personal’ Twitter feed, presenting the friendly face of No. 10 and promoting good, wholesome, and for the most part politically neutral causes, until recently that is…
Turns out that my socialist darling, the ‘Beauty’ to Gordon’s ‘Beast’, is not who I thought she was. The reality is that my darling Sarah is in fact some slimy, manipulative, Downing Street PR minion who is only interested in seeing my X on a ballot paper. (Or even worse, my Sarah IS that minion, NO!)
At around 8:00 pm Wednesday evening this tweet was issued from the SarahBrown10 Twitter account:
“SarahBrown10 http://bit.ly/c9gZlc this is just a lovely blog in memory of a much loved dad”
A quick investigation reveals that the purported ‘tribute to dad’ is in fact, (in the blogger’s own words), “about all my different interests, but mostly about politics”.
Closer inspection shows that there are indeed a LOT of politics, indeed a cursory look below the surface reveals the blog for exactly what it is; a ruthless pre election party political website in all but name, and comming from such a nice, sincere, church-going Geordie lad who “work[s] for the University of Northumbria to buy food, and sell[s] art to pay for holidays”, (and also happens to hail from that pesky, recently Lib-Dem voting social grade C1 demographic in the former Labour heart-land of North East England). I don’t know if ‘Novocastrian Rob’ is real or imagined, (if real then I’d bet my vote he’s a paid up party member and local activist), but I do know this; when I saw the Tweet and read the blog, I was actually a little bit sick into my mouth.
Bootnote:
As a Lib-Dem voting, church going, C1 Geordie lad myself I can assure the No. 10 press office that they’ve severely missed the mark on this one.
are you surprised that the PM’s wife will throw in a few party political tweets? She has over 1million followers, mostly women (ahem…), if it keeps Cameron out – good luck!
If it this was done up front I’d have no problem, and I agree with you 100% on keeping Cameron out, (although as you know I’m for seeing Labour’s wings clipped as well).
Sock puppeting, however, is another matter; it’s basically a form of low level computer fraud, potentially illegal and certainly in breach of Twitter T&Cs, (not to mention the sickening insincerity of the whole thing and general insult to the intelligence of the average voter).
I suppose after Cheri-gate we shouldn’t be surprised if the downing street press office strictly controls every keystroke of the SarahBrown10 Twitter feed, but I still can’t stomach the way in which this particular piece of PR has been so obviously engineered to deceive.