UK Independence Party candidate for Rochford and Southend East James Moyies has utilised social networking site Twitter to raise the profile of the UKIP campaign in the run up to the European elections on 4th June.
Politicians all over the country have been jumping at the chance to use the microblogging site to connect with the electorate. In April, Parliament’s very own Twitter site www.tweetminster.co.uk was set up by Alberto Nardelli, who claimed that the site would help voters “gain a greater insight into the lives of people that make up UK politics.”
Alternatively, Tweetminster could be used as yet another avenue for politicians to bombard internet users with party messages, but this should come as no surprise. For James Moyies, however, Twitter seems to be backfiring a little.
Whilst Moyies has used the site to discuss the progress of UKIP in the local area, his Twitterfeed – the constantly-updated stream of posts he creates – alludes to criticism from other Twitter users.
A leisurely scroll through Moyies’ page reveals increasingly angry comments at other users who have criticised UKIP on one policy or another.
Gary Williams, CEO of charity Soundseekers (providing facilities for deaf and hard-of-hearing people) received a snappy telling off from Moyies, who posted “shame on you! Why are you telling lies?” after Williams made references to UKIP’s appearances on TV over the past few weeks.
According to Moyies, there has been quite a bit of fibbing on Twitter. He accuses Gordon Hodgeson, Eudinburgh Green Party activist, Rupert Read, Green Councillor in Norwich, and EU09TwitLife, an EU election twitter service, of lying about UKIP as well.
This aside, Moyies’ tweeting is full of insults to other users. He refers to other users as “dimwits”, “Mr Pedantic”, “stupid boy”, “immature”, “infantile” and “you strangely violated person” when they challenge his views or statistics.
To add further to the bizarrely negative image the tweeting creates, Moyies presents readers with inconsistencies. A post from 16th May, for example, reads “It encourages me that every attack on UKIP uses swear words and infantile toilet humour. The potty mouths have lost the argument.”
Further on in the week, however, Moyies indulges in a little lavatorial word-play himself, saying:
“The parliamentary expense cistern [sic] is seemingly what needs sorting. Flush it out and get rid of the Brown stuff.”
It seems that Moyies hasn’t really got the ethos of Twitter down. The idea of Twitter is to use the short space available for posting to create pithy comments that will amuse, entertain or inform other users, or post quick links to interesting stuff online.
So far, Moyies seems to have used it mostly to hurl abuse at other users, or endlessly post the same three statistics: “EU costs UK £40M a day, imposes 75% of our law, & allows unlimited immigration” (tweeted 10 times in the last week). From the looks of things, it doesn’t seem like Moyies, despite his 2,000 followers, will be rivalling Twitter heroes like Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher any time soon.
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