Dec 17, 2009

Nadine Dorries claims satire to be an obstacle to democracy

What a load of unmitigated bullshit from Nadine Dorries this morning:



Nadine Dorries is spreading outright falsehoods in a pathetic attempt to mobilise pro-democracy forces in her favour.

1. No, she's not allowed to pass herself off as an MP during the election, so she probably will have to change her current URL of twitter.com/NadineDorriesMP if she seriously wants to engage via Twitter during an election (which I consider to be unlikely, as she is already notorious for failing to engage on Twitter on a day-to-day basis). At any time she can keep the same account and simply switch her URL to 'http://twitter.com/NadineDorries4MP' or something similar, just as Kerry McCarthy and other less-hysterical MPs have decided to do.

2. Even if this were as big an issue as she makes it out to be, the unavailability of ideal account names is not an impediment to the actual act of tweeting, especially when she can take all of her existing remaining followers with her to any available location she chooses. Nobody has robbed her of the capacity to exercise her democratic anything.

3. There is at present no account live for twitter.com/NadineDorries - there was an account live there at one stage (no, I don't know who was behind it) - but Dorries appears to have taken action that led to its closure, by claiming impersonation (something that Twitter does not allow). She's failed to manage that with twitter.com/Nadine_Dorries, the account under my control, because it is clearly satire.

4. She thinks she can use the old 'no names' trick to avoid a charge of libel, but there's only one 'nadine dorries' account on Twitter at present that uses her name in the URL... mine. I am not a 'Labour supporter' and Nadine is using the 'obsessed' tag after a series of earlier tweets accusing me of being mentally unstable. As for my being 'sad', well that depends on which definition of the word you use, but I can tell you that I'm not happy that an MP would think libel to be an appropriate response to satire.

5. Still, I can understand why she'd want to lash out (again) while avoiding any mention (again) of what's really put the wind up her skirt:

Conservative Change Channel - Rupert Murdoch and other great Australians


No comments: