Crikey

Twitter users, ever DMd someone only to realise that you’ve broadcast it?  Left off that crucial ‘D’?  Hit ‘reply’ instead of ‘direct message’?

Okay, everyone put their hands down. Such mis-tweets can be painfully embarrassing for ordinary punters suddenly sharing personal details or defamatory statements with the world.  A bit like the trouble we used to have in the 1990s with hitting ‘reply all’ instead of ‘reply’ in that now fossilised medium, email.

Thus NSW opposition leader Barry O’Farrell’s “deeply off the record” message to the world this morning in reply to a journalist: “I think the timetable & struggle to get candidates reflects internal poll - pre & post the ranga”.  O’Farrell, presumably now deeply sorry he’d publicly reflected on the quality of Liberal candidates and their chances at the coming election, quickly deleted the tweet. But it had already been re-tweeted by several followers and blogger Ben Raue took a screenshot and tweeted it to create what one prize idiot — okay, me — dubbed #rangagate.

Politicians and Twitter have already proved a dangerous combination. While journalists are all for politicians to 1. get on Twitter and 2. use it for more than just issuing press releases, they swoop when anything faintly controversial appears on a politician’s Twitter feed, creating the same dynamic as applies to other media — the press demands ‘authenticity’ from MPs but attacks any deviation from a bland set of talking points as evidence of disunity and non-adherence to Australian values.

O’Farrell’s not-uncommon error was compounded by the fact that despite deletion, tweets will continue to appear, if not necessarily in your own feed. Twitter itself says that deleting a tweet means: “Voila! Gone forever…almost. Deleted updates sometimes hang out in Twitter search. They will clear with time.”

“With time” means quite a while. Despite deletion, as of writing, O’Farrell’s gaffe was still appearing in Twitter search, and could still be retweeted. Endless retweeting by, at most recent count, 50 others, means it has taken on a life of its own anyway, like those endlessly-forwarded emails a decade ago that detailed some work colleague’s, usually sexual, embarrassment and proceeded to circle the globe in an ever-expanding circles of profound, worldwide humiliation for the original subject. The loss of control, once something escapes into cyberspace, is complete.

Emails, though, only have a limited circulation until someone sticks the contents on a webpage where they can be searched for and viewed. Twitter’s ‘killer app’ is that is it both a direct communication and a broadcast medium at the same time, with a tiny slice of screen space separating the one from the other. O’Farrell, like Catherine Deveny and previous Twitter victims, can take solace in the fact that he won’t be the last to humiliate himself in 140 characters or less.

And O’Farrell, unlike most tweeting MPs, actually interacts with people on Twitter and uses it for more than issuing bland talking points or links to press releases. Hopefully he’ll keep it up — but just be more careful about his DMs in the future.