Tweet in haste and repent at leisure

Olivia Cole
16 Nov 2009

The other week I heard Stephen Fry speak at a fundraiser at the Criterion Theatre.

Twitter is "the voice of the people," he opined, a revolutionary, democratic force: "Edmund Burke termed journalists the fourth estate Twitter is the fifth estate."

Just weeks later, one complaint that his tweets were 'a bit ... boring' and he'd thrown his cyber toys out of the pram and professed he would tweet to his 800,000 followers no more.

At 6am, Fry tweeted: 'Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it's been fun."

Within 12 hours, though, bashful and blushing, he was back with his nearly hourly update on life, love and what he had for breakfast.

Fry is just one of a number who have discovered that you can tweet in haste only to repent at leisure, and at the rest of the world's leisure too, as historic tweets are harder to get rid of than nuclear waste.

Late-night or ill-thought-out tweets are the cyber equivalent of drunken dialling.

Despite the inherent risk, the Labour party now has a "twitter tsar", Kerry McCarthy MP.

Her tag denotes the seriousness with which politicians have embraced Twitter's 24/7 opportunity to listen the sound of their own tweets and engage with voters.

Over at the Tory party, The Spectator's diary of a Notting Hill nobody, the satirical diary of a Conservative minion, reports that all MPs are supposed to spend three hours a day on Facebook and a further three on Twitter.

Parties might want us to see their tweeting members as spontaneous and modern, but the freedom allowed by constant tweeting can be disastrous.

McCarthy reacted to news that the Sun would be supporting Cameron with the following tweet: "Labour doesn't need The Sun. We've got Twitter ..." only to backtrack furiously.

The most regretted tweet of all made a front-page political row. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw gave a kneejerk twitter response to David Cameron's conference speech.

Within minutes he tweeted about his attack on "big government", seeming to imply that Cameron and his family had big government to thank for the care their late son Ivan received in the hands of the NHS.

The times of Bradshaw's tweets, too (a veritable dawn chorus), are extraordinary. He regularly tweets at midnight, one, two and five, from his mobile.

Give me a minister who sleeps with his BlackBerry under his pillow, and is prone to insomniac tweeting, and I'll give you a well behaved politico metamorphosing into a Prince Philip- style gaffe machine.

Last month, American pop poppet Miley Cyrus quit Twitter with the devastating insight that her tweets were fuelling gossip magazines.

She rapped: "I want my private life private ... Everything that I type and everything that I do/All those lame gossip sites take it and they make it news." You think?

Similarly, the sober but still tweet-prone Sadie Frost writes in detail about her life at all times of day and night, and yet also recently pondered: "Thinking Twitter attracts too many weirdos."

But be you a minister or celebrity, help is at hand. Online store Zappos recently filmed an ad campaign offering help for addicts: "Don't Drunk Twitter" is the message. "So you've had a long day at work, you come home, you kick back, twitter while drunk maybe you write about how you're still in love with your ex-girlfriend, that's fun right? Wrong"

Take inspiration from ex-addict Lily Allen, who left her 1.6 million followers behind with the immortal tweet: "I am a neo-luddite, good bye."