Twitter versus the Telegraph: you can’t stop the lulz
A fair amount of amusement online today, as the Telegraph decided to embed a Twitterfall in the sidebar of their dedicated page for Wednesday’s budget, showing tweets with budget-related keywords. Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone tested out what they could get onto the page… in this case, it seems to have been my internet pal Joe, who asked the pertinent question:
Very quickly, people caught on, and soon enough the Telegraph’s budget page had a sidebar filled with people making jokes, insulting the Telegraph, doing swears and dropping in various bits of absurdist nonsense (my personal favourite being this.)
Within an hour or so, the Telegraph twigged, and took the Twitterfall down. The general consensus seemed to be that it was an embarrassing cock-up on the Telegraph’s part, a failed attempt to be down with the kids. That side of things was summed up quite well by Josh Millard (aka cortex) in a now-deleted MetaFilter thread:
Totally unmoderated and unfiltered streams of publicly-authored/-editable info is not something you endorse if you’re in the business of presenting filtered and moderated info. It’s not rocket science; this is basic stuff.
Put someone on a queue and approve the interesting/appropriate tweets only. Drop an authentication barrier on your wiki. Give yourself the tools to actually identify and highlight the good and mitigate the crap, from day one, if you want to harness a reactive, self-aware firehose like this.
But, while Josh knows a metric crapload more about moderating web content than me – he’s one of MetaFilter’s superb mods – I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Certainly, the Telegraph didn’t fully think it through, but I don’t believe their core problem was one of lack of moderation, but one of inaccurate expectations. Joe put it very well in a series of follow-up tweets (here stripped out of the Twitter format and tarted up a little):
The system/concept works as it should. We are the boneheads. No one at the Telegraph should be in trouble for this. (And by boneheads, I mean glorious, wonderful boneheads.) With every important event in man’s history, there is always someone standing at the back throwing peanuts. Today we are the peanut gallery. Tomorrow we may be the ones on stage. Or, to put it another way: You can’t stop the LULZ.
Sorry Daily Telegraph. I think if you’d ridden that out for another hour, it would actually have been useful. Lessons for co-opters of Social Media: 1) You don’t own the message anymore 2) If people are using it for LULZ then ITS WORKING.
For me, the Telegraph’s major error in this case was that they put the thing up two days before the budget is actually going to be announced. The amount of natural real-time discussion of the budget was therefore minimal; in the absence of anybody saying anything else, it was possible to hijack what was displayed on the Telegraph site almost by accident – this wasn’t a co-ordinated attack in any sense, just a few people idly goofing around. I suspect that the Telegraph had considered and accepted the possibility that someone would say “big shitty balls” on their page; what they didn’t realise was that, absent anything else to discuss, the balls would dominate entirely.
It’s as if Newsnight, in the middle of a piece on Bolivian land reform, suddenly announced “and now we’re going over live to the saloon bar of The Dog & Duck to see what their opinion is” – except the patrons of The Dog & Duck hadn’t been discussing Bolivian land reform, and weren’t told anything about Newsnight’s plans until the moment that they blinkingly realised they were on national television. What would you expect? You might get lucky, and someone who’d read the papers might mutter something about Evo Morales’ significance as the country’s first indigenous leader. But most likely there’d be a bemused pause, followed by nervous laughter, followed by someone shouting “wankers!” and Terry getting his knob out.
That doesn’t mean that nobody in a pub ever has anything insightful to say. It doesn’t mean that broadcasting from a pub is always a terrible idea. It just means that you need to better understand the nuances and uses of real-time conversations, and the locations they take place in. Without a pre-existing conversation, all you have is a silence begging to be filled. You’re practically asking Terry to start waving his bits around.
UPDATE: Yay, it’s back! They seem to be filtering things more carefully this time, although it’s not clear exactly how stringent they’re being, or what method they’re using (and they’re not telling…) Kudos to the Telegraph for sticking with it.
[...] gave us lols. Well, I say measured, it’s a bit more than just ‘hahahaha! Idiots’ I blog, you blog, they blog, weblog… …the Telegraph’s major error in this case was that they put the thing up two days [...]
Pingback by Telegraph Twitterfail | Sim-O — April 21, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
For me, the Telegraph’s major error in this case was that they put the thing up two days before the budget is actually going to be announced.
Yeah, I agree with this generally, and thought it was a good point when I saw it come up in the thread. My admonishment is a little more general and curmudgeonly as I stated it, so fair cop. Careful, sensible timeliness in the use of live feeds will mitigate much of the danger of the feed being gamed by self-aware participants—in many cases, sufficiently so that what noise creeps through is acceptable.
The example of seizing on a live feed at the time of breaking news is a good one: so many people will be busy actually reacting to what’s going on (e.g. the Twitter storm when Sully was landing in the Hudson recently) that jokesters won’t have a chance to significantly hijack the feed and set up a feedback loop.
But the difficulty remains, and as a hardline statement about the conflict between editorial policy and live streams, I stand by my argument: publishers for whom merely mitigating rather than eliminating the chance of off-message or editorially-verboten content is not sufficient need to start from scratch with a plan for filtering these things. If the Telegraph is relaxed enough that the occasional “big shitty balls” on the front page is okay in this context, cool. If that’s a problem, then they need a more constrained approach.
Which, I hate to even be that guy, because I love the idea of old media embracing more fully the serendipity and relaxed attitude of live crowds and open feeds, and I hope this sort of thing (sans cockups, mostly) becomes more and more common. But until you can actually go to a board meeting and say “we’ve found a way to let JoeTheDough shout ‘big shitty balls’ on the front page of our newspaper without our permission, and we’re running with it!”, knowing what you’re getting into and planning some defense ahead of time is the smart move.
Comment by Josh Millard — April 21, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
Yeah, I’d agree completely with that – we’re going through a tricky transition phase, where the traditional media institutions (one of which i work for) aren’t sure if their future lies in embracing the chatty immediacy of the crowd, or differentiating themselves from it. (Which is not to say that those are the only two options, or that they’re mutually exclusive across your entire output.)
Certainly, the Telegraph suffered a failure to anticipate a reaction that most long-term observers could have told them was pretty likely. But I think what I was trying to get across was that the differences between success and lol-fodder in this sort of thing are as often ones of subtly different starting conditions as they are of broad generalities. And I’d much rather big media companies played around with this thing and were willing to get it wrong, than shut themselves off from it (even if the Tele’s “throw everything at the wall” approach to their online strategy of late does annoy me quite often, mostly because it seems to be working and they’ve got more money than we do.)
Comment by Tom — April 21, 2009 @ 11:59 pm
[...] Telegraph had to briefly remove its budget twitterfall box after people deliberately tweeted #budget plus swear words to make them appear on the Telegraph site. [...]
Pingback by That Shane Richmond / Charles Arthur Twackdown in full … » malcolm coles — April 22, 2009 @ 10:31 pm
And I’d much rather big media companies played around with this thing and were willing to get it wrong, than shut themselves off from it
Absolutely. I think some of my face-palming grouchiness comes from a fear that the failure to do (or involve someone savvy enough to know to do) some of this basic thinking-ahead may lead to more potent and progress-retarding failures. I want them to get comfortable with this stuff sooner and with fewer potential backslides, so it’s frustrating to see them cock it up and give the luddites in the room fodder.
Comment by Josh Millard — April 22, 2009 @ 11:19 pm
[...] i blog, you blog, they blog, weblog » Twitter versus the Telegraph: you can’t stop the lulz Tom reviews what happened with the Telegraph adding a Twitter search (tags: twitter socialmedia) [...]
Pingback by Digital Stuffing » links for 2009-04-23 — April 24, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
[...] @ianshepherd: RT @Reynolds: Reasons why Twitter is not a panacea for all things http://www.flashboy.org/blog/?p=369 (via @deanwhitbread) [...]
Pingback by Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-04-26 — April 26, 2009 @ 7:42 am
[...] This worked well for a while. Then someone got wise to this, and pretty soon opened the flood gates. The Telegraph promptly removed the feature. More screenshots. And more. [...]
Pingback by The Daily Twittergraph « Dysphoric Mania — July 13, 2009 @ 3:21 pm