THE Twitter hashtag is a tricky thing to explain to anyone who doesn't use Twitter. In short – which is its purpose – the hashtag is like a club: you use it either to state your position on something, or to take part in a wider debate that is linked by a common hashtag, like #indyref.
One of the biggest worldwide hashtags of the last year came out of the Charlie Hebdo killings. For those who took a particularly strong line on freedom of speech – no matter who it offended – #JeSuisCharlie was the quickest way to put down a marker on where your views lay. For those who felt that freedom of speech should come with the responsibility not to offend religious groups, #jenesuispascharlie was the preferred option.
Nothing demonstrated more effectively how the hashtag performs as a dividing line for people on a platform where views must be boiled down to 140 characters.
And that same pattern has been observable in Scotland, albeit on a smaller scale, with the recent debate around the #SNPbad hashtag. For Nationalists convinced that mainstream media has a vendetta against the SNP, #SNPbad has become the default term used to dismiss any "bad" news story concerning the party of government.
It's quite a powerful thing: when a significant group of people use the same hashtag in this way, it serves as a form of evidence among them that there must be some truth to it. That can be a contagious thing on social media: it feeds into a tribal mentality, and reinforces positions to the point where evidence or analysis is no longer required.
The SNP's Angus MacNeil MP helped ramp up the rhetoric, tweeting a graphic showing low UK trust in the press to Wings Over Scotland, the most critical commentator on the media, saying: "The #SNPbad prob of the media is an exacerbation in a situation where trust in them is low anyway." This was in response to Wings stoking the #SNPbad fire with his own tweets.
It’s true that public trust in the media has plummeted in the wake of recent events such as the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson inquiry into press ethics. Add to that the fact 45 per cent of a population voted Yes when only one newspaper, the Sunday Herald, took the same position and it's understandable – if also dangerous – that so many have acquired a default disregard of anything published in "the mainstream" that challenges their views on a powerful party they believe is the solution to their problems.
Yet it doesn't seem to occur to some of the noisiest tweeters that an alternative media source like Wings which, while often offering worthwhile analysis, rarely tackles the party of government on anything, signifies democratic dangers. A media compliant with, or unwilling to criticise, a powerful political party is a danger for democracy. Scrutiny of those who hold power is essential, and while some online blogs continue to take deflective swipes at Scottish Labour – a party which now must barely remember what power felt like – a worrying culture of intolerance within the independence movement for self-reflection has emerged.
The downside of the hashtag bandwagon on Twitter is that it discounts thoughtful analysis in favour of soundbites, but its obvious strength is in rallying people to a cause, because the collective agreement contained within it adds to a sense of purpose and prominence.
SNP politicians have unashamedly jumped on the #SNPbad bandwagon, happily feeding a growing movement that greets scrutiny of the party with fury.
Last Tuesday, SNP MP Pete Wishart responded to a story about the Forth Road Bridge – an issue with significant safety concerns attached to it and no laughing matter – with a flippant “#SNPbad?” on Twitter.
Inevitably in the echo chamber that social media often is, the #SNPbad debate is unlikely to have changed any minds, but has instead become another tool for self-definition online, a trend which commands people to pick a side.
It trades original analysis for collective thinking, and is by that definition contrary to the spirit of the independence movement it has grown from. Scotland urgently needs to have a discussion – preferably not on Twitter if it is to have a constructive outcome – about how the media, its consumers and politicians interact with one another in a healthy democracy. Right now, that relationship appears to have hit a post-indyref rock bottom.
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