When a Twitter Followers List Becomes a Political Issue

You know it’s coming.  When it does, the effect on Twitter could be disastrous. 

It will happen something like this – First, there will be a news report that some political candidate is following a skinhead or anarchist (take your menace to society of choice) on Twitter.  Second, public horror will be displayed.  Third, the candidate, who probably has never seen hers/his twitter account, she/he will blame a campaign worker and then promise a thorough review of their follow list.  Fourth, within 24 hours the only accounts the politician follows, if any, will be charity groups.  Finally, the 90% of the country that doesn’t use Twitter and has little understanding of the mechanics of following and re-following will now have the politician rebranded in their mind as a skinhead/anarchist lover.

At that point, the days of freely following without the potential of recrimination are over.

We already see accounts in the media on a regular basis of politicians who are called out for some unacceptable donation from some nefarious sort.   Usually the information has been passed along from political opponents or their supporters who have poured over campaign finance reports thousands of individual donations.  This isn’t new.  Data mining on opponents has been around since the days of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson.  Today we just have better tools.  And the internet is a political ops dream.

There is no doubt that finding out who a politician friends on Facebook and follows on Twitter is already a part of the dirt digging process.  I am sure that questionable connections have been forwarded to the media in the past but, as of yet, there has not been a follow-gate.  This may be in part because the media is pretty savvy when it comes to Twitter and they realize that the emerging etiquette of the Twit-verse is to re-follow.  Plus, the best way to keep something out of the press is to do something the press does too – in this case, indiscriminate following.  But there are too many outlets and too many media people who let their own feelings advance a story.  So the day is coming.

When that day comes it will change forever how we use Twitter.  Companies will not only read your tweets but they will search your followers.  Start-ups will be created to rate the nature of your followers and give you a score based of words and phrases in their tweets.  Jobs will be lost or never offered, and another aspect of freedom on the web will be lost.

Some hardcore tweeters won’t mind because they see this huge grown in the size of follower lists as the antithesis of why they came to Twitter.  They came to communicate with people they know in a public but personal way in 140 characters or less.  How can you having a conversation when 2,000 people are talking at you at once?  They blame this trend on the commercialization of Twitter.  But the other great aspect of Twitter is finding people around the world who share your interests.  You can’t do this with a background check.  (The whole issue of how Twitter is at a crossroads will be the subject of another blog).

The majority of politicians I see on Twitter already don’t follow.  That just takes another way for a constituent to speak to their elected official (or the intern who handles the Twitter account).  Still, I see a few brave politicians who do follow.  But there are many future politicians who don’t realize somewhere in the cloud is a database of all of the Twitter hook-ups. Twitter, in its unending search for a monetization model, have recently announced what they are going to sell – us. 

So I have a request for politicians – don’t follow me! 

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