Anti-social media

On Tuesday morning I was thinking to myself how oddly pleasant social media seemed. Then Theresa May dropped her election bomb. Immediately the posts started appearing: ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tories launch coup’, then came the memes and I thought: I can’t take another two months of this. I’d only just tentatively returned to Twitter and Facebook following Brexit and Trump; now I find myself wanting to suspend my accounts again.

I think back nostalgically to general elections of yesteryear. I vaguely remember some fellow students being pleased about Blair winning in 1997 but most of us were more excited about seeing Teenage Fanclub at Leeds Metropolitan University. The polls of 2001 and 2005 passed by without me noticing. I think I voted Conservative but it may have been the Monster Raving Loony Party. It was difficult to tell the difference. From 1995 until 2007, I can count the number of political discussions I had on one hand.

In 2007 though, Facebook started to become ubiquitous. After a couple of months I realised that I was politically at odds with nearly every one of my friends. I had never realised quite how left-wing they all were. But it was only in retrospect that it was an important moment; at the time it didn’t matter that much. People were mainly there to post pictures of weddings, join silly groups, and poke each other (remember that?). I joined Twitter in 2009 and, being a freelance drinks writer, found it an invaluable way of making contacts, many of whom became friends. The politics was always there, but it wasn’t until 2010 when David Cameron became prime minister that it started to take on an edge.