Wildfire

I've sort of fallen out with Twitter today. To be honest it's been building up for a little while. If you follow me  you may have noticed I get a little (ok, a lot) annoyed when people refer to the Health and Social Care Bill as the NHS Bill. The worst offender is the BBC.

Now you may think I'm being a bit up tight getting so annoyed about something that isn't that big a deal right?


It would be safe to say that I know more than average about the legal basis of the NHS. I certainly know more than average about the H&SC Bill.

I don't want to write about the rights and wrongs of this particular Bill (if you are interested I'm actually fairly neutral to it, the NHS gets re-organised on a pretty regular basis, I do consider it to be incredibly poorly drafted but then I've read every single version as it's been published). However, as the Bill gets ever closer to being passed, more and more agenda based articles about it are being retweeted all over the shop. Unfortunately I'm finding people I respect retweeting links to information which is quite frankly wrong. This annoys me because once something starts on Twitter it can become a runaway train, impossible to stop.

What really annoyed me today was a link to a blog relating to the Bill which contained information which I know is categorically not true (it relates to my work so I'm not going to go into detail). This isn't the first time I've seen these sorts of posts either. A few weeks ago a popular comedian tweeted a link to an opinion piece in the British Medical Journal.

Now that would appear to be a fairly reliable source, but note it was an opinion piece. The article referred to sections of the Bill out of context to further its own agenda. The article basically failed to take into account about half of the structure of the NHS thus creating a rather scary picture of the reforms. Whilst some of the points might have been valid I just couldn't get past the fact the authors had effectively concealed key information in order to further their own argument. Sadly the comedian and his hundreds of thousands of followers will never know this.

Both those tweets, and countless others have spread like wildfire across Twitter. Whilst for some it will be possible to work out what information is reliable and what isn't, for the majority it isn't so easy. In respect of the Bill, I can pretty much guarantee that 90% plus of those tweeting and writing articles about it are relying on secondhand information rather than analysing it themselves. I know this because I've studied that Bill and an easy read it is not (it's essentially a set of instructions on amending other Acts so unless you read them along side it it won't make a lot of sense). Put it another way, if the person writing about the Bill cannot get the name of it right, what does that say about their argument? That's why it's important.


What I'm really getting at is this: think before you retweet. I'm sure I have been guilty of simply retweeting without thinking in the past but following this Bill through Parliament and on Twitter has really opened my eyes to how fast false information can spread online. It is amazing how we have all become drawn into political points scoring on Twitter through these tweets which state opinion as fact, constantly retweeting without even thinking whether the statement is reliable. It's so easy to simply retweet a link to something that accords with you own view but be selective and think why you are making that retweet before hitting send. If possible do your own research and form your own opinion on a subject to tweet about rather than simply retweeting that of someone else.

(The irony of this post is not lost on me by the way - I've been feeling the need to write this for a long time, when you have spent a rather large proportion of the last year studying a piece of legislation it really begins to grate when your Twitter timeline gets filled up with it as well!)