Tweet others as you would tweet yourself

As Stewart Mclennan has discovered it's not what you tweet its how you tweet it.  Its all a question of context.

Had he not been the Labour Party's candidate for Moray, nobody would have cared about his extremely rude and ignorant tweets.  However he was that party's man and he was plain daft. As a result many people are looking at what they tap into their keyboards and making sure it doesn't cause problems.  But its not that easy.

I've been involved in a major contractual litigation, which resulted in my being cross examined under oath by one of the UK's leading Barristers.  Clearly, other than to explain my absence from various tweetups etc. I've mentioned nothing about the case, however it has resulted in a lot of air travel between my work location and the UK and because I've been in London, I obviously took the chance to attend one or two of my favourite pubs.

The first question I encountered in the witness box after the affirmation was "Did you enjoy your pint of Young's Special last night?".  This was a reference to a tweet that I had sent at around 7:30pm.  It was not actually a surprise because I'd noticed the opposition's solicitors had been browsing my linked in profile over the previous week or so.  However it was a surprise that he'd open up with that.   His next one was quite interesting.  He quoted a post from a week before which went "Before criticizing someone take a walk in their shoes, then when you do you'll be a mile away and you have their shoes."  Missing out the second half he asked me if I wrote it.  Yes, I said, "And is that how you treated my clients in your dealings with them?" or words to that effect. Of course there's no answer to that because he'd taken the post completely out of context.  I just suggested it was a good way of working.  Then we carried on for approximately four hours.

So, in my case it wasn't anything bad just how it was used against me for other purposes.  This is where I think Iain Dale the political blogger is coming from when he suggest that all tweets of the party activists should be reviewed.  Its not that people cannot be trusted indeed other than the complete idiots such as our ex Labour Party candidate, people will just tweet good stuff.  But as I've demonstrated above, these things can and will be used against you.

Of course it also beggars belief that leading members of the Labour party were reading Mr McLennan's tweets, yet did nothing about it.  Perhaps they shared his views?