Grant Shapps is in the headlines after being accused of self-serving edits made to his own entry on Wikipedia, as well as unflattering changes made to rivals’ pages. But he may not be the only politician giving himself a virtual facelift. Analysis of the Twitter account @parliamentedits, which tracks edits to Wikipedia made from inside the Houses of Parliament, shows other attempts to edit the online encyclopedia, many of them controversial.
Continue reading “The MPs whose Wikipedia pages have been edited from inside Parliament”
Tag: Labour
What the Thornberry Affair tells us about politicians online
Published on the the LSE British Politics and Policy blog.
Many commentators have speculated what was going through the mind of Emily Thornberry, the shadow Attorney General, when she tweeted a picture of a terraced Rochester house draped in three England flags and a white van parked in the driveway, with the simple caption ‘Image from Rochester’. Continue reading “What the Thornberry Affair tells us about politicians online”
Nick, Nigel, and the Neapolity: The Fragmented Future of British Party Politics
Here are some predictions that I make with a fair degree of certainty. An indifferent British electorate will shrug its collective shoulders and award Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party the second highest vote total in this May’s European elections. Buoyed by this win, Farage will force his way onto the stage for the party leader debates in 2015. And in the subsequent general election, for the first time in history, four parties will each take more than 10% of the vote nationwide. After trialling an alternative arrangement between 2010 and 2015, the era of big-party government will be over. Continue reading “Nick, Nigel, and the Neapolity: The Fragmented Future of British Party Politics”
Cyber-revisionism: Parties’ Attitudes to Web Archiving Are a Worrying Sign for Digital Democracy
Following an earlier, somewhat rantier post on this blog when the news originally broke, I’ve written a more academically-oriented piece on British political parties’ cyber-revisionism with Mor Rubenstein, a current MSc student here at the OII. This was published yesterday on the LSE Politics and Policy blog, and you can read it here. Mor’s undergraduate work on political parties on Facebook provided a useful counterpoint to party websites, and unearthed some deep ironies regarding the (dis)integration between the two platforms and some of the unintended consequences.
(The eagle-eyed may notice that the ‘Fahrenheit 401’ hook in the original post became ‘Fahrenheit 404’ – a less phonaesthetically evocative contrast with Bradbury’s 451 but more accurate, technically speaking…)
Josh Cowls 