Give a man a twitter account and he thinks he's Edward R Murrow

Recently there have been a number of outrages against public decency that have broken as stories or been heavily promoted by celebrity Twitterers: these include Jan Moir being rude about a dead gay singer; Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting the Guardian; and the Scottish Sunday Express intruding on Dunblane.

What's curious is that the voices promoting these issues are not in the main political reporters, politicians, or even political bloggers. Instead the likes of Graham Linehan (instrumental in the Dunblane issue), Stephen Fry (credited with publicising Trafigura), and Charlie Brooker (promoting a variety of liberal causes from drug policy to being nice to Stephen Gately) are comedy writers and/or presenters. The tone is summed up by this tweet from Brooker: "RT @arusbridger: Thx to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #trafigura #guardian". The Guardian makes use of Twitter for advertising as well as campaigning so this is a happy collision of both.

The JCPR Twitter Index attempts to rank Twitter account holders based on retweets and other measures as well as the number of followers. The top 10 British Twitterers as of 30 Oct are:

1 Jonathan Ross 438,099 followers
2 Fry 921,760
3 Linehan 33,458
4 Downing Street 1,523,922
5 Jason Bradbury (The Gadget Show) 39,913
6 Philip Schofield
7 Alan Davies
8 Russell Brand
9 Coldplay
10 Phil Jupitus

Brooker was further down, 51st of the British, but with 83,856 followers was more popular than many above him. He does retweet a lot, though.

In contrast, when The Independent asked "Who are the most influential bloggers on Twitter?" on 3 Aug 2009, the top 3 were Guido Fawkes (notorious right-libertarian blogger) (as of 30 Oct, he has 5672 followers), Jon Snow (Channel 4 newscaster of somewhat liberal persuasion) (8800 followers), and Iain Dale (mainstream Conservative) (6411 followers). None of them feature in Twitter Index's list. So it's clear that (with the uncertain exception of Downing Street) it is comics, not politicans or political writers, who are getting their message across on Twitter.

While Fry is in the popular imagination something of a polymath, with plentiful books (fiction and non-fiction), numerous factual TV shows, newspaper columns, dramatic acting, as well as being funny, the others have less obvious claim to be moral guardians. Linehan has written or co-written some amusing TV comedy (working on Father Ted, Big Train, Black Books, the IT Crowd, and others).

Brooker's story is perhaps the most interesting example of a man pushed to fame by his ability to spout opinions in easy to package doses. He started off as a video-game journalist before progressing to mock bad TV online and in the Guardian. Eventually he progressed to an all purpose ranter, mocking the obsession with Twitter (1, 2), attacking the mob mentality of the outraged who rush off to complain about everything they see or hear, saying "I hate offended people", and that he hates opinions. The self-contradiction is almost-certainly tongue in cheek.

In October 2008 he penned a column about how maybe it's not so good to mock celebrities, after reading some of the megabytes of hate-filled email he gets from wannabe comedians seeking his seal of approval: "Perhaps I'm mellowing in my old age, or perhaps I've grown 15% more human, but kicking real people when they're down doesn't really activate my chuckle cells." A few weeks before he'd talked about his spiritual emptiness, suggesting a kind of personal crisis.

Since then his columns have been less sneery, and Brooker's career has had its ups and downs: You Have Been Watching, a Channel 4 panel game in which he sneered at TV got mixed reviews, while Newswipe in which he reported more seriously on TV news coverage was widely appreciated as one of the few TV programs to take television seriously. His tweets and columns reflect a growing interest in the reporting of science, as well as the more obvious expressions of outrage (Trafigura, Moir).

Will the growth of the comic-turned-twitter-politician be the start of a new popular movement? Fry, being intelligent, sees the risks and has expressed sympathy for Moir in the witchhunt she suffered:

I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity.

He continued musing on his own Twitter popularity:

And what am I after all? What right have I to wield this kind of influence? A question people have been asking about journalists for years, but which they have every right to ask about me too. I don't know what business I have wielding influence either. This whole thing has just grown up around me and now I cannot help wondering if, despite my preference for turd-sucking over politics, I have found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed as some sort of tribune by friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the other. I am not cut out for the hurly-burly of adversarial politics. I am not qualified to represent anyone nor, I cannot repeat often enough, do I wish to. So I should shut up.

Fry continued for another 1000 words.

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ADDENDUM: Further controversy has accompanied Fry's Twitterings (Guardian 2009/10/31, 2009/11/02). A twitterer called brumplum called Fry's postings boring, and Fry announced his retirement: "You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone." Large number of Fry-followers attacked brumplum (some names removed):

@brumplum IS SO BORING HE FUCKS SHEEP @brumplum ur soo gonan be fucking sorry for callin my fav celeb boring u fukin turded faceless arsole

@brumplum You sound like a prick and I only half read your Twitter.

@brumplum r u the reason that stephen fry is thinking of leaving Twitter?Shame on u -he's a national treasure with a kind soul y b so nasty?

@brumplum you truly are a nasty little individual.

I can think of fewer things worse really. Who the fuck is @brumplum to upset Twitter's and England's darling?

@askjeevesdotcom guess what the arsehole @brumplum called @stephenfry boring when stepehn fry isnt

Fry defended brumplum and the two made up:

stephenfry: @brumplum I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.

brumplum: @stephenfry Thanks. Can we all be friends again? *tweet favourited* (I have an ego as big as the next man!) ;-)

As already mentioned, the whole story was covered in detail in the Guardian and much of the other media.