Twitter for direct online action

Today, after much thought, I launched a trial of one way of using Twitter for direct political action. For the time being I'm calling it a Twitter action

Note Well: This is not a scientific or academic analysis or trial or test. It represents merely my experience and thoughts.

I say one way, as there are probably other online activists also thinking about how to more effectively use applications like Twitter. Considering my existing knowledge and experience using social media and networking, it occurred to me that it may be possible to use Twitter for direct political action. The question became how to do this in the least number of characters.

What I ended up with was this:

say NO to clean feed. pls twt this --> @KevinRuddPM i don't support net censorship #nocleanfeed

Quickly there were results coming in and one that did and didn't surprise me. I was politely asked to stop spamming the 'nocleanfeed' hashtag. I'd sent the same tweet 3 times within the space of an hour and twice within minutes of each other. And it was good advice too.

As the conversation took place. Reply to my tweets:

Tarale: @TRON_Lord Could you um.... stop spamming the #nocleanfeed hashtag? Some people follow it for news on the filtering, not the same tweet over

My reply:

@Tarale sincerest apols...not my intention. am trialling way of using Twitter for online action. lesson learned. thx

And Tarale's response:

Tarale@TRON_Lord Ah, it's OK, I encourage the use of Twitter, just no need to tweet it more than once. Forward on the news about the filter, etc

There have been a handful of Twitter users that have tweeted the message to the official Twitter feed for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Fair to say it is (was) a trial run and the results may prove to be quite patchy. And then there are the myriad of reasons why the results are patchy. Indeed, if the action had come from someone with more 'followers' or influence, then the results may have been different. Spamming the hashtag may have also affected response rates as it may have aggravated users of the hashtag search function.

As I've mentioned it is (was) only a trial of a method of using Twitter to engage in direct online action. It will be interesting to see how others will use it for direct political action.

Licentia per key tabula quod rectum mucro