On holy cows, politics and Twitter

Will politicians ever use Twitter for something other than self-promotion? I very much doubt it: an interesting recent study by researchers at the University of Maryland analyzed all tweets coming from the members of Congress and found that only 7% of them represent genuine engaging with their voters, with 80% of tweets aiming at self-promotion.

This is, perhaps, not surprising: whenever politicians appear on radio or television, their interlocutors usually try to remind them not to spend too much time extolling their own virtues (and sometimes – even though such moments appear to be very rare these days – they’ll actually be told to stop with self-promotion and get straight to the point!). Twitter lacks such inhibitory mechanisms, so it automatically becomes the favorite virtual playground of narcissistic politicians.

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that most politicians are rather dull fellows: their feeble attempts at humor are usually pathetic and could easily backfire. Turning them on Twitter – with its 140 character culture and lack of context – is like giving matches to a 5-year-old: little good usually comes out of that. But can a politician get fired for saying something dumb or inappropriate on Twitter?

Politicians in India are finding an answer to this question the hard way: AFP reports that Shashi Tharoor, who is India’s Minister for External Affairs and a former UN communications chief (as well as a contributor to this magazine), has recently got himself into trouble with his party leader Sonia Gandhi for twittering a mangled joke about "holy cow" politicians that must have fallen flat on his Twitter followers.

After the opposition politicians began voicing calls for Tharoor to resign, he must have understood the seriousness of his situation. On Sept 17th he tweeted: "I now realize I shldnt assume people will appreciate humour & u shouldn’t give those who wld wilfully distort yr words an opportnty to do so (sic)." I am not exactly sure what part of his words got distorted: the tweet that got him in trouble reads "Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!" (this was in response to a question on whether he was travelling economy on a trip to the southern state of Kerala).

Well, if the former chief of UN communications failed to see the implications of his tweet, what should we expect of less cosmopolitan and sophisticated politicians?

If Tharoor gets fired, he will not be the first politician to get sacked for saying something silly. But he’ll certainly enter social media history for saying something silly in Twitter’s 140 characters. American politicians – the subject of that University of Maryland study –  perhaps, got the point: if you are going to say something stupid, at least do it to promote rather than demote yourself. Others should take heed of that.