The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-01)

22 The Sunday Times May 1, 2022

NEWS REVIEW

I

f you scrolled through the news sites on Wednesday you would have read about an investigation of sexual misconduct claims against the former BBC DJ Tim Westwood; about witness reports from a pro- Ukraine rally in the occupied city of Kherson; and about the withdrawal from bookshops of one of the Biff, Chip and Kipper children’s books after an outcry over depictions of appar- ently Muslim characters who are described as “scary”. These news stories, which would appear at first glance to have little in common, all had the same source: Twitter. To the casual observer, the interest generated by Elon Musk’s $43 billion buy- out may seem baffling. Twitter has 329 million users, a modest number next to Facebook’s three billion. It is used less often than YouTube and by an older demographic than TikTok. It is a minnow in the social media swamp, but its influence on public life is huge. Twitter was where many people learnt Michael Jackson had died; it was where mass movements such as Black Lives Mat- ter and #MeToo grew; and it was the stage on which Donald Trump cut loose, before his account was suspended in Jan- uary last year. It has been a key tool in cat- aloguing Russian war crimes in Ukraine. It has also evolved rapidly. When the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis joined in 2007, the site was all about harmless fun. “It felt like an anarchic community, full of jokes and silliness — dumb stuff like ‘Replace a word in a film title with cheese’,” she says. The mood changed in about 2014. “It became much nastier and more tense. Then came Brexit, Trump, Corbyn, the gender wars

... The divisive politics of the past few
years has often made social media feel
like a wasteland patrolled by angry

Rebecca Thomson was a 26-year-old reporter on a niche computer magazine when she first revealed a gross injustice at the Post Office. Only now, 13 years on, is her scoop getting the credit it deserves, writes Sabah Meddings

for a decade as others reported on the Post Office story. The cause was eventually taken up by politicians — notably by Lord Arbuthnot, a former MP, who says he was “galvanised” by Thomson’s original reporting — and the subpostmasters have continued to campaign to clear their names. “It was really exciting when big things happened, and it was a little bittersweet. I would have loved to have continued to help,” she says. Seven years after her investigation, Thomson was contacted on Twitter by Nick Wallis, a freelance journalist, asking to speak to her about Horizon. Soon afterwards, she says, her boss at the accountancy firm was contacted by a senior partner. The Post Office was a client and had seen the tweet. “It was something along the lines of, ‘She needs to tread carefully’,” Thomson recalls being told. It wasn’t until months later, when she had left the job, that she was able to tell Wallis her story. Thomson, now a freelance journalist, met Lee Castleton, 53, in person for the first time in November at the launch of Wallis’s book, 12 years on from her original story. Castleton, now an electrician, is still fighting for proper compensation. Yet while her appearance on Panorama last week has prompted an outpouring of gratitude on social media, Thomson is uncomfortable with praise. “I don’t know what to say, because they did all the hard work,” she says of the subpostmasters and their efforts. “They achieved this extraordinary thing.”

What is posted on Elon Musk’s $43 billion plaything has a disproportionate influence over politics and the media. It’s a Wild West forum that has already undermined democracy, writes Rosie Kinchen

the equivalent of dipping their private parts in honey and exposing them to angry bees,” wrote the political journalist Isabel Hardman. Those who remain on the site are increasingly changing how they use it. Emma Barnett, presenter of Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, was technology correspondent for The Daily Telegraph when Twitter was launched in 2006. “Whether it’s abusive, whether it’s — in inverted commas — a critique of an interview, whatever it is [that people] are con- tributing [on Twitter], it is not a request for genuine conversation any more. I’m not being treated like somebody who is a real person. I am more of an object.” She still finds it a useful source of stories but doesn’t look at her mentions or engage with people replying to her tweets. Twitter has guarded its data closely since growth began to slow, but it does provide a free real-time stream of 1 per cent of all tweets. Using this data, Forbes magazine concluded that between 2012 and 2018 the number of people tweeting each day fell by 100 million, and the number of tweets dropped from 500 million a day to 300 million. Barnett says more and more accounts are disappearing behind the “private” padlock. “Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!” Musk tweeted on Wednesday night, but his commitment to free speech raises legal questions — and commercial ones. Many users, including advertisers, will find it hard to drag themselves away while the mad Musk show is generating so many headlines. But if the platform becomes toxic, advertisers will sever ties. Lewis does not rule out going back to Twitter, but for now she is enjoying the peace. “Someone asked me last week if it felt like I didn’t have any friends now I’ve left Twitter. I said it was the opposite: it feels like I don’t have any enemies.”

There’s a new

sheriff in

Twitter Town

but he should

be worried

West longer than any other platform. When Leslie Miley joined the company as head of security in 2013, there was a 20-step complaints procedure to have a graphic or abusive tweet removed, and even then the success rate was less than 50 per cent. When Miley’s team reduced it to an eight-step process, the number of complaints doubled. Miley, who has since left Twitter, remembers a meeting about online safety shortly after Twitter had bought the video service Vine. He raised his con- cerns: “People are going to live-stream rapes and killings, all sorts of bad things are going to happen and this is not going to end well.” The response was ambi- valence. “It is not our place to stop that,” he says he was told. In recent years Twitter has attempted to rein itself in. “The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation,” said Jack Dorsey, the platform’s co-founder and former chief executive, in 2018. Since then it has started measuring “conversational health”, the character limit has been extended to 280 and prompts have been introduced to encourage users to read an article before they share it. Divisive and damaging accounts have been suspended, including those of the far-right Briton Tommy Robinson and Donald Trump. Haidt is sceptical that any of this has made a difference: “If you have strangers who are not verified human beings interacting on a platform where they are performing, not communicat- ing, then there is no way to make it good.” Musk says he is a free-speech absolu- tist — within the bounds of the law. That line will become a lot harder to tread when the Online Harms Bill is passed in the UK and the EU’s Digital Safety Act becomes law. Has Musk considered this changing landscape? He must be aware that laws on free speech can be inconven-

ient; he has so far failed to overturn his own legal agreement to have all his tweets relating to Tesla scrutinised by a lawyer before he publishes them. The other risk Musk faces is that the nastier the site becomes, the more people with influence will leave. Shortly before his takeover bid, Musk tweeted that many of the ten most-followed accounts, including those of Barack Obama and Taylor Swift, rarely said any- thing. “Is Twitter dying?” he asked.

L

eaving only to return again has become a 21st-century cliché, but increasingly people are sticking to their guns. Lewis left in 2012 only to be accused of flouncing when she returned. She deactivated her account again recently and says the overriding reaction from those who have noticed is envy. “Many journalists I know have a ter- rible, dysfunctional relationship with Twitter. They feel they need it to be visi- ble. But they also hate the feeling that at any moment their phone could light up with thousands of people laughing at them or sending them abuse.” Earlier this year The New York Times updated its guidance for journalists, stat- ing that having a Twitter account was only optional, partly because of harass- ment problems and partly because “reporters can rely too much on Twitter as a reporting and feedback tool”. Haidt says: “If journalists were never allowed to tweet, the world would be a better place and journalism would be better, but any journalist who goes off is committing career suicide, because you aren’t going to know what’s happening.” British politicians who were once encouraged to use Twitter as a means of engagement with constituents have now been encouraged to leave by parlia- ment’s health and wellbeing service. “It’s

ARTWORK: TONY BELL

public and had often been sent by the Argus to report on criminal trials. “You get a sense of whether or not people are telling the truth, and he was immediately very believable,” says Thomson of her first chat with Castleton. She soon discovered there were more victims. Jo Hamilton, now 64, a postmistress from South Warnborough in Hampshire, was prosecuted for theft and 14 counts of false accounting. On legal advice she pleaded guilty to the second

naval officer and a primary school teacher. She took a degree in economics at Durham University before training as a journalist. She also has a master’s degree in philosophy from Birkbeck, for which she studied part-time while at Computer Weekly. It was in the middle of 2007 that Thomson arrived in London after two years at the South Wales Argus in Newport. She wanted to break into investigative journalism, and Computer Weekly’s stories were often followed up by national papers. “They prided themselves on that kind of work,” she says. She was offered £24,000 a year — double her salary at the paper. Collins, Thomson’s editor, had received a letter from Lee Castleton, a 40-year-old subpostmaster from Bridlington in East Yorkshire who had been taken to court over a £24,000 discrepancy at his branch. Collins asked Thomson to give Castleton a call. She was astonished by what she heard. Despite repeated calls to the helpline of the Horizon IT system, Castleton was suspended. He could not afford lawyers or IT experts to look at his system logs and was forced to defend himself in the High Court. He was left bankrupt after being made to pay the Post Office’s legal costs. Thomson was used to speaking to members of the

I

n May 2009, Rebecca Thomson was preparing to publish the biggest story of her career. A 26-year-old reporter at the trade publication Computer Weekly, she had landed the job just two years after graduating from a journalism course at Cardiff University. It was her first investigation and she had spent the past six months speaking to Post Office workers who claimed their lives had been destroyed by a faulty IT system. She had seven case studies of people who had lost everything after the government-owned Post Office had accused them of stealing. The story was featured on the front page of the magazine with the headline: “Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods: postmasters tell their story”. Thomson and her editor, Tony Collins, had pushed the story as hard as they could. They prepared for the scoop to be picked up by the nation’s news media. But nothing happened. There were no national newspaper follow-ups; no Radio 4 Today programme interview requests. It was a flop. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” says Thomson, 39, of the paltry few stories that appeared in regional papers. “I was super- ambitious, and I was

disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel it was incredibly strong.” It was to be a further decade before these subpostmasters, who had become pariahs in their communities, spat at and labelled criminals, saw their names finally cleared. But by the time they won a High Court victory in December 2019, Thomson had left Computer Weekly, and former colleagues and other news organisations had picked up the baton. However, her story had fired the starting gun for a years- long battle to uncover what is now considered the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. She got to tell her story at last in “The Post Office Scandal”, an episode of the BBC’s Panorama show. Thomson grew up in Portsmouth, the daughter of a

These people were clearly not criminals

allegation; she was given a year’s probation — and lost her job. Thomson discovered Hamilton on the internet after finding a good-news story tucked away in the Daily Mail about villagers helping to clear her debts. Thomson named seven former subpostmasters who had been hounded by the Post Office, accused of stealing and even jailed. Noel Thomas, now 74, of Gaerwen in Anglesey, had worked for the Post Office for 42 years but was accused of stealing

and spent his 60th birthday in prison. In each case Thomson was struck by how “kind, open and honest” each victim was. “It was such a human story, of people being completely steamrollered by something that was so far out of their control,” she says. “These people were very clearly not criminals. They were the type of people you would expect to be public servants and to be playing a central role in their communities.” By the time Computer

Weekly’s lawyers were comfortable enough to publish the story, six months had passed since that first call with Castleton. The Post Office, which is owned by the taxpayer, had fiercely denied any suggestion of wrongdoing and the magazine was worried about being sued — particularly by the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu, which had designed the Horizon software. Fujitsu was eventually left out of the story. At the time, the Post Office said there was “no evidence that points to any fault with the technology”. Still the story was not picked up. “Nobody touched it,” says Thomson. “It was the subpostmasters’ version of events against the Post Office. And the Post Office was lying really aggressively and saying there was nothing wrong with the system.” Thomson went on to cover the story for a year and a half, reporting on the formation of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and on Seema Misra, a postmistress from West Byfleet in Surrey. Misra, now 46, had been accused of stealing £74,000 and claimed the IT system might have caused the account deficit — even showing the judge a copy of Thomson’s original story to back up her case. She was sent to jail while pregnant with her second child. Thomson eventually grew disillusioned with journalism and took a job in marketing at a big accountancy firm. She lives in Beckenham, south London, with her husband, Digby Bodenham, 36, who works in marketing, and has watched from the sidelines

The investigation by Rebecca Thomson was revealed in Computer Weekly, above. Below, celebrating the quashing of convictions last year

wolves who are ready to jump on any stray comment.” For some this undercurrent of anger and discord poses a very real threat. In a recent essay for the magazine The Atlantic the American social scientist Jonathan Haidt goes as far as to argue that social media has weakened democracy. “Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three,” he writes. Speaking to me from his office in New York, he has no doubt which site is doing the most harm: “The single most destruc- tive platform for democratic institutions, I believe, is Twitter.” That is why Musk’s takeover, and his absolute commitment to free speech, matters so much. Twitter stands at a crossroads, and the direction in which it heads off could set the tone for years to come. The questions of what we should be able to say online and how we should be

She exposed a national scandal — and nobody listened

able to say it are ones that all social media companies have wrestled with — none more than Twitter. The platform was not just spawned from the libertarian engi- neering culture that built the internet; it was its greatest cheerleader — “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, as its founders used to say. Many of Twitter’s problems are built into its DNA. The original 140- character limit left no room for nuance. With little accountability or risk of pun- ishment, there has never been a reason to behave. Nor has anyone really been thinking about the impact the site might have on the human brain. In 2020, when Haidt was invited to give a talk to Twitter staff, the company employed only one social scientist. Pamela Rutledge, a media psycho- logist, says negative news and negative emotions spread faster than posi- tive ones: “People get a biased view of the world as more negative or hostile than it actu- ally is. It activates the fight- or-flight syndrome, which increases aggression.” C Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, argues Twitter has “gamified” conversation by giving “immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. Twitter offers us points for discourse; it scores our communication.” If a nasty or aggressive tweet is shared and liked more, our reward instinct is triggered and we think of more of the same kind of thing to say. A libertarian ideology combined with chaotic management made sure that Twitter remained a Wild

Twitter has gamified conversation. It gives us points for our communication

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logist, saysnegative news a emotions spread fast tive ones: “People view of the world ative or hostile ally is. It activat or-flight syndr increases agg Thi Nguyen, a at the Univers argues Twitter fied” conversat “immediate, quantified eva one’s convers cess. Twitter off for discourse; i communication or aggressive tw and liked more, instinct is trigge think of more of th of thingg to say. A libertarian ideolog with chaotic manage sure that Twitter rema

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VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

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The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-01)

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