WhatsApp guys

One has to wonder, given that party after party has had problems with online social media groups, what possesses them to maintain them. That’s not the only example this week of social media and politics interacting in problematic ways. Take the latest anti-immigrant far-right outfit which the Irish Times revealed had a very unpalatable chat group. Didn’t they have the cop-on to realise there would be monitoring of that group? 

Even in more innocuous contexts they’re an accident, a news headline, a spat, a possible rupture inside a party, waiting to happen. A single comment is going to have legs beyond the supposed internal and closed membership. Moderation needs to be continual.

Having been in a couple of leaky ships in my political life (where despite supposed near-military discipline somehow, amazingly, ‘who’d have thought’, information leaked out on a weekly basis to the media and knowing what people say in circumstances where they feel they are ’safe’, none of this is a surprise. For insider groups within parties, this still holds true. Foot soldiers are, after all, deniable in ways that elected representatives are not. And for tweets to generate responses on WhatsApp groups which then get a public airing. All very messy. 

Surely at some point it makes no sense to allow them to function the way they do?