Several weeks ago Chris Snowdon blocked his 1,000th account on Twitter. He wrote about it here:
‘To mute is human, to block is divine‘.
To the best of my knowledge only two people have blocked me - radio and TV presenter Jeremy Vine and former Tory MP Nicholas Soames.
Vine is a cycling advocate - nothing wrong with that - who frequently posts video clips of cyclists being harassed or endangered by other road users.
Some of the clips - often taken by a camera on his own cycling helmet - are truly gobsmacking. Sometimes however they suggest the cyclist is at fault but Vine can’t see it.
He blocked me because on a couple of occasions I suggested - not impolitely - that the cyclist not the driver may have been to blame.
Soames blocked me for insinuating he was a pompous prat. Fair cop. In his shoes I might have done the same.
Unlike Snowdon, the number of people I have blocked can be counted on the fingers of one hand although, to be fair, there is probably a reason for that.
One, I have a fraction of the followers he has. Two, I don’t attract the same hate-fuelled mob and their persistent ‘Who funds you?’ mantra.
Generally I wouldn’t block someone I’ve never engaged with, doesn’t know me from Adam, and will never know I’ve blocked them because ... what’s the point?
Blocking should be a statement and if I block someone I want them to know I’ve blocked them otherwise it’s a waste of time.
Muting feels less confrontational because the other person will never know and for me that’s a good compromise.
Often it may be someone I chose to follow. I could ‘unfollow’ them but if I know them (or they know me) that seems quite passive aggressive, and if they have one of those apps that alerts them to people who have recently followed or unfollowed them you risk years of smouldering resentment (even the cold shoulder) if the person you have unfollowed knows you.
(I have one of those apps and whenever I get an alert to say someone has unfollowed me it’s far more interesting than news of a new follower. And if I know them I never forget. Just saying.)
Most of the time I don’t know the person who has unfollowed me. Often it’s someone - a stranger - who may have followed me in the expectation that I would follow them back, but if I haven’t (and I rarely do because I like to keep the list of people I am following to a minimum) they subsequently unfollow me, which is fair enough.
It suggests however that their principal reason for following me was to build up their own list of followers and I can’t be doing with that. In fact, a friend of mine has a rule that I have adopted too.
Unless he knows the person or has a specific reason to follow them, he never follows anyone who is following more than 1,000 people.
I totally get that. If someone follows me and I see that they follow thousands of people, why would I follow them? They clearly have no interest in anything I tweet because it will flash across their screen in the blink of an eye. The chances of them ever seeing my tweets are minimal.
No, what they are trying to do is increase their own number of followers. I see it all the time. A person who follows 10,000 people has 8,000 followers. Go away! Don’t waste my time, or yours.
But I digress.
More often than not the people I mute are people I don’t follow but their tweets appear on my timeline because they’ve been retweeted or liked by someone whose account I am following.
It would be silly to block these people. They don’t follow me so they will never know or care. Blocking them would be a completely pointless act when I can achieve the desired effect - removing them from my timeline - by muting them.
And so, dear reader, that is what I have been doing.
Social media has always been a mecca for opinionated armchair experts but the coronavirus has brought out the worst in many people - on Twitter, especially.
The negativity and blame game is not just tedious, polls suggest it’s completely unrepresentative of the population at large, most of whom have accepted the current situation and are making the best of it.
To be fair, Twitter is a good medium if you want breaking news and the occasional laugh so I will continue to use it but I will mute anyone whose tweets raise my blood pressure or make me inwardly shout “Fuck off!” because of their persistent negativity.
The list includes many household names including just about every lobby correspondent (Peston, Rigby et al).
It also includes anyone who thinks the government has got its response to Covid-19 ‘wrong’ and is persistently pointing the finger at politicians who are plainly doing their best in difficult and unchartered territory.
They may be right - only time and the inevitable post-coronavirus inquiries will tell - but at the moment I don’t want to read their asinine remarks and half-baked bile, even when restricted to 280 characters.
Life is so much better thanks to the mute button. In fact, I feel so much calmer I doubt I shall ever let these people back in to my life.
As PG Wodehouse might have said, pip pip!