BBC's Laura Kuenssberg row raises questions of Twitter etiquette

What is the best way to deal with online trolling? When should you simply duck out and take a break? And, most pressingly in the case of the BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg, what rules – if any – govern the use of tweet-quoting or, to use the vernacular, the “pile-on”.

The football pundit Gary Lineker and Countdown’s Rachel Riley have been at the forefront of a new campaign to combat ugly trolling. A new charity, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), has published a report entitled Don’t Feed The Trolls and advocates a simple set of guidelines for those being targeted online.

The CCDH’s findings were co-authored by charity chief executive Imran Ahmed and the pop psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, and foremost among their discoveries was that neo-Nazi groups in America had actively encouraged supporters to target public figures in a bid to widen their own exposure.

Their research is compelling. It demonstrates that if an individual with a significant followership responds or seeks to fight back against trolls, it has the unintended consequence of increasing their attacker’s followers by up to 14% and invites others to join the fray.

There is a lesson there for Yes supporters who love stirring the hornet’s nest: by all means fight back, but be careful not to spread the contagion of ugly opinion in the process.

Armed with algorithmic data, the campaign simply advises you to block rather than to engage. One example came from the anti-Brexit MP David Lammy, who has more than 500,000 followers. He quoted a racist tweet that stated he was not “indigenous English”. The abuser was given a higher profile by Lammy’s engagement and his popularity grew.

While not seeking to dispute the research, it has some obvious flaws. I am not a blocker by nature. Despite seeing many opinions that I profoundly disagree with, some of which are deeply ugly, I am disinclined to block people.

There are many good reasons why not. Firstly, the instant-block can seem undemocratic, that you are content to sound-off about your own opinions but unwilling to hear others.

Another reason I am not a serial blocker is that it gives some followers a “trophy” – the thrill that they have got to you – and can return to their tribe boasting about being blocked.

The CCDH research also exposes another weakness in online protocols – the risks that come with “quote-tweeting” and passing on the opinions of others.

Some women, including the comedian Janey Godley, use the quote-tweet function to expose the dark and ugly misogyny that lurks on the web and can be found at its most fetid in the so-called “yoon-stream” of extreme right-wing Unionists. It’s a brave response and sometimes involves her having to retweet despicable attacks on her life, her backstory and her looks. In order to undermine her attackers Janey shines a torch into the darkness and exposes their ignorance to the full light of ridicule. If retaliation shames people into backing off then that’s a good thing, but if it gives them false courage, fake camaraderie and a reason to return, it is not.

The CCDH report is quiet on this kind of retaliatory tweeting and virtually unaware of the brazen satire that Godley employs to fight back. Their research is good, but, if I’m honest, a bit superficial, as if this is their first pass and more will follow.

It was a quote-tweet that landed the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg in big trouble this week. She quoted a tweet by Omar Salem, the man who had upbraided Boris Johnson about under-staffing in the NHS in England. The Prime Minister was on what appeared to be a PR visit to Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, East London, where Salem’s sick baby-child was in care.

Not ashamed of what he had done, Salem had later admitted he was a Labour Party activist, but the tone of Kuenssberg’s re-tweet, with the words “This is him here”, was unpleasant and carried the impression that because he was politically active, he was not really entitled to his views. I am not imagining this interpretation. Many thousands of people were also taken aback that a senior BBC journalist would use Twitter in such a casual and ambiguous way.

Paul Sweeney, the Glasgow Labour MP, asked: “What are you implying? This comes across as inappropriate.” The writer Denise Mina simply said “Shame on You, Laura”, and another person posted a quote from comedian Frankie Boyle: “If you’re a political journalist who has regular contact with people in power, and your analysis is always aligned with prevailing orthodoxy, then you’re not really a journalist, you’re a courtier.”

The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg faced a backlash over her Tweet – but the BBC stuck by her

It was not Laura Kuenssberg’s finest moment and her social media on the day may have fallen foul of the BBC guidelines, which warns against staff expressing opinion when it overlaps with their role within the organisation. The BBC were quick to defend Kuenssberg, calling the suggestion that she had shown bias “absurd”.

Good that they defended their employee in the face of fierce criticism, but not so good that Laura Kuenssberg is now forever tarnished by a judgement in the last days of the BBC Trust when she was found to have breached impartiality guidelines in a news item about Jeremy Corbyn and his views on a “shoot-to-kill policy” in the context of terrorism.

The complaint divided the BBC newsroom at the time, again Kuenssberg was robustly defended by her senior managers, but the judgement left behind a festering belief that she is simply too close to the Conservative Party and instinctively hostile to Labour.

The Kuenssberg case demonstrates another flaw in Twitter discourse – the whole messy culture of retweeting. Many people even include in their profile the lame and imprecise get-out clause, “A retweet is not an endorsement”. I always wonder about that defence. If you are not endorsing something, why give it the oxygen of publicity? Better to add a short line that gives context, points to flaws or even distances you from the original tweet. It may well be that that is exactly what Kuenssberg was trying to do, alerting people including other journalists to the background of Johnson’s complainant. If it was, then she chose the wrong four words, and left many believing that she was inviting Tory activists to “pile-on” a man who was raising legitimate complaints about the quality of NHS services available to his sick daughter.

I prefer a much clearer policy of retweeting. I tend to only share things that I am endorsing. This week it was David Pratt’s photo exhibition in Glasgow’s Saltmarket, Joanna Cherry’s formidable appearance on Channel 4 news were she scythed through the constitutional ambiguities of proroguing Parliament, and for those that have reached the conclusion that not everything on Twitter is serious, I was happy to endorse the Dundee journalist Jim Spence’s apparent induction into the Nation of Islam. Why else would he wear that suit?

Although social media permeates our life, often defining and distorting the news agenda, it is worth remembering that we are still in the infancy of this form of communication, and that for all its many good points, the CCDH report is scratching the surface of a much greater human phenomenon, one where fake news, robotic opinion and aggressive trolling are just some of the issues thrown up by a form of media that is always on and never rests.

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate has opened up a debate which will be cited and disputed by others – there will be counter-arguments, different data-sets and widely varied interpretations of what is the best behaviour online – but I welcome its next chapter.

Perhaps the best advice it has come up with is glaringly obvious: always remember to take time out from Twitter and get a life.

Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan – The Odd Couple of Scottish Football – will be performing live at St Luke’s in Glasgow on Monday October 28