Congratulations to Ben Bradley, Conservative MP for Mansfield, who, in little over a week, has managed to clock up more retweets – 55,000 – than all of the Tory party’s tweets in 2018 combined.

Unfortunately for Bradley, the tweet in question was part of a legal agreement following a defamatory post sent about Jeremy Corbyn, in which he said that the Labour leader had “sold secrets to communist spies”. A slur related to a right-wing press fabricated story that Corbyn cooperated with a Czech intelligence agent in the 1980s.

Nothing new about political mudslinging on Twitter., but the reach of Bradley’s single tweet, dwarfing Theresa May’s 27,000 retweets for all activity in 2018, demonstrates a clear divide in social media savvy. Labour insisted the final sentence of Bradley’s apology be “please retweet”, which sent it skyrocketing.

On the 19th of February I made a defamatory statement about @jeremycorbyn. I have apologised to Mr Corbyn and here is the complete text of my apology. Please retweet. pic.twitter.com/6JZc8O9E82 — Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) February 24, 2018

Political apologies are normally quietly issued via statements from spokespeople. On Twitter too, it is often the case that a fake tweet has been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, but a debunking barely passes the low hundreds.

In contrast, where the original slur failed to gain traction, Bradley’s mea culpa went viral, despite his attempts to bury it by posting it at 10.30pm on a Saturday night. Partly its reach was due to Labour’s wording. But Labour also has an army of supporters across social media that know how to drive engagement combining youth, such as Abi Tomlinson’s #milifandom in 2015, with effective organisation by digital-savvy groups such as Momentum, whose members volunteer their time for free.

It also helps that Labour has the backing of many celebrities, such as Lily Allen with her 5.9 million followers and Paloma Faith with her 600,000. The Tories rather notoriously have few open celebrity supporters short of Gary Barlow.

Labour also rapidly produced a short video debunking the Czech smears and condemning the mainstream press for entertaining them. Pushed out to social media, Corbyn’s video spread quickly across Facebook and Twitter, providing a new way to shape Labour’s response without having to go through the gatekeepers of the rightwing press.

“This enthusiasm [of Labour’s direct approach] is not compromised by a media strategy seeking positive coverage in the rightwing press, which would at best water down Labour’s policies,” said former Labour communications spokesman, Matt Zarb-Cousin. “Attacks on Labour by the rightwing press can be framed as an establishment worried about a Labour government because unlike the Conservatives it would not govern in their interests.”

Traditionally legal action is brought against papers responsible for libel to force them to print an apology. That correction is meant to receive the same prominence as the libel, but often doesn’t unless forced to by press regulator Ipso. Labour know this, switching to social media to provide another option for recourse.



Zarb-Cousin said: “Mainstream media attacks can amplify [Labour] popular policies, and if [attacks] are framed as the establishment closing ranks, the attacks prove Labour is serious about change. This is accurate, but it would be more difficult to frame it in this way without social media.”

But do successful social media takedowns of Conservative policies and their allies in the rightwing press cut through to offline spaces?

In the recent past, clicktivism and virtue-signalling didn’t exactly result in real world action or voter turnout, but according to Jamie Bartlett, the director of the centre for the analysis of social media at Demos, things have changed. He said: “I think we have reached the point at which social media really is big enough to reach a wide enough audience. I think the numbers reached illustrate that.”

Another Tory “mea culpa” received widespread traction last week with 14,000 retweets, when Jacob Rees-Mogg issued an apology after erroneously claiming in a Channel 4 interview that Corbyn had voted against the Good Friday Agreement.

“Twitter of course has its own Westminster bubble, but information, rebuttals and messages do tend to reach a very high proportion of politicos, which I think does make a difference,” said Bartlett.

It’s clear that Labour has the edge over the Tories in use of social media. Activate, the party’s attempt at a replicate Momentum, was widely mocked for inefficiency. Recently, the Telegraph reported that the Conservatives are hiring “paid tweeters”, which is as embarrassing as it is anti-democratic.

“It’s very hard to fabricate a genuine grassroots movement of people willing to create their own content, share it and meet up to campaign,” said Bartlett. “I think the Tories are therefore mistaken to try to replicate the model. It also takes longer than you think – Momentum’s origins, in my view, are all the anti-cuts and even climate camps of several years ago. I’m not sure if the Tories have anything like that. And they may need to go into opposition to find it.”

There are a few Tory politicians who are social media astute. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, is perhaps the best example, mixing humour with passion for policies. Jeremy Hunt can often be found answering critics on Twitter, but sometimes his spad does it for him, while Nicholas Soames is famous for his popular but indecipherable hashtags.

But there are many Tory MPs who have single-figure thousand followers and leave a trail of incriminating activities, such as Gavin Barwell’s replies to porn accounts or Andrea Leadsom’s list of interesting accounts that includes just one: her own.

Labour have been slick in their campaigning on social media for a while. Be it the video of Corbyn reciting Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy on election day 2017 (13,000 retweets) or excellent memes. But it is the tactical chess-playing of social media which is new.



Labour is now utilising social media against their opponents, rather than just to shore up support, bypassing the mainstream press and boosting membership (hovering around 570,000) in the process. All of which asks the question: how long will the influence of political spokespeople, newspaper proprietors and journalists last?