When is a retweet not an endorsement? Quite often really.

An issue came up recently about whether or not our CLP twitter account should retweet residents’ tweets that could be viewed as not completely 100% supportive of a particular policy passed by the CLP. 

We’re not talking about a politician or an organisation here but a fellow resident of our community who has a viewpoint on something happening to them in their everyday lives.

Some argue that CLP twitter accounts shouldn’t tweet about politics at all, that they should limit themselves to promoting events and nothing else. I do think this is a slightly disingenuous argument often made by people who happen to be in a minority in their CLP. I also think what is ‘political’ and ‘not political’ would be of considerable disagreement here. What critics of ‘political’ tweets regard as uncontroversial, some of us might disagree with.

Labour needs an active, engaged social media presence where we are present in our local community. If the price of that is an occasional retweet that is anyway critical of our worldview, so be it.

It’s a misunderstanding of what twitter is to treat it like a newsletter or website. Twitter is for engaging with and communicating with those we both agree and disagree with, not for approving or disapproving of views with a CLP policy binder next to us. It’s also a very politically myopic viewpoint to think everything can be viewed through the lens of for and against us.

Of course, the CLP twitter account is there to promote CLP policy and actively undermining a CLP policy would be unacceptable. But hopefully it’s also there for us to listen as well as speak.

As ever, If any member wants the CLP twitter account to retweet something, please just mention @CambPeckLab in your retweet. If you’d like to post something on this blog just email cplabourdigital@gmail.com

Our CLP twitter account here: https://twitter.com/CambPeckLab – give us a follow!

Andy Higson

CLP Digital Media officer

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