Tag Archives: facebook

Mother of disabled child submits official complaint against “retards” rant Tory councillor

10:35am Mon March 7th

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The Tory who branded anti-cuts protesters a “collection of retards” has been subject to an official complaint from the mother of a disabled child. The Conservative leader on Hull City Council hit the headlines after Scrapbook exposed his rant against those viewing a council meeting in which 1,400 jobs were axed in £65m cuts.

David Cameron has been called to act against Cllr John Fareham after Unison organiser Steve Torrance revealed several people with physical and learning disabilities were in the public gallery at the time. Julie Corbett, who was at the meeting and also on the local Learning Disability Partnership Board, wrote of her “shock” and “horror” at the remarks in her complaint to the Standards Board:

“One of my children has a severe learning disability and if I was aware that this word was used about her I would consider it a hate crime.”

A Facebook group has been set up calling for Cllr Fareham to be sacked as group leader and forced to stand down as a councillor in May:

CLICK THE “LIKE” BUTTON TO SIGN UP

And we all thought dinosaurs were extinct.

Days after launch, the coalition's official "Spending Challenge" Facebook group has less than 100 followers

4:26pm Wed July 21st

10 comments

What is it about Conservative Party and social media comedy gold? During the election they found their much vaunted Cash Gordon site redirected to pornography by hackers. Having finally got their hands on those red boxes, no sooner had they launched the Spending Challenge website than it became an unmoderated forum for racists to rant about “immergrants” [sic] and tongue in cheek suggestions for “a windfall tax on people called Steve”, “sell the unemployed after six months on benefits” and a very good recipe for beef and vegetable casserole, inter alia.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! To give this whole cuts in public spending thing some down-with-the-kids street cred, Spending Challenge has its own Facebook group which - at the time of writing – has, um, a risible 69 followers. This would be slightly less embarrassing if the page hadn’t been live for several days following its launch with some fanfare, including a video conference between David Cameron and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The short exchange features an absolutely cringeworthy performance from Dave, who outdoes even his own stellar best on the phoniness front:

Fail.

George W. Bush joins Facebook

8:17am Thu June 3rd

81 comments

Retired to your Texas ranch with too much time on your hands? When you’re done “visiting 20 [US] states and 8 countries” why not while away the days (and spy on the cooler kids) with a dedicated cocaine Facebook addiction. Yes, Dubya has signed up for the world’s largest social networking site.

For younger readers, perhaps this is the political equivalent of their uncool dad joining Facebook (especially if their father was an election-stealing, torture-supporting, climate-destroying moron).

Is it too late to for a reverse-Groucho?

Facebook to sue Daily Mail over "child grooming" story

2:01pm Thu March 11th

3 comments

“Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.

So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.”

And so began the Daily Mail’s double-page hatchet job on Facebook (edited legal retreat version here). This would be incredibly damaging for the social networking giant. Damaging, that is, if it happened not to be a load of b****cks:

The original author, Mark Williams-Thomas, had told the paper that the social network he referred to in the article was not Facebook.
He re-asserted this when sent a draft of the story with Facebook named.
The Mail’s own expert backed up Williams-Thomas, repeating that the network described couldn’t be Facebook.

But they went ahead and published it anyway! Global Dashboard has the full story.

Daily Mail: keeping you afraid since 1896.

Prezza taunts Boy George on Facebook

10:15am Fri February 12th

4 comments

Earlier this week the Tories got all social meeja on us with a Facebook Q&A session entitled “Everything you’ve always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask George Osborne” “George Osborne answers your questions on the economy”:

The idea was that the great unwashed enter questions using the Conservatives’ Facebook page which would then be put to Boy George along with queries from a live audience - all streamed live over the internets (video here). The honourable member for Hull East’s curiosity evidently got the better of him:

Strangely enough this matter was never put to Osborne.

Maybe they ran out of time or something?

Pimp your Facebook with an anti-BNP profile image

11:10pm Tue October 20th

5 comments

For those of you that don’t have time to blog/leaflet/agitate.

Fire it up at facebook.com (and while you’re there join this)!

Forgive me, Father, for I have Twittered

8:30pm Mon August 3rd

2 comments

Archbishop Vincent Nichols: zero Facebook friends

The head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, has let rip with an alarmist tirade against mobile phones and social networking in an interview with the Torygraph:

Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities, but I’m wary about it. It’s not rounded communication so it won’t build a rounded community.
We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

Benn Parr’s Mashable post boils his arguments down to one sentence – overuse of Facebook and social media are leading to the decay of society – and promptly knocks them over:

Social media’s the straw man of this debate. It’s easy to blame new technologies for breaking down the fabric of society. It doesn’t go to the root of the problem, though. For example, it’s misleading to point the finger squarely at social networking in the Megan Gillan Bebo bullying case. Bullying is not specific to the web – it happens on the playground just as much as it happens on the Internet. The issue isn’t the medium in which the harassment occurred, but the harassment itself.

The Telegraph’s online communities editor makes similar arguments and observes wickedly: “You’ve also got to wonder what a person who spends a significant amount of his life talking to an imaginary being knows about ’rounded communication’.”

Given the church’s enlightened position on such matters, someone should probably let the Catholic Herald know so that they can take down their official Facebook group and Twitter account:

That’ll be ten Our Fathers and five Hail Marys for the RSS feed!

As an interesting aside, the Catholic Herald is owned by hotel magnate Rocco Forte and newspaper magnate convicted fraudster Conrad Black, who is currently incarcerated at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida. Black is reported to “relish the power [the Herald] gave him within the Catholic church, and he could use it as a base from which to rebuild his media interests when he is eventually released”.