During the 2017 General Election campaign the Tory party thought that they could simply buy social media popularity by pumping £millions into an unprecedented campaign of social media dark ads.
The strategy backfired spectacularly because the Tories just didn't understand that you can't buy social media virality, you have to produce content that people want to share (something I'm apparently quite good at having written the #1. #2, and #7 most viral articles of the entire 2017 General Election campaign).
The Tories got absolutely trounced on social media, and now that they know they can't buy social media success, they're expressing hatred and contempt for it.
The Tory MP for South East Cornwall Sheryll Murray (the one who went viral when she was caught on camera saying that she thinks food bank Britain is a good thing) has been calling for a crackdown on social media free speech, and the Tory MP for South West Devon Gary Streeter has said that he hates social media "because it gives voices to people who don't deserve one".
The idea that some people don't deserve a political voice is exactly the kind of digracefully elitist Tory rubbish that has alienated millions of younger people, and made the Tory party so damned unpopular on social media.This is why i hate social media. It gives a voice to people who dont deserve one https://t.co/7DmVwa92ND— Gary Streeter MP (@garystreeterSWD) June 28, 2017
The idea that there is a kind of special establishment elite who deserve to have their political opinions heard, and the rest of us are political untermenschen who deserve no political voice might well appeal to bitter old right-wing authoritarians who want to be dominated and repressed by a powerful political elite, but it's absolutely toxic to anyone with liberal social values or even the slightest amount of self-respect.
The last three decades has seen a dramatic reversal in social mobility, with higher percentages of privately educated elitists in front bench politics and in the mainstream media than back in the 1980s, but social media is levelling the playing field a little by allowing state educated people from ordinary backgrounds (like me) the opportunity to express our political opinions.
The Tories hate the freedom of political ideas that social media and the Internet allow, and that's why they're so damned keen to censor it.
The idea of uppity plebs having political ideas of their own, rather than rote learning and mindlessly regurgitating the propaganda they're fed by the political establishment makes them sick with fear.
Thankfully the scale of the social media fightback meant that Theresa May threw away her parliamentary majority in her vanity election, so now she's going to have a hell of a fight on her hands (inside and outside of parliament) if she's going to try to impose self-serving Tory censorship on social media and the Internet.
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