I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.
Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.
I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)
They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.
Wings had just over 300,000 unique readers in June, despite taking the last couple of weeks off ourselves, bringing the monthly average readership for the first half of 2017 to 346,226. That’s 55,532 up on the same period last year, or a 19% increase.
Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:
You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.
We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.
We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.
Just a brief update on some legal shenanigans. Having received no response to TWO lawyers’ letters, I’ve filed a court claim against Express Newspapers over false and defamatory claims made in an article by Siobhan McFadyen (sourced by JK Rowling) on the Sunday Express website of 30 October, as detailed in this Wings article.
The court fee was partly funded by popular politics pundit John McTernan.
I wasn’t going to mention this on the site because it’s basically a personal matter, but as most readers don’t use Twitter or Facebook it probably ought to be briefly filed for the record, given the amount of media coverage there’s been.
And since we don’t generally do stat posts any more (the last proper one was a year ago), we hope you’ll forgive us a small indulgence to mark the milestone with a light sprinkling of facts and figures.
The popular children’s author and litigious bully JK Rowling, whose personal wealth is measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, has been devoting her time to the tricky task of finding people being rude on Twitter again.
In an attempt to prove that the independence referendum (described by the Scottish Police Federation as “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”) had been every bit as grotesque as the Brexit one which has seen an enormous rise in serious hate crimes in England and Wales – comprising thousands of incidents up to and including murder – Rowling had cherry-picked out a few unpleasant-sounding social-media comments and compiled them into a series of delightful collages.
One of the comments (visible in the top-right corner of Rowling’s composite image) came from the Twitter account of this site. And we thought it sounded a bit off, so we had a quick check to see if we’d really said something so mean.
Mark Beggan on The Pit Of Vipers: “The Lord said to Moses Chisel out two tablets….” Apr 20, 00:17
Confused on The Pit Of Vipers: “re : “deleted” messages … if any of you folks think you can access secure messaging and you are not…” Apr 19, 23:41
willie on The Pit Of Vipers: “I suspect the names are more widely known that folks realise. The hidden emerge, are exposed. That is inevitably appears…” Apr 19, 23:09
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pit Of Vipers: “To refresh memories… short article by Gordon Dangerfield about Craig Murray’s imprisonment by Lady Dorrian: THE CROWN CAME FOR CRAIG…” Apr 19, 23:05
Jerry Carroll on The Pit Of Vipers: “I didn’t think I could be any more sickened by the SNP but here we are” Apr 19, 23:02
Mark Beggan on The Pit Of Vipers: “Baby Trump says. When was the last time you said to yourself: I’m going to be Better, Bigger than ever…” Apr 19, 22:54
Anne Gorman on The Pit Of Vipers: “Couldn’t agree more. She’s a nasty piece of work and you cross her at your peril. I remember reading an…” Apr 19, 22:26
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Pit Of Vipers: “Best wishes to Craig Murray who is incapacitated abroad: « It was not my intention to run for election to…” Apr 19, 22:15
Mark Beggan on The Pit Of Vipers: “Amen. Wake up time folks.” Apr 19, 22:11
Gav on The Pit Of Vipers: “I never thought I could hate a politician like I hated Thatcher. Then along came non stick Nicky” Apr 19, 21:48
Debatablelands on The Pit Of Vipers: “Yet a third will still turn out and vote for them. If it’s depressing what this story says about the…” Apr 19, 21:46
Young Lochinvar on The Pit Of Vipers: “Lorncal Of course she was behind it, individually or as a fully embedded major part of their own little Lord…” Apr 19, 21:46
Lorncal on The Pit Of Vipers: “Because that’s not how evidence works, tw. Lady Dorrian considered them extraneous to the actual charges. That they are coming…” Apr 19, 21:45
100%Yes on The Pit Of Vipers: “NS was front and right dead center of it all she was in total control of the SNP, just ask…” Apr 19, 21:34
Lorncal on The Pit Of Vipers: “Everything she touches fall to bits, so good news. Not before she pockets wodges of lolly, of course. Should have…” Apr 19, 21:29
Alf Baird on The Pit Of Vipers: “Aye Dan, still too many Scots in denial of our colonial status, which is of course part of the ‘condition’:…” Apr 19, 21:25
Lorncal on The Pit Of Vipers: “You know, I don’t actually believe that NS was behind it all, but she must have okayed it. She did…” Apr 19, 21:21
MaryB on The Pit Of Vipers: “The revolving door keeps revolving… Remember too, that Kez is Jenny Gilruth’s partner.” Apr 19, 21:13
Mark Beggan on The Pit Of Vipers: “So how you good folks gonna vote now?” Apr 19, 20:58
Lorncal on The Pit Of Vipers: “Joan: Joanna Cherry’s book has blown the lid off a great deal. That is why they have released it now.…” Apr 19, 20:54
George Ferguson on The Pit Of Vipers: “@100%Yes I have always voted too but there comes a time when not voting is a victory. If less than…” Apr 19, 20:41
Alf Baird on The Pit Of Vipers: ““the poisonous, posing human trash on our quangoes, running our councils, topping our public bodies” Indeed, and according to Albert…” Apr 19, 20:31
Sally Hughes on The Pit Of Vipers: “Aye Alf, and timing is everything. Swinney has promised a second referendum if they get an SNP majority. Polls indicate…” Apr 19, 20:17
100%Yes on The Pit Of Vipers: “Kezia Dugdale appointed new chair of LGBT+ charity Stonewall.” Apr 19, 20:01
George Ferguson on The Pit Of Vipers: “@Dan Well my only regret on the betting front is not backing Reform UK to get 20 MSPs at 8…” Apr 19, 19:53
holymacmoses on The Pit Of Vipers: “What saddens me most of all is that it was shiver of grubby-minded, meaningless mediocrity which created a stagnant pool…” Apr 19, 19:51
Dan on The Pit Of Vipers: “Well George, they do say Caveat Emptor and that fools and their money are easily parted… Plus you regularly state…” Apr 19, 19:37
George Ferguson on The Pit Of Vipers: “@Sarah Your positively optimistic I will give you that. Tommy Sheridan was found guilty of 5 out of 6 Perjury…” Apr 19, 19:37
sarah on The Pit Of Vipers: “@ George Ferguson: Congratulations on the grandchild – something cheerful to think about! As for not voting, in my constituency…” Apr 19, 19:21
100%Yes on The Pit Of Vipers: “George Ferguson, I too constantly give donations to SNP and then the Alba Party and for what??? When Salvo started…” Apr 19, 19:20
