Word: blaney
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sometime before June 2010. With 79 of Britain's 645 MPs currently using Twitter alongside almost 200 prospective parliamentary candidates and a raft of Westminster journalists and bloggers, digital politics has become as crowded and combustible as the analogue version. The latest conflagration - a battle between Conservative blogger Donal Blaney and a Twitter imposter tweeting as @blaneysblarney, the name of Blaney's blog (http://donalblaney.blogspot.com/) - looks set not only to make legal history but also possibly to impact on the use of Twitter worldwide...
...response to a petition filed by Blaney, the English High Court sent this "direct message" to @blaneysblarney via Twitter: "You are hereby ordered by the High Court of Justice to read and comply with the following order." This was accompanied by a link to a web page containing the command to desist from the misleading tweeting. By clicking the link, the miscreant risks revealing his or her personal IP address, but Blaney realizes his shadowy opponent might not fall into this cunning trap. "I've watched enough [of the police TV drama] NCIS and all these kinds of programs...
...blaneysblarney tweets things like this: "Now Obama, who the eurofederasts love, is happy to leave us to the mercy of the mad mullahs." The real Blaney just blogged on Obama, suggesting the President might have done better in pitching for the Chicago Olympics "to play up his Kenyan heritage (and, as some allege, the country of his birth)." Blaney says that it's precisely because the impostor is doing a good job of imitating him that he decided to act. "If it was a parody, if it had been set up saying 'I'm bored today...
...bother to go to the expense and effort of court when Twitter has its own procedures for dealing with impostors? The answer is twofold. Blaney first encountered the problem of fake Twitter accounts when he represented a client who was attempting to have just such an account shut down. He complains that Twitter took more than a week to suspend the fake account. "You can't phone Twitter," he says. "As an aggressive litigator I was sending lots of nasty, threatening letters making clear what would happen to Twitter's metaphorical gonads if they didn't behave. Those were ignored...
Tebbit and Blaney's opprobrium appears to be shared by Britain's rightwing press. "Kennedy is one chum [of Brown's] who should not be honored," opined a Daily Telegraph headline. The historian Andrew Roberts penned an opinion piece in the Daily Mail entitled "The Obsceneity of Giving Ted Kennedy a Knighthood." But the Conservative party - now a touchier-feelier bunch under the leadership of David Cameron - is also divided on the issue. Simon Burns, a Tory MP, submitted the following "early day motion" to the House of Commons: "This House warmly welcomes the awarding of an honorary knighthood...