I love social media, and hate racism. Which is why I was particularly pleased when this delightfully xenophobic poll courtesy of the Daily Mail swung right back round and hit them in the face thanks to good ol’ Twitter.

The poll asks whether or not gipsies should be allowed to jump the NHS waiting list. Whether or not they should or even if the poll is politically correct is not really what I’m interested in though.

What I am interested in is how viral the poll has gone and how quickly it has achieved it. People have been sending the link around the interweb to skew the results and show the Daily Mail up. As I’m writing this, there have been 190+ retweets of it in the past 20 minutes, and it is currently number 5 on trending topics. Social Media is such a powerful tool that when people get up in arms about something, big things can happen, such as giving the impression that Daily Mail readers are perhaps more liberal minded than most may think.

I hope another paper prints a story tomorrow about how Daily Mail readers think gipsies should go straight to the front of NHS waiting list. Yay social media.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Social media, Uncategorized, Web content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.