“We’re going on a troll hunt…” The Sun searches for offensive comments about its beloved 'Boris'
The moment Carrie Johnson announced her pregnancy, the ‘vile trolls’ stories were being written.
When Carrie Johnson announced her second pregnancy and wrote about her miscarriage, a second story was inevitable: The ‘horrified’ hunt for offensive comments about Johnson (Mrs), Johnson (Mr), Johnson Jnr (their son Wilfred) or Johnson In Vivo (their unborn child) on social media.
It’s an easy win for a hack hunting for outrage. Across the blasted wastes of Twitter, there is always going to be someone saying something that can be used to shock your readers, regardless of how tiny their audience is or how their words would have probably gone unread entirely if you hadn’t dragged them out of the mire and slapped them in a national newspaper.
Sarah Vine — sadly no longer ‘away’ — was quick off the blocks with a piece for The Mail on Sunday headlined Cowardly trolls may mock - but Carrie Johnson is doing women a great service by speaking with such candour.
Given that it will have been written at speed, thrown into the paper along with Vine’s usual column, the column didn’t actually quote any of the ‘trolls’ Vine was castigating. Instead, she essentially predicted what thought would be said (that “may” in the headline is doing a lot of work):
Carrie Johnson announces she is pregnant with the couple's second child, having suffered a miscarriage early on in the year – and Twitter springs to life like a putrefying zombie sensing a piece of passing grey matter.
'Fake baby'; 'Ooh, look, another dead cat'; endless jokes about nursery wallpaper; and the rest, quite honestly, so unpleasant even Frankie Boyle might consider them a bit de trop.
Most of them, of course, hiding behind anonymity like the pathetic cowardly creeps they are.
Vine, of course, commits her acts of cruelty and cowardice from beneath a byline featuring an optimistic rendering of her face so it’s much, much better you see. Elsewhere in the Mail on Sunday, she used space in her column to sneer at Stormzy for funding 30 more scholarships at Cambridge for black and mixed-race students, writing:
Why does it have to be about skin colour? Why can’t it just be about opportunities for all young people from deprived backgrounds, regardless of what they look like?
It’s the kind of dog-whistling, why-oh-why wailing that usually rattles around in the comment sections. The difference is that Vine is a very expensive way for The Mail on Sunday to print such cheap opinions.
Clemmie Moodie in The Sun has an advantage over Vine with her column coming out a few days after Johnson’s announcement. That means she — or a workie, probably — has been able to go digging for 'disgust’, seeking out some actual examples of unpleasant comments from social media with which to season her column and spice up her outrage.
Under the typically understated headline, Rabid Tory-haters mocking Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson’s tot need to #bekind she writes:
When Carrie Johnson revealed over Instagram last weekend she was expecting a “rainbow baby” — a term given to a child following a miscarriage — within minutes, toxic social media had crawled into action, spewing forth its venomous bile. With the hashtag #BorisBaby, first came endless gags about the Prime Minister and his fondness for procreation…
… But then the rabid Left started to rear their ugly little heads. (Of course, we couldn’t tell if some of them were ugly because, predictably, they were faceless, hiding behind a made-up name, and no identifying photo.)1
She continued:
Carrie, a 33-year-old woman still grieving the death of her unborn baby, was compared to a Nazi. Adolf Hitler was mentioned. A “comedian” made a “gag” about Jimmy Savile.
In this section of the column, Moodie doesn’t quote the tweets she’s talking about so I went looking to find the things she references. I found one person with 551 followers who responded to someone else’s tweet asking for compassion by saying, “Would you extend that offer to Hitler and the nazis?”, who said later in a back-and-forth debate:
I didn’t make it seem she’s a nazi, I was wondering at what point you draw the line. She is a member of the Conservative Party and married to Boris Johnson, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.
Neither the first tweet nor the follow up have received any likes or retweets. If tweets are stones skimmed across a pond, these were the sort that sink the minute they hit the water, leaving no ripples. Moodie had to hunt for them.
Similarly, I found a tweet comparing Carrie Johnson to Eva Braun and mentioning Adolf Hitler but that was sent in May long before the news of Mrs Johnson’s second pregnancy and previous miscarriage was publicly known. That tweet — from an account with just over 750 followers — also had no likes or retweets.
Jokes comparing Boris Johnson to Jimmy Saville aren’t uncommon on Twitter. In fact, the place is awash with them but there don’t seem to be any with much traction specifically about the baby news.
Moodie finally quotes a specific tweet…
An imbecile called James tweeted to his 18 followers: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a cynical lie to garner sympathy. Gets a few votes, doesn’t it.”
… but again it’s a message that was nestled in the replies to a tweet by Sky News Political Correspondent Rob Powell. It got 7 likes and 5 retweets, with three of those quote tweets by people castigating what ‘James’ said. The Sun also prints only part of his tweet, which read in full:
100,000 people have lost their lives. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was a cynical lie to garner sympathy. Gets a few votes doesn't it.
There’s no justification for claiming a woman has lied about a miscarriage.
‘James’ tweet was not remotely representative of ‘the Left’s’ response to the news that Carrie Johnson was expecting a child and that she had suffered a miscarriage previously though. The tweet was a fringe opinion that would never have been seen by Johnson and probably would not even have reached all 18 of the account’s followers.
But Moodie has a line — the Left are “rabid” — and she wants to ‘prove’ that, so an unpleasant tweet by an account with 18 followers and no traction is lifted onto the pages of The Sun, held up as if it were originally presented in fifty-foot neon letters rather than the output of a dim bulb in the darkness.
Moodie’s search for practically unread tweets goes on:
Another user demanded to know, “What are the Tories trying to slip under the radar?” as if Carrie’s announcement was all one cynical ploy to detract from her husband imminently bombing every hospital in the land, or pressing a big red button under his desk and casually destroying the free world.
Here The Sun columnist is using hyperbole for rhetorical effect. The tweet she’s referring to reads “First thing that came to mind on reading that news was what are the Tories trying to slip in now under the radar?”. That user hardly “demanded to know” but rather idly wondered in a reply to a radio presenter which — guess what? — received no likes, no retweets, and no replies.
Moodie sketches out hyperbolic scenarios (“bombing every hospital in the land or pressing a big red button under his death and casually destroying the free world”) to imply that governments never push out news to get a quick polling bump or to take attention away from bad news.
I’m tired of people crying “dead cat”2 whenever Boris Johnson’s administration does anything but there is good reason to be sceptical about when and why it puts stories out. It’s also worth remembering that Carrie Johnson is not a naive ingenue but a former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. I do not remotely disbelieve that she had a miscarriage nor do I think she talked about it for political ends, however.
It’s not outrageous to think that Boris Johnson (or any politician of any party) would push out news of a new baby at a convenient time though. Johnson bluntly described the distraction tactics in 2013, in a column that discussed advice Lynton Crosby gave him during his 2008 and 2012 mayoral campaigns:
'Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table, mate”.
There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table, and I don’t mean that people will be outrage, alarmed and disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant.
The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat — the thing you want them to talk about — and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.
Was this what Johnson and Johnson were up to this time? No. But is it a “conspiracy theory” to be cynical about Boris Johnson? Not even remotely.
Moodie mashes together everything from unsurprising jokes about wallpaper and the Johnsons’ sex life to present a picture of a mob with torches ablaze marching towards the castle. It’s a classic tabloid tactic: Presenting social media as the swamp and the papers as a corrective as if cruelty, prurience and prying aren’t the main moneymakers for outlets like The Sun.
Where Moodie gets truly bold is reaching for academic evidence to support her claims about the ‘rabid Left’:
In a study published five years ago in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science, findings linked low intelligence to prejudice.
So that’s something for these cretins to mull over. For years, Conservatives have been branded intolerant . . . in the past, often for good reason.
But times have changed, and so have the Tories. In trying to shut down free speech — readily “cancelling” anyone who disagrees with their ideas of what’s acceptable — the Left is becoming increasingly illiberal.
Only, the study she’s referring to — research by Dr Mark Brandt of Tilburg University and Dr Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey — actually indicated that prejudice exists all along the intelligence spectrum. They suggested that individuals with lower IQ test results3 tended to dislike minorities they perceived as liberal while people higher end of that scale tended to be prejudiced toward conservative groups such as religious fundamentalists.
Way to subtly slag off Sun readers, Clemmie.
When people mock right-wing politicians (and yes, their spouses), the papers are quick to hunt for social media posts to ‘shock’ and ‘appal’ their readers. When it is the other way round — such as the repeated racist monsterings of Diane Abbott — the right-wing press either turns a blind eye or joins in with glee.
And there’s another kind of hypocrisy at work in Moodie’s social media searching: When she was recently heavily criticised for writing the following about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's baby daughter Lilibet…
Lilibet isn’t a Princess . . . but by maintaining their royal connection in such a blatant, contrived fashion, they have cunningly ensured that she will always be entitled.
Presumably, a Spotify baby playlist will follow. (No nursery rhymes though, because we all know Baa Baa Black Sheep is racist).
… she used a subsequent column to complain:
It seems we’re all fearing imminent cancellation.
One household name, a daytime presenter, texted to say he was too terrified to go off-script in case the “worker bees scouring the media, who know exactly what to do to get us sacked” took offence. And, well, get him sacked.
But what is Moodie doing but “scouring” social media trying to find things to be offended by, bringing less than a handful of messages that virtually no one saw to a national newspaper audience and heavily implying that they represent the view of the “rabid Left” of her invention, which is stuffed with more strawmen than a Wizard of Oz convention.
The last time I had cause to cover Moodie in this newsletter, I wrote:
No one is cancelling Lamb or Moodie and, unlike many people who fall into the sights of their respective newspapers, they have the tools, the connections, and the backup to argue back. Bolstered by national newspaper bylines they can pour hot oil on their critics, dubbing anyone who disagrees with what they say a “troll” and rolling up honest anger with opportunistic abuse.
And so it goes again. There was no huge wave of abuse rolling towards Carrie Johnson over her baby announcement or her discussion of miscarriage. Most people were either happy for her or indifferent and only the most fringe voices had anything cruel to say about her suffering.
The newspapers need social media as both a source and an enemy. The Carrie Johnson story came from an Instagram post and Clemmie Moodie had no column today without mining for tweets. But the notion that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any other social media network is more reliably toxic than the British newspapers is belied by a single day of flipping through their pages.
The trolls of the British press are simply well paid and have access to more expensive photography than mere amateurs.
Remember: A byline in a national newspaper turns any cruel comment from ‘trolling’ into ‘sharp-eyed analysis’.
Adding a shocking or sensational topic into a debate to distract from an area that is more damaging for your candidate.
It’s worth noting that IQ tests are widely considered not to be a good measure of intelligence as they do not produce consistent results across cultures and do not reflect the complex nature of human intellect and its different components.