Daily Mail Watch

Julie Moult is still an idiot! (Please RT)

Posted by Tim Ireland

September 10th, 2009

Hi, folks! I’m quietly readying myself for a return to the blogosphere, but I just got this wind of this via an anonymous tip, and it seemed to be an ideal warm-up exercise:

Do you remember Julie Moult? You should; it was her idiocy that finally got me fired up enough to get our little group of Daily Mail watchers together here at Daily Mail Watch.

Here’s Our Julie’s latest scoop, and it’s whopper.

Demi snubs Sarah the Twitter fan and ignores her message
By Julie Moult

Her contacts book may be bursting at the seams, but it appears not everybody wants to get to know Sarah Brown. The Prime Minister’s wife has successfully wooed U.S. socialite Paris Hilton, supermodel Naomi Campbell and America’s First Lady Michelle Obama. However, Demi Moore seems rather less interested. In fact, the Hollywood actress has just delivered the internet equivalent of the cold shoulder…

Miss Moore and her husband Anton Kutcher were among the first celebrities to help make Twittering an international craze. So who better to help Mrs Brown publicise a book documenting the plight of women in the developing world? On Tuesday afternoon a series of Tweets popped up on Miss Moore’s page from Mrs Brown’s Twitter account telling the actress to ‘Spread the word (in the U.S.A)!’ that ‘Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day’. The response from Miss Moore? Very little, apart from a nonplussed silence. In terms of Twitter etiquette, it’s rather like being ignored at a social function.

(read full article)

This absurd and pointless pop at the PM’s wife would have earned a place on Daily Mail Watch regardless of what I’m about to reveal, as Demi Moore (mrskutcher) has just under TWO MILLION followers on Twitter, and it absurd to suggest that any failure to respond to any tweet sent her way is a ’snub’, as anyone with over a few hundred followers (*cough*) will readily tell you.

But it gets better… hold onto your sides:

Sarah Brown (SarahBrown10) did not tweet an RT (re-tweet) appeal at Demi Moore; quite the opposite, in fact.

It all started when Demi Moore posted the original message:

Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day- http://bit.ly/AaNkX Amazing & inspiring book !
(mrskutcher: 11:25 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck )

About half an hour later, Demi Moore then RTed this response after being alerted to the idea that she should include some sort of RT appeal in her message:

Spread the word! RT @GTproductions: Just bot it! RT Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day- http://bit.ly/AaNkX
(mrskutcher: 11:40 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck )

Then Sarah Brown kindly responded to that appeal, with this, which is clearly an RT of Demi Moore’s second tweet on the subject:

RT @mrskutcher Spread the word (in the USA)! RT @GTproductions: RT Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day-
(SarahBrown10: 1:51 PM Sep 8th from web)

She has added “in the USA!”, but this is in brackets (standard etiquette for comments in RTs) and either way the message begins with a dirty great ‘RT’ followed Demi Moore’s account name. Even if Julie Moult had only seen this single tweet by Sarah Brown, if she knew anything about Twitter she should have immediately recognised it as an RT by Sarah Brown in response to an appeal from Demi Moore.

But no.

Further, while she actually managed/bothered to conduct enough research to scan Demi Moore’s Twitter page for any ‘response’ to Sarah Brown’s ‘appeal’, she failed to recognise that what she was looking at was the original tweet and appeal:

On Tuesday afternoon a series of Tweets popped up on Miss Moore’s page from Mrs Brown’s Twitter account telling the actress to ‘Spread the word (in the U.S.A)!’ that ‘Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day’.

You could tweet a million messages at Demi Moore, but nothing would not turn up on her Twitter page unless she tweeted it herself. There’s also the minor matter of Sarah Brown’s tweet being published some three hours after Demi Moore’s, but a certain someone had difficulty wrapping her brain around that, too. And yet here she is writing as if she’s some sort of authority on Twitter, while portraying Sarah Brown as an outcast and wannabe.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call an Epic Iain Dale.

To paraphrase Our Julie, in terms of Twitter etiquette, it’s rather like grabbing the wrong end of the foot and sticking it in your mouth. Or something like that.

Julie Moult is an idiot. Fact.

If the Daily Mail are going to continue to employ her, they should probably go back to checking her work.

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Postscript: The only ‘Julie Moult’ on Twitter is jem1973, who currently has 6 followers and only follows this feed from a rival newspaper. (Not that I’m judging anyone… over anything but their idiocy.)

Categories: Media |