When Ministers Tweet Falsely

Update: This gentleman may be the Adam referred to in Clement's post from earlier today. If all of Tony's refs were pseuds, then I will look silly and have to issue an apology. We shall see. Although his origonal tweet is not indexed in politwitter, though one or two later ones are.

Origonal post starts here:

So Tony Clement has been sending tweets thanking various supporters of the government's position on the long form for indicating their support on twitter. I've written about it here. The Minister has also said that he will not identify these supportive twitterers because he is worried they might get verbally abused for their support.

I thought about this this afternoon, and I suspect that these people he is referencing are not real, and I think the proof is that none of them show up in the right hand column of his page on politwitter. To test my theory, I sent an email to one of the people at politwitter. It ran as follows:

So here's Tony Clement tweeting about all the folks on twitter who support his census long-form decision. But none of their names come up in the right hand column (tweets to Tony). Is that possible? In other words, if you send a tweet to someone using Ptwitter, should it not ALWAYS appear in the right hand column. (And may I reproduce your response) at bigcitylibstrikesback?

And I recieved the following response from Trevor May:

You don't have to use Politwitter to send the tweet for it to showup. Polit[w]itter indexes ALL tweets. And yes the right-hand column shows all tweets that are directed at the user with @username in the tweet text.

Yes you can use it as an example.

So let me repeat this. If you sign up for politwitter, anyone that sends you a tweet gets indexed. But nobody using the names Tony has mentioned have been indexed, at least back until last Thursday. Either Tony didn't receive these communications from these people by twitter, or the people sending them used pseudonyms, or he didn't receive them at all.

More Mystery People Support Census Change!

No sign of their emails, nor their twitter posts either. But they're out there....1,000s of them. A very silent majority. Invisible. Mysterious. But they talk with Tony Clement, and he hears 'em!

Update: Now Tony claims to be unwilling to reveal the twitterdentities of the brave folk you have spoken up in favor of the government's position re the long-form, for fear they might be verbally abused. But the thing is: he's on politwitter (see link) and if these people were real, wouldn't their IDs appear in the right side column?