Mean Frightbat Girls

Yesterday, conservative commentator Tim Blair called them frightbats. Today, ex-Liberal Party doer Graham Young, writing for the Australian Financial Review, calls them Mean Girls. Who are these women, and why do they seem to attract this negativity from the right? 

This week’s Mean Frightbat Girls aren’t the same women who were destroying Alan Jones’s joint – they were politicians: Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon.

The Frightbats are exclusively journalists, bloggers and activists; they’re younger, and they’re feisty. They’re concerned with all sorts of “”progressive” issues, from feminism and equality to environment and science. In short, they embody a shopping list of characteristics generally distrusted by conservative men. They have both agenda and audience, and by all indications, that audience is growing.

In contrast to Tim Blair’s outing of the frightbats yesterday, Graham Young’s effort today contains no names. We’re just supposed to know who these mean girls are. Why, they’re the ones using social media to undermine our democracy of course. Surely they have some kind of neon marking on their foreheads or wear a special uniform or something?

Y’know, Twitter isn’t a private club, and those who have spent some time in and around the cesspit known as #auspol knows that there are conservatives as well as progressives in the pit, throwing their best 140-character grenades back and forth across the ether.

A quick glance at #auspol this morning suggests it’s an even fight, but the conservative tweeters have one major point of difference: they tend to tweet under pseudonyms more often than progressive tweeters. As I scroll through the last few hours of #auspol, I wonder who are the people  behind @AxeCo2Tax, @GeeForce77, @BigMiney, @LaborFAIL and @TipsySkunk.

In contrast, the Frightbats tweet under their own names: @JennaPrice, @JaneCaro, @vanbadham, @clementine_ford, @clembastow, @SummersAnne, @emfarrelly, @mariekehardy, @CatherineDeveny and @margokingston1. Of course, some progressive tweetsters do use a pseudonym, but none of them made Mr Blair's Frightbat Sorority. Is it this willingness to be open and accountable for their tweets one more factor that differentiates these women of calibre from political party hacks hiding behind fake accounts and trolling their #auspol opponents? 

Mr Young commented: 

"Polling we did during the last election showed social media was a news  source for the minority but they were two to three times more likely to be Greens or Labor voters than Liberal  ones. The corollary is Greens and Labor voters are far more numerous  on Twitter, and Twitter, as a collective, will be  on the left of the political spectrum."

This may or may not be true - he gives no source  for his conclusion. It is, however, a measure of the general distrust with which the conservative side of politics treats social media. LNP politicians are discouraged from indulging in Twitter, and when they do, it's often done with little understanding of how to use Twitter to advantage. Andrew Robb uses Twitter to distribute press releases, Joe Hockey drops in the occasional acerbic shot but disappears at the first sign of engagement, and Education Minister Christopher Pyne doesn't have a twitter account at all. Earlier this year, the Abbott Government spent millions of dollars on consultants to monitor social media with regard to immigration policies. 

Graham Young comments:

"Twitter should be a great connector. Instead it is a great divider. It is also a great undoer of "progressive" politics."

As he meanders through his thoughts on the evils of Twitter, he fails to see that Twitter is great at connecting people. Today's progressive politics - and many many other communities, political and otherwise - live large on social media, and it is from within this environment that action and activism flows into what Mr Young refers to as 'the yard'. 

Twitter is part of The Yard. It is just as real as any party boardroom, but far more accessible.