The Trafigura story from last week has grown and grown, if only because of the follow-up, which I was too busy to blog about, in which Jan Moir’s piece in the Daily Mail was savaged across Twitter to remarkable effect…….

‘liberal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘left’ (in the typical tax-and-spend sense) and the impending replacement of Labour by Conservative isn’t necessarily a ’shift to the right’: it’s the replacement of one ‘centre’ by another ‘centre’, mainly because people have got sick of the last lot, not due to any large political shift. Also the actual ’swing’ could well simply amount to a couple of million voters not bothering to turn up and vote. A lot of topical issues don’t break down easily into ‘left-versus-right’.

It’s about a liberal/illiberal divide. What’s so interesting is watching the liberals adopt the tactics of the illiberals. That might not be a bad thing – as I say above, the illiberals get shit done. Crazy awful shit, but it gets done.

I’m just wanting this adoption to be noticed, and kept in check. Will there come a point where we start setting up binary polls demanding that people vote to agree that foreign people shouldn’t be rounded up and shot in the face?

There’s a second half to this whole conversation about the anti-war marches a few years ago, and what a hideous, HIDEOUS mess that was, with people marching against a war under seas of anti-Semitic signs and banners. But that’s for another time.

But with Twitter, it’s so beloved by the media types that an outraged reaction there is given a disproportionate amount of significance. It’s brilliant, but I fear it won’t last once the Twitter fad passes and the next big social networking tool is less conducive to this sort of thing.

I think the two most interesting questions looking to the future of Twitter activism are:

a) Is there a significant but currently dormant right-wing minority on Twitter just waiting for their own issue to galvanise around? If so, what kind of issue might light the fuse and how will the existing Liberal majority respond? If not, how long will it take for the right-wing to “get” and co-opt the power of Twitter.

b) All the wonderful examples of Twitter activism in recent months have been very simplistic, black or white issues for anyone of even a vaguely leftist bent. What will happen when a more complex topic arises and a plurality of opinions are fighting for trend space? Will Twitter prove to be so powerful then, or will it turn out to be no more than a very blunt instrument?

Oh, one final thought. It seems interesting to me that the most potent political activism in this country right now is coming from the Left (the contrast with the US couldn’t be clearer). We could be just months away from a change of Government and the return of the right-wing to power after a long time in the wilderness. Twitter could be maturing as a campaigning platform just at the point that it’s seemingly natural constituency moves into opposition. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s use changes during that transition.