It's not often that BBC Trending's Mike Wendling veers away from his pet subject - the far-right on the internet - but #wreathgate has tempted him to do so. Linking to the BBC's Newswatch, he's tweeted:
The real story of the PM, the wreath and the footage on Breakfast is actually very dull and will not go viral, because it’s not nearly as sexy as a half baked #wreathgate conspiracy theory.
And I agree with him. He's right about that. It won't. (Despite my post about it!).
Where I part company with him is that I favour argument and mockery in dealing with such conspiracy-mongering folly. He - as his following tweet shows - inclines towards censorship: i.e. the tech companies 'doing something' to stop it:
This is a major problem with our information ecosystem, and atm its {sic} very difficult to see what anybody (other than a few dudes in Silicon Valley) can do about it.
Fools will always be among us. Getting the dudes in Silicon Valley to prevent them from being able to use social media to accuse the BBC of deliberately inserting the wrong footage of Boris Johnson at the wreath-laying service at the Cenotaph in order to cover up for his wreath-laying ineptness (because of their 'pro-Tory bias') isn't the right way to go, at least according to my way of thinking. And I find it rather worrying that a senior BBC journalist seems to think it is.
