The subtitle for this post should be “I really don’t care”. Yesterday during the Labour Congress, David Cunliffe’s account tweeted an image of him interacting with someone at the Congress. As with many tweets, there was a couple of hashtags in it. One of them was meant to be #Labour2014, but it was mistyped as #Labour2041. This has been picked up by a number of people on the right. Keepingstock and Whale Oil have both blogged about it, as has Home Paddock. I also had it drawn to my attention by Caffeine Addict on Twitter:
Unsurprisingly the Young Nats picked up on it as well:
Now in the past I have called Labour out for mistakes in their tweets, such has with the Kauri Policy graphic. However this time I wasn’t going to comment on it. Unlike the Labour Party Kauri graphic issue, which was a preplanned tweet, with supporting graphics, which would have gone through a sign off process, this was a tweeting from the hip, on the fly situation. It was quickly corrected. I remember seeing the initial tweet, not noticing anything odd about it, then seeing the same tweet come up again. If Labour had left it up for a long period of time, without noticing and correcting, then it might have been worth comment.
The bottom line is, there is a difference between a simple mistake in a fast paced setting, and a failure to check in a preplanned, staged execution situation. This was a case of the former, not the latter. When it comes to social media mistakes, this is well down the list.
