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Tristram Hunt warns Labour against social media disconnect

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By John Glenday, Reporter

October 9, 2015 | 2 min read

Labour’s former education secretary Tristram Hunt has warned his party against getting too distracted by social media and focus instead on the ‘real concerns’ of voters.

Tristram Hunt, Labour

Hunt frets that a growing focus on online tools risks isolating activists within an echo chamber, disconnecting them from real world concerns away from the febrile environment of street protest and the realities of government.

In a speech to be given later today the Guardian reports Hunt will say: “If social media were politicising the many as well as radicalising the few; were it significantly growing the number of people engaged in politics in the first place, rather than confirming pre-held bias, then Ed Miliband might now be sitting in 10 Downing Street.”

“What people say to each other on the internet – and social media in particular – rewards strong, polarising opinions and primary coloured politics.

“Far from broadening the mind through access to the greatest library human beings have ever created, people’s experience of the internet is increasingly a narrow online world where anyone who puts their heads above the parapet can be the target of an anonymised digital mob.”

Hunt will go on to warn that Corbyn’s election risks throwing the party into a position of “…perennial demonstration and the thrill of being the relentless outsider".

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