Weekly Media Trends: Osborne Email Bombshell

PLUS Viral Mail Column and Zuckerberg's Twitter Copycat

Tory Tales of affairs and Misconduct Rock Westminster

A bombshell story was conspicuously absent from today's newspaper headlines of plane strikes and tennis serves. Over the last 48 hours, a highly salacious email has been circulating amongst journalists, MPs and guests to George Osborne's upcoming wedding, outlining a series of ever increasingly outrageous allegations about Osborne's infidelity.

Amongst other claims, the email alleges Osborne and Thea Rogers, who are due to wed tomorrow, started their relationship as an affair, and Osborne then had affairs outside of that affair, sometimes with very young women. It provides a series of links to various tweets and Mail Online stories to count as 'evidence' in a blatant attempt to goad journalist recipients into ignoring fears of libel to publish instead. Judging by today's papers, they haven't taken the bait!

The scandal isn't just terrible timing for Osborne and Rogers - what we'd do to be a fly on the wall at tomorrow's 'celebrations'. It is also damning timing for the Tories, who this week also saw former MP Rob Roberts stripped of the Tory party whip for 'repeated and unwanted sexual advances towards a member of staff', AND the publishing of the damming Chris Pincher report, which recommended he be suspended for eight weeks for groping two staffers at a Carlton Club do.

It seems fitting that all of this landed during the peak of Westminster's summer party season, which will likely give rise to a new suite of scandals.

It is a pretty damming indictment on the state of Westminster that all three stories landed with minimal shock or surprise. After so many years of Boris' antics, are we desensitised, or are we immune, having accepted that the whole of Westminster is rotten?

Wherever you land, Sunak's Diet Coke vice has never looked so virginal.

Liz Jones column and the Power of Outrageous Melodrama (& Horrible People)

Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones has for some time now – and this is meant as a sincere professional compliment - been one of the UK’s most skilled attention-seekers.

But this week Liz managed to obliterate even her own lofty histrionic standards with a column so unhinged that even many of the most ardent boycotters of the Daily Mail group felt the need to click.

Inspired by an episode of Sex and the City reboot ‘And Just Like That’, Jones contacted all her exes and eventually persuaded her ex-husband to meet for a date. What followed was a melodrama of astounding proportions.

Jones’ account of the meeting was a particularly entertaining edition of her usual far-fetched, self-involved Telenovela, but what really made the article go viral was the response of her ex-husband, who not only verified Liz’s outlandish account of the meeting but did so in such a vitriolic way that he actually made the usually-demagogic columnist look like the reasonable one.

People of all political and ethical stripes love outrage, salacious drama and villains so much that this extra-strength, double-concentrate of these elements allowed even a media title as polarising as the Daily Mail to transcend its own controversy and, temporarily, attract readers of all stripes.

Threads is here.

Threads, Instagram’s anticipated rival to Twitter launched on Thursday and has been well-received by users. In the first seven hours of its launch, the app had over 10 million sign-ups. Existing Instagram users can log in using the same username, and posts are limited to 500 characters, including links, photos, and videos. Brands have reacted quickly, and celebrity backers include Shakira, Gordon Ramsay, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and the Dalai Lama.

The Threads feed automatically defaults to show you all the noise. Currently the app has a single feed that shows you posts from both people you follow and people you don’t, compared to Twitter’s “Following” feed and a “For You” feed. It also lacks some of Twitter’s more advanced features, such as hashtags, bookmarking, and the ability to search for specific content.

Let’s not forget that Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has a history of copying successful features from other social media platforms. In 2016, Instagram launched Stories, a copy of Snapchat’s Stories feature. In 2020, Instagram launched Reels, which was scarily similar to TikTok’s short-form videos. And now Threads is a blatant rip-off of Twitter, ramping up the ongoing rivalry between tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (who is threatening to sue, btw!) The launch of Threads also came days after Musk controversially announced new limits to how many tweets users can access per day based on their subscription level – something he quietly scrapped after user backlash.

As of today Threads has reached over 55 million users. How does this compare to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter? There are currently over 2.35 billion monthly active Instagram users, close to 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook, and over 368 million monthly active users on Twitter. It is still too early to say whether Threads will be able to attract a large user base and challenge Twitter’s dominance. It is still a relatively new app with a smaller user base than Twitter. But nearly one-third (31%) of global Instagrammers were aged between 18 and 24 years, so Threads is on track to become the social media platforms where Gen Z talk and hang out.

Threads is here to shake up the social media landscape. The app has the potential to become a scalable Twitter alternative, where brands and creators can connect with their audiences on a more intimate level. On the other hand, Twitter’s future is uncertain. Twitter has been struggling to grow its user base in recent years, and with frustrating new changes, Threads could offer users a more appealing alternative. Only time will tell if this is the beginning of the end, and we can only wait and see.