Just a quick post for twitter users who follow Canadian politics.

Twitter is a handy tool to stay on top of events and issues and a great platform for debate. Unfortunately, the urge to stifle communication and jam the lines appears to be overwhelming for some folks.

Most twitter platforms allow a form of filtering. Simply blocking the hysteric, obscene and just plain crazy tweeters does not always work. In tweetdeck for example, blocked twitter users still show up in hashtags that I am watching. When I filter for the troublesome names though, they forever remain invisible making the hastags usable again.

#cdnpoli #yyccentre and #CPC have become utterly useless due to a pile of accounts spawned by a couple people. Below I am listing the anonymous accounts & sockpuppets that amount for about 90% of the white-noise in the aforementioned hashtags.

In tweetdeck you can simply cut and paste the names into the global filter. I imagine hootsuite and other programs give similar options. I strongly urge filtering. It is really not that many accounts making so much noise. Perhaps one day we will see useful discussion on Canadian politics again on twitter someday.

 Names to filter:

tersestuff,TarSandsTwat,GerryDaGiraffe,BolloHollo,Beari8it,datatect

There are a few more names out there but just filtering those above will make a profound difference in your twitter viewing. Others will no doubt spawn as users keep creating new accounts. They are generally easy to spot. Usually the account will have tweets in the 10s of thousands but only a couple hundred followers, they will always be anonymous and they often will only deal in retweeting and obscenity.

Happy rational tweeting.