Goldacre: asked for correction

She may be Britain’s pre-emininent turd critiquer but Gillian McKeith: not so good at social media.

McKeith has for a long time been criticised by Bad Science columnist Dr Ben Goldacre – you can see on his website the number of times he has written pieces criticising her qualifications and health claims, dating back to 2004.

Over on Twitter this week, someone tweeted that they were looking forward to reading the chapter about Gillian McKeith in Goldacre’s book Bad Science. Gillian McKeith, who appeared to be looking herself up on Twitter, took umbrage to the tweeter’s comment and then appeared to say that Goldacre’s book contained lies about her.

Goldacre himself is an ardent tweeter with a big fanbase. He quickly responded to McKeith with an offer to discuss any issues she had with his book, pointing ‘libel fans’ in the direction of McKeith’s Twitter stream.

Instead of acceding to Goldacre’s request that she tweet that Bad Science is not lies, McKeith started deleting tweets. Unfortunately for her, Goldacre’s army of followers quickly turned up cached copies of McKeith’s timeline. Then things got worse – McKeith suggested that the whole Twitter feed in her name had been set up by an imposter (that weird kind of imposter who suddenly declares they’re not real just when they’ve got everyone fooled). Again, Goldacre’s followers quickly turned up evidence that it was the real Gillian McKeith’s Twitter feed, showing links to it from her website and newsletter.

It’s a pretty spectacular example of what not to do – angering someone who is well known for being, let’s say tenacious; deleting tweets when she realised she was in difficulty; and then, the crowning act of idiocy, trying to pretend that her whole Twitter account wasn’t really hers after all. Genius.

McKeith’s account has now gone quiet, which is probably for the best. Will she quietly return, or is Twitter now over for her as a vehicle for promoting her books and products?

McKeith: has gone quiet

Separately, Dr Ben Goldacre is calling for the creation of what he calls a repository of news ingredients – which is to say all the elements that a journalist has used to create a story. His argument is that he doesn’t trust mainstream media to report stories in an “accurate, complete, and interesting” way. Hard to see journalists, who seem to have less time than ever to get stories written, going for this idea, as much as you can see Goldacre’s point.