It’s been quite a week for the UK Twittersphere – #Trafigura, #JanMoir and #TFL

The past week has been nothing if not eventful.

On Tuesday Trafigura-gate captured the public’s attention about the length to which a ‘large but comfortably anonymous trading company’ would go to prevent the Guardian from reporting parliamentary proceedings. People (who otherwise would never have heard of either Trafigura or Carter Ruck) didn’t waste time in expressing their displeasure in 140 characters.

Then this morning we got the double. Daily Mail columnist Jan ‘the beast’ Moir wrote a column so spiteful and homophobic that the ensuing online backlash caused:

And on top of that there was Ian, the ponytailed TFL twat bully who shouted down an elderly gentleman at London’s Holborn Station, then suggested he be ‘slung under the train.’ Ian’s now been suspended, and Boris even weighed in on Twitter.

In each of the above cases, Twitter was central in publicising the events and the outrage echoed across the web:

Without overstating things, it’s a pretty good week when a web service can cause a gag to be lifted, expose abusive customer service and get even the Mail to change their behaviour.

Credit to Malcolm Coles for encouraging people to tweet to BT, M&S and Visit England asking them to pull their advertising. And credit to Jonathan MacDonald who filmed and blogged about the incident at Holburn Station.

Need some further reading?

#Trafigura: