7 Twitter accounts you should hatefollow

Hatefollow /heɪtˈfɒləʊ/ verb – When you can’t help but follow someone on social media, despite how much you despise them and/or what they stand for.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a good hateread. When we have time, we love to peruse articles on the Telegraph and Spiked, gently tutting under our breath as we ingest the latest thinkpiece about the impending doom of our once-glorious nation and the awful youths who now prowl the streets looking for opinions to censor.

But sometimes you don’t have time for a whole article. Sometimes you want to be able to feel morally superior and get that slight twinge of anger but in tiny, digestible, bite-size form. That’s where hatefollowing comes in. Jump on Twitter, follow these accounts, and you, too, can revel in the joys of the 140-character hateread.

1. Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) – Milo is the Associate Editor of Breitbart (no? me neither), but he’s probably more well-known for wandering the halls of social media, looking for fights. He has a devoted, almost cultish following of 16-year old misogynists who fall under the banner of ‘GamerGate’, one of the worst things to emerge from the cesspool of the internet in the last five years.

Follow him for: unapologetic narcissism, self-hating homophobia and laughably FOX News-esque conservatism.

Indicative tweet:

This, his pinned tweet, including a picture of himself, dubious promises of objectivity, and the cold, dead eyes of a social conservative born in the wrong century:

2. Eoin Clarke (@LabourEoin) – on the other side of the spectrum, Eoin – sorry, Dr Clarke – has made a name for himself on Twitter by creating and sharing the most wonderfully one-sided party-political memes you are ever likely to encounter. 10 out of 10 for toeing the Labour Party line. 0 out of 10 for nuance.

Follow him for: tweets which invariably contain at least one of the words ‘Labour’, ‘Tory’, ‘Cameron’, ‘Miliband’, ‘right-wing’ and ‘bias’, methodologically sound polling, and many, many graphs.

Indicative tweet:

Unflattering pictures of David Cameron, attempt to launch a new hashtag (riding on the coattails of the highly successful #CameronMustGo ), use of the words ‘ordinary people’.

3. George Galloway (@georgegalloway) – when you follow George Galloway, you sign yourself up to an endless barrage of retweets of worthy causes and righteous fury. You also, merely by interacting with him or tweets about him, put yourself at risk of being sent letters demanding £5000 plus VAT for legal costs.

Follow him for: indefatigable anti-Zionism, endless retweets of support from his followers, the constant reminder that just because someone is left-wing doesn’t mean you’re going to agree with them on much, if anything at all.

 

Indicative tweet: ‘A tidal wave of filth racism insanity’

4. Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) – people occasionally, sometimes with some justification, accuse me of being smug. However, any smugness which may exist in me is but a tiny atom to the colossal Red Giant of insufferable smugness and crowing self-satisfaction that is Louise Mensch’s twitter feed. From the knowingly superior smile in her display picture, to the perfectly placed passive aggressive smileys, to the blocking of anyone who uses the word ‘Zionist’ as an anti-Semite, her entire timeline is an exhilarating, wonderful insight into a mind that you can’t quite understand.

Follow her for: a really weird brand of Tory feminism , getting really confused when you find you agree with her on something, becoming furious because some people think that disagreeing with her justifies misogyny.

Indicative tweet: Your confused reaction as you find yourself backing Louise is probably the best indication of the overall following experience.

5. Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) – the experience of following Richard Dawkins can be summed up by this blog post, which illustrates ‘The Dawkins Cycle’.

If you thought Louise Mensch was self-satisfied, Richard Dawkins is an entirely different league. It’s almost adorable. He just doesn’t understand how people could possibly think he was ever wrong. And he preaches epistemic humility. It’s delicious.

Follow him for: gentle, woman-respecting eroticism, ‘abort it and try again’, and good old religion-bashing.

Indicative tweet: presented without comment.

6. CCHQ Press Office (@CCHQPress) – completing the triad of smugness, here’s the propaganda department of Tory HQ. Crowing over Labour gaffes, quoting statistics without context, triumphantly linking to favourable Telegraph articles – really, what more could you want?

Follow them for: taking a policy that’s 80% awful and attacking the 20%, playground-esque oneupmanship, taking a weird interest in the personal lives of Labour MPs.

Indicative tweet: ‘populism’, pots, kettles, and light-absorbing colours.

7. The Spectator (@spectator) – we’re cheating a little bit here, because the only reason that the Spectator’s twitter account is insufferable is because it consists almost entirely of links to Spectator articles. If you have ever attempted to read the Spectator – and we would highly recommend it on the condition that you consume at least 6 units of alcohol beforehand – then you will likely be nodding along in agreement. The Spectator may be ‘the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language’ (that’s an awful lot of qualifiers), but it doesn’t seem to have improved with age.

Follow them for: mental gymnastics, links to Brendan O’Neill articles, and moralistic hand-wringing over the decline in values.

Indicative tweet: Tradition.

Do you have a twitter account that you hatefollow? Let us know in the comments below.