Westminster watchers have become obsessed with one thing on social media of late — who’s behind the Politics For All (PFA) Twitter account?
The upstart news aggregator has surge to almost 100,000 followers thanks to its cheeky spins on breaking news stories, posted often before the journalist or outlet behind a report has been able to publish it on social media themselves. Twitter over-indexes on hacks and politicians so they lap it up and re-tweet PFA.
The aggregator, which is now also on Instagram, has also done well because it only links to the news article in the second follow-up tweet. For some media types this has caused outrage, for others it’s a source of amusement — as is the fact that the user name of the PFA account is ‘Politics For Ali’, with the ‘i’ capitalised. ‘Politics For All’ was clearly taken when the account was established in August 2019.
With all that being said, FN had a chance encounter with the until recently one-man-band (he’s taken on some volunteers) behind PFA the other day. To respect his privacy and his goal to keep the focus on the project, FN will only go as far as to reveal that he’s an enterprising student at one of the country’s top universities.
There’s no revenue generated from the venture. But forward-thinking new outlets and other media types would do well by dropping PFA a DM with some deal offers, as would those advertisers and brands looking to reach into the halls of power in the U.K.
PFA has taken a fair bit of flack recently on Twitter, but he’s taught a whole generation of news-focused social media managers how to actually reach consistent vitality (the dream) and he has a bright future ahead of himself in the industry (if he wants to pursue that route, of course).
This has been a FN Short. Normal FN service will resume on Monday.