Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Oh dear...

Once again, Helen Dale is attracting attention, and not in a good way: An Award Winning Novelist Is Lifting Viral Tweets.

(She apparently doesn't like Twitter*, so instead of retweets, she just lifts them and puts them on her Facebook page, with no acknowledgement of the source.   But I guess if they are viral, people would often be recognizing the main part as being from elsewhere - and it's not as if people would think she drew a professional cartoon or graphic.    The problem is more the words or caption in a lifted Tweet:  they make it look awfully like her either desiring, or not caring, that some people will think they were her creation too.)

* I was quoting her from the article, though I now see that she is pretty regularly using Twitter - so it seems a very odd explanation.

Update:  I had forgotten, until I re-read her Wikipedia entry, that she had been sacked from writing for the Courier Mail for not acknowledging someone else's jokes she used in a column.    And I'm pretty sure she left Catallaxy after putting up a viral giant pig photo, claiming it was genuine and from people she knew, and then people called her out about that.   It is strange behaviour, and the book tour for her next novel is likely to present more oddities, I expect...

3 comments:

not trampis said...

Helen Dale, very odd explanation. yes and not for the first time.

John said...

What is wrong with her? After all those legal studies she is now a writer for a UK paper? Plagiarizing tweets of all things? Resigned in the middle of an election campaign.

Steve said...

Well, the article says she writes in the Spectator, but someone in comments said they hadn't noticed, or if she has, she's not a regular, so perhaps that is an error. It's not clear from her on line presence what's she's doing now, apart from planning to travel soon to promote her novel.