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1/ I've noticed this trend quite a lot recently - campaigners publicly calling out on Twitter for a meeting with a politician at short notice, then publicly shaming them when they don't get it.
2/ Pro-EU youth group OFOC has 50,000 followers so that tweet got a lot of traction. Kevin Foster, Conservative MP for Torbay, has 5,000 so his reply didn't get as much. But this seems like a fairly decent excuse...
3/ Foster is a Conservative who voted for May's deal. Thangam Debbonaire is a Labour MP who voted against it...
4/ Again, her response here seems very reasonable, but lots of people will have seen the initial tweet (which looks a bit bad), fewer people will have seen Debbonaire's replies. This isn't the usual method of organising a meeting with an MP on a busy day! @ThangamMP 
5/ The other week, Labour refused to accept a hand-delivered People's Vote petition from an MP. Nothing wrong with that necessarily but the story probably got far more traction as a result. ''X REFUSED TO MEET Y' sounds bad!
6/ The idea of 'refusing to meet' is catnip for social media but there might be good reasons why an MP can't reply on Twitter at short notice on a busy day. Twitter gives a window into MPs' lives, but we don't know what they're doing every hour of the day... and nor should we.
7/ Campaigners need to be careful. Sometimes websites publish lists of MPs who didn't vote on an important issue implying they couldn't be bothered. But sometimes there are good reasons- illness, bereavement, pregnancy. And then the MP gets hate mail in hospital...
8/ This thing needs a name, it's loads of characters to explain otherwise. Stand-upping? Stand-up-shaming? Any better suggestions?
9/ OFOC say they encourage all campaigners to conctact MPs first and say Foster was contacted. A spokesperson said: "it's not our intention at all to do some kind of twitter "gotcha" by requesting meetings at a moment's notice, but a lot of the time our people get put off."
10/ response:
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