The Queen on Facebook?
The Queen launched her very own Facebook page yesterday. No doubt you saw the news on the television and in print. She finally completed the multimedia saturation of the Royal Family following previous Twitter, Flickr and YouTube launches over the past 3 years.
At the end of the first day, over 57500 people had become fans of The Queen’s Facebook page. They turned out in their droves, much like for the average Royal visit, except everyone stayed dry and local florists gained no welcome boost in revenue.
A mixture of well-wishers and naysayers, royalists and anarchists left a plethora of posts on the surprisingly unrestricted ‘Wall’ section.
Most just wanted to say ‘Hi’ and revel in the Queen’s newly-found online identity. Facebookers voiced their support for her latest move, such as Michael Haggart, who wrote, ‘On behalf of my CCF contingent, welcome to Facebook 
.’
However, the rest of his message revealed another element had found time to post – he continues, ‘btw, could all haters please leave this page, you’re neither welcome, nor wanted, nor appriciated (sic). Leave.’ Indeed, several posts are too obscene to post here, but offer plenty of references to irreverent comedian Frankie Boyle.
Most were thankfully good-humoured. Conor Jordan started his message with the common ‘God bless you ma’am,’ before revealing, ‘And thank you for giving us perhaps the best common drinking game ever. I will save you every time there is a penny in my pint.’ A true royalist in his own esoteric way.
Of course messages ranged from the quirky – Sam Johnson’s ‘I wish you were my grandma’ – to the curious – Rico Mateus’ ‘Do you drink earl grey or PG tips?’ – to the grossly over-familiar – Grace Allison-Arnold’s ‘Must get together soon for scones and a naughty pot of tea.’ The corgis were often mentioned (sometimes in recipes), and people from all over the Commonwealth joined to mostly offer their support.
So with all this activity in such a short time, one is left wondering if this new foray into the social networking site has been a success? Is this new technology giving the Queen better access to her subjects? Well, 57500 people can’t be wrong.
Except that they can and are. For those of you who missed this crucial point, the Queen actually launched a British Monarchy page on Facebook yesterday (joined, incidentally, by over 145,000). This is not a personal profile page so users can’t ‘poke’ the Queen or be her ‘friend’. What they can do is receive updates about the Royal Family to their Facebook feed and even track official visits in the ‘Near Me’ section.
Amongst the fast-approaching 60000 who missed the complete lack of any Royals news on the hoax page, or the fact that the only information on it indicated the Queen’s personal interests to be ‘Hunting, Fishing and being god blessed’, this will come as a surprise.
But then if you’re that easily taken in, what doesn’t?
