Ever since Twitter began, it has had a dual function: as a place for sober and pithy commentary, and as a transitional public/private space in which things that would have once remained shared between a few people come to the fore. Numerous folks in Australia have come to realise that the second function can undermine the first. But few have done it so spectacularly as @fleetstreetfox, an anonymous tabloid hackette whose 38,000 followers get a stream of goss, arch comment and trade secrets from inside the newspaper industry.

Last week, they also got something else — two hours of drunk-dialling equivalent as Foxy made her way home from a night on the town. It began innocently enough on Friday night with the Fox tweeting that she was sitting next to a Wimbledon ball girl, wanted to steal her uniform and take her job. Then it went sideways very quickly:

“INWILL UNDERSTAND BELIEV ME BELIEV ME I CAN’T HELP BUT LOVE TOUUUUUUUUUII”

“YOUBDONT HAVE YONSAY YOU LOVE ME”

Then she got lost:

“Where is tube?”

But then, the moment of epiphany every Brit hopes for:

“Ooh chip shop”

“Man in chop shop thinks impossed. Sssh don’t tell him. SECRET.”

By the time she got on the tube, she was tweeting along to her playlist, which has a strong emphasis on break-up ballads:

“THANK GOD TOU BLEW IT IM SO GLAD I DOSGED A BULLET”

“THERE WAS A TOME WHEN BTIOHGT YOU DOD EVERYTHING ROGHT”

“WHAT GOES ATOUND COMES BACK AROUND HEY MY BABY”

“Foot hurts”

“Why the frog dint I get mayonnaise? I LNOWNYOU WANG ME BACK OTS TIME YO FAC RTHE FACTS”

That’s really the essence of English romance — breaking off from a one-person pity party to curse the fact that you forgot the mayo. By the end of the tube journey, it was getting sad. Huey Lewis and the News sad:

“POWER OF L OWE IS A CHEIOUS THIBG MAKE A ONE MAN WEEP MAKE ANOTHER MAN SING”

The next day, incisive commentary on media matters had been resumed

“Ow.”

— Guy Rundle

Peter Fray

Fetch your first 12 weeks for $12

Here at Crikey, we saw a mighty surge in subscribers throughout 2020. Your support has been nothing short of amazing — we couldn’t have got through this year like no other without you, our readers.

If you haven’t joined us yet, fetch your first 12 weeks for $12 and start 2021 with the journalism you need to navigate whatever lies ahead.

Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey

JOIN NOW
https://www.crikey.com.au/2012/07/03/the-hack-who-went-on-the-twitter-attack/
www.crikey.com.au
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-04
115398
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GARMDAJDFI6KYDSN6JCU2ETBJHQI25SH
<urn:uuid:2752bc1c-dc62-45c1-9e2d-e514ebe6eebd>
2021-01-26T19:44:01Z
172.67.69.209
text/html
sha1:Y2VAW7CLKRQ4XXT54IOEZ4DIK6N5AYA7
<urn:uuid:7dd2f1e3-c825-46cf-a6c9-6a7a4fa99f2e>
https://www.crikey.com.au/2012/07/03/the-hack-who-went-on-the-twitter-attack/
response
<urn:uuid:e9f1935e-9559-4b9b-82a4-4a24c6da56b4>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-04
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-35.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/