In the UK at the moment, many digital consumers are angry about the
Digital Economy Bill which the front benches are trying to push
through parliament quickly in the wash up before the general election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Bill
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-05398.pdf

The following site illustrates one of the reasons for the outrage:

http://debillitated.heroku.com/

Any intimation of the restriction of digital rights for the consumer
mixed with a perceived extreme lack of attention at the fag end of
what has been a very controversial parliament anyway is bound to get
the sort of people who use Twitter riled up.

At some point, a friend came up with the idea to automate the sending
of one-to-many messages on Twitter in order to provide a service for
people to contact all MPs on Twitter. This was intended to be valuable
not only in connexion with the Digital Economy Bill issue, but other
wider issues as well. The service took about a day to create:

http://pestermp.appspot.com/

The idea was to take a list of MPs he'd found recently in spreadsheet
form, feed them into a database on a site which allows Twitter OAuth
login, and then provide an interface to that for the public to use. So
he assembled these bits and pieces:

http://mps.monstermischief.com/
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter
http://github.com/Arachnid/AppEngine-OAuth-Library
http://blog.notdot.net/2010/02/Writing-a-twitter-service-on-App-Engine

And this is the resulting code:

http://github.com/laurilove/pesterMP

The service was announced:

http://twitter.com/pesterMPs/status/11747425040

And after a few re-tweets, got mainly negative feedback, but quite a
few uses. One of the main problems is that people were including the
#debill tag in their messages, which had the effect of "flooding"
people who were monitoring it. I'm not sure how the same people coped,
however, when there was over a message per second with that tag
towards the end of the second reading of the bill last night.

Another problem is that people weren't satisfied that it was
publishing to a user's public timeline instead of sending a direct
message. This was then made clear in the instructions for using the
service, along with a note not to pollute tags.

But the main negative reaction was also the most easy to counter.
People were worried that MPs would get pestered. Of course the name of
the service was more of a joke, because actually each member only gets
one custom message per person; it's not like receiving 1000 of the
same form letter. Twitter users did not seem to grasp the difference
between many-to-one and one-to-many, however, despite complaining last
night that MPs did not understand the difference between theft and
piracy, two differences which are of about the same level of cognitive
difficulty to grasp.

The announcements of the service noted that it could be used for more
than the #debill, and in a sense the general focus over the previous
few days on the #debill exclusively by Twitter users was somewhat
disappointing when there are so many other bills being considered. One
user looked up his MPs voting attendance at last night's meeting and
his overall voting record, and was surprised and disgusted at what he
saw. Why did he only check this on the very last day of parliament?

Another thing which I believe many Twitter users did not understand is
that the process for pushing through legislation can take very strange
turns and twists very swiftly. If you've not followed the progress of
a bill or some other issue through parliament, it can be very
confusing the rate at which things change and the odd custom and
manner in which things are done.

All the same, I do think there is a clash of cultures going on, and
that Tom Watson MP came up with a most apposite remark on this:

"I do not believe that this discussion will end today. It will
dominate debates in this House for years to come. The next generation
of MPs will have to contend with the direct implications that our
regulatory moves in the internet sphere will have for the kind of
society that we want to live in, and how they will impact on the
rights that we all expect to have."

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm100406/debtext/100406-0015.htm

We can only hope than an influx of younger MPs will be enough to
offset the obvious apathy that will otherwise be shown due to
traditionalism and the perception of such issues only affecting a
minority of constituents and not having a major influence on active
voter decisions.