Mention the words “Twitter” and “revolution” to most people and their thoughts will, not unreasonably, be drawn to events in Tunisia or Egypt. Yet over recent weeks a growing number of tweets have been discussing another revolution: that being unleashed on the NHS in England by the Conservative led government. As with revolutions elsewhere in the world many of those engaged in these discussions are frustrated by the information they are getting from politicians, whom they often distrust, and from the mainstream media, which they see as recycling press releases and repeating the opinions, not always informed, of the same select group of commentators.

So it was on Twitter that you could read of the immediate incredulity that greeted the claim on the BBC’s Question Time television programme by Caroline Spelman, secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs, subsequently repeated by the prime minister, that “someone in this country is twice as likely to die from a heart attack as someone in France.”1 Did this mean, asked some of those tweeting that evening, including seasoned political observers such as the former Liberal Democrat health spokesman Evan Harris (@DrEvanHarris on Twitter),2 that someone in the United Kingdom who had a heart attack was twice as likely to die from it as their counterpart in France? If so, then it would …