Twitter and Egalitarianism

I've recently, and slowly, been getting into Twitter. For those of you who do not know it, it allows you to post short (140 character) updates (similar in fashion to status updates on Facebook), and allows you to follow other Twitter users updates, and these may include celebrities (Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry, for example, are converts to it) as well as one's friends, families and colleagues.

Celebrities often allow people to follow their updates, but often do not follow other peoples' leading Toby Young in The Spectator this week (21st Feb 2009, p.62) to argue that Twitter 'only looks egalitarian' but should 'drop the pretence of being socially democratic' as it is hierarchical underneath. The chief reason for this (Stephen Fry being a noticeable exception to this rule) is that 'the interest shown by the hoi polloi... in celebrities is not reciprocated.'

Is this really fair? Where do Twitter (or for that matter Facebook or MySpace) really make a strong claim to being socially democratic? They allow anyone to use their web facilities, but do not purport to a social philosophy. I am interested in hearing what Jonathan Ross is saying, and it does not surprise me that he is not that interested in me; but I enjoy the fact that I can follow his tweets.
Also the web is simply not the democratic thing that some people claim it is, and often people, by making claims that things such as twitter are claiming to be 'egalitarian' are simply creating straw persons. What the web does well is to allow people a medium to contact one another, what it cannot do is overcome the very structures of society itself.