Our post on whether it is right to profit from the poor generated lots of interest, so we decided, as an experiment, to hold a “Twitter debate”. It went well, as the transcript shows. If there are topics you’d like us to Twitter debate about in future, let us know!

Matthew, who on Twitter goes by the name @mattbish, kicked it off at 2pm Eastern Time (7pm UK time) on July 30th, and it ran for an hour. (Michael’s Twitter handle is @shepleygreen – as you can see, he is a fan of extreme food.)

These were the only rules. Keep your comments to under 140 characters each. Always include the hashtag #propoor (for profits and the poor). The hashtag allows people to follow the flow of debate without everyone having to retweet comments they refer to. If you respond to a particular person’s comment, start your tweet with re and the person’s twitter name: for instance, if you respond to a comment by @mattbish, start your tweet: Re @mattbish and end it with #propoor

Other than that, please avoid personal abuse.