How Twitter almost destroyed me

Last year, my old sparring partner George Monbiot got himself into a spot of bother. ‘Why not stick the knife in on your blog?’ various people suggested. But I didn’t because George’s travails had nothing whatsoever to do with his wrongheaded political views (which I’m more than happy to attack at every turn). They had to do with a libel he’d repeated about someone on Twitter. About this, I refused to gloat.

This is not because I’m an incredibly decent, warm and caring person. Well, not just. It’s because, as a fellow Twitter user, I recognised a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Of course I felt terribly sorry for the poor fellow he’d libelled. But if the fault lay anywhere, I thought, it didn’t lie with George; rather it lay with the perpetually gaping maw of the gigantic elephant trap that is Twitter.

Twitter is a publishing medium more dangerous than any that has ever before existed.