‘Great God, Twitter is an awful place!’ I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It’s quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle.
The reason Rod doesn’t do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness.
He’s right, of course, as I’m reminded almost daily by missives like this: ‘Gutted to learn that c**t @jamesdelingpole has kids. So that means even more c**ts in the world.’ (Obviously, it came without the asterisks.) Now we’re supposed to have thick skins, those of us who appear in the public eye. But I defy anyone to read a tweet like that and not feel at least a flutter of discomfiture.
It’s not so much the hurt caused that’s the problem but all the time you waste mulling over the identity of your enemy, and wondering about his sick motivation, and plotting how to strike back. Do you go through the rigmarole of trying to get his account closed down? Do you do a Dom Joly — good on you, Dom! — and report him to the police? Do you craft a reply so acerbic that on reading it he dissolves into a fizzing puddle of self-hatred and mortification? Or do you just press the button marked ‘block’?
What I try to do these days is block. As my young social media guru @nero is forever reminding me, to do anything else is to give these loser malcontents more power than they deserve.
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