Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 February 2019

The rage and bile of Surrey horse owners kept people talking about my RSPCA story

issue 16 February 2019

Since posting some of my research into the RSPCA on Facebook, I now better understand the way social networking works.

Social networking is local as well as global. So if you live in Surrey and ride horses you can join a Facebook group full of people in the same area doing the same thing. Only because these people are not speaking face to face, they can be tremendously rude to each other.

The upshot of my spending a couple of days on one of these sites plugging my investigations into the RSPCA, including its role in the seizure of 123 horses from a farm down the road from my home, was that all these people started arguing and fighting with each other online in a way they would never dream of doing if they were standing in the same room.

Of course, the main point was that so long as they were arguing, it kept the issue going, and so on balance I was so grateful to Facebook I could have kissed Mark Zuckerberg.

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