Television, not social media, is fracturing our society

All it took for the Twitter mob to descend on me was a retweet from Michael Gove. Message after message called for a resignation. Often it wasn’t entirely clear who the target was: me, the leader of a medium-sized youth charity, or him, the second best known member of the Cabinet.

What on earth was in this few short sentences that had unlocked the world’s bile and aggression? Gove had committed the cardinal sin of recommending a book I have written. Ironically enough, it is a book on why our societies have become so divided and how we fix them.

It is blindingly obvious to most of us why our societies have become divided. Two words is all we need: not the ridiculous 300 pages I took. Social. Media. The only solution is to tame the beast and ideally shut it down. Facebook has made a gallant start by banning Donald Trump. That’s it, Mr Zuckerberg, eight billion bans to go and our healing can begin.

There is only one trouble with the ‘social media divided us’ story.