Welcome to the world you created, J.K. Rowling

Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet.

This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain. On the last weekend of July, on the basis of a poorly written column in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times about the pay differentials in the BBC, London social media vilified me. I was then denounced worldwide as a misogynistic, anti-Semitic Holocaust-denier. One of my most successful accusers was J.K.