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Press “Send”, sit back & enjoy the Show – Why IS Social Media so Very Attractive to the Green Ink Brigade?

Things move mighty fast on the real-time web. This morning’s storm in a tea cup swiftly becomes this afternoon’s non-story – or does it? Once a Twitter hashtag has emerged and a few thousand tweets have included it, one hundred and forty unthinking characters can lead the BBC News website – or so it seemed last weekend.

Returning guest Alison Gow found her draft thoughts on Twitter rudeness and online bullying acquired a whole new focus over the course of last weekend. Here, in a post well illuminated by her own experiences in the 21st century cyber newsroom of forums, pseudonyms and over-worked moderators, she poses some thought-provoking questions about how to prevent the media circus from camping out on your virtual lawn – unless of course, that is what you always wanted them to do?

I have been meaning to write a post about online bullying for some time now; but I ground to a halt because I just couldn’t find the right words to reflect my thoughts. I didn’t want to write about extreme examples of bullying – there are way better qualified people than me already discussing this – but I did feel there was something to be said about how some people converse online. And, equally, what I may think is out of order, others might well think is just part of lively debate; just part of being involved in any community, from the school playground to the office, where you can choose your friends, but not dictate who might be sharing the same space as you.

I finally finished my planned post on Friday and emailed it off with a note apologising for the delay. Then, on Saturday morning, I spotted the now-much-featured tweet from Stephen Fry about Twitter, meanness and his decision to quit. I followed the conversation back to what I thought was a fairly bland little message from someone I didn’t follow, but it was so mild (it even included an apology for harbouring such a view) I figured there must have been some other, more vitriolic, message from another user to SF to spark such an extreme reaction.

I was wrong; as the day wore on it became apparent that some poor bloke had logged off his laptop, tweeting an apology for writing ‘sing’ instead of ‘sign’ to his mates, utterly unaware of the total storm gathering at his back. I feel for @Brumplum, I really do. Search his name and he has been pilloried by Twitter users worldwide, made the BBC, the Sunday papers, blogs. For all I know, Obama is being drafted in at this very minute to rehabilitate the poor guy.

The upshot? Stephen Fry now says he was being over-sensitive and that he isn’t leaving Twitter at all. And a whole bunch of Twitter-users got to call a Birmingham blogger they don’t know and will never meet a bunch of vile names, while inviting him to do some impractical and uncomfortable things.

In no way did Richard the Blogger deserve the calumny heaped upon his head, but, when he wrote that Stephen Fry’s tweets were boring – why use the @ reply option, knowing it could be seen by the man himself? If he’d written ‘Stephen Fry’ – then the circus would not have pitched up on his virtual lawn and he could have had a weekend of peace, rather than one of dubious celebrity.

It may have been unintended, it may have even been ignorance, but it may also have been a sneaky desire to poke the National Treasure, just to see what happened. If so, he certainly found out. I bet if the issue had evolved in reverse, with Stephen Fry calling another Twitter user boring, the resulting silence would have been deafening.

This incident, of course, is a very public and hugely stellar example of what occurs across online networks all the time.

Recently, one of my contacts started being pestered by a Twitter user to follow him back, through a series of ‘Why don’t you follow me?’, ‘Please tell me why you won’t follow me?’ and ‘FOLLOW ME!!!’ tweets. Eventually, she did. Me? I would have blocked the pesterer (I suspect this isn’t a word, but you know what I mean…) I wouldn’t have felt pressurised; equally, I’d guess the Twit repeatedly sending messages, accusing her of being rude for not following back, didn’t think for a moment they were acting in an aggressive manner. However, the object of his attention did feel browbeaten, and to the extent that she went from being an active Twitter user to a sporadic one for a few weeks.

Around the same time, a London-based writer told me of how they, and their work, were being pulled to pieces on Twitter by a rival from another publication. Even though no names were used, it was (to their peers) patently obvious who was the target, and he felt bewildered and upset by the whole experience. His followers rushed to show their support but, he told me, it didn’t really mitigate how hurt he felt at being on the receiving end of an unprovoked, public, attack. It’s the petty, arms-length meanness of the whole thing that bugs me. If you wouldn’t say it to a person’s face, or want your mother/boss/partner/friends to read it, don’t say it on an online network. It’s public, it’s searchable, it’s cached and it’s eminently shareable.

Online communities are amazing places – I have learned so much from using social media and the interaction with people, many of whom I many never meet, but whom I respect hugely. But, my god, there are some tossers (our forum users use t@ssers, to get around swearbots) trolls, racists, misogynists, people who are insufferably superior and people who are so aching dense, you can almost see their index fingers following the words on the screen out there too.

However, it is not something you can do much about; any platform, be it audio, print or digital, is going to attract those who feel the need to provoke others, usually just to see what happens when they do. And if it kicks off, they tend to sit back and enjoy the show.

I’m not talking about you, of course. No, no, you’re witty, hilarious, and full of interestingness. If you’re on Twitter then, by association, just about everyone you follow, is shiny too – because you have impeccably good taste!

But the public timeline and the world of hashtags offer a window into another world. Scroll back through #boyinaballoon and you can find people genuinely excited at the prospect that a six-year-old child might fall to his death live on TV. The other thing about online networks is that you can build up a mental image of someone’s psyche, only for them to shatter it with one tweet so disturbingly out of kilter with your own viewpoint that it leaves you flummoxed. The #bbcqt BNP debate was a case in point for me; since then I’ve quietly done the virtual-back-away from a couple of people.

Anyone who has spent time in a newsroom will be aware of the Green Ink Brigade; it’s a tribe made up of the disaffected, under-medicated and plain odd, and its members tend to fire off multi-page rants to the Editor, sometimes with illustrations, always featuring long paragraphs written in block capitals. On our forums at the Liverpool Post & Echo, there are several running feuds, a coterie of Geert Wilders admirers, and one on-going issue which really caught my eye recently – a thread pointing out the links between ‘fat women and feral youths’. Just this week I spotted a piece of scintillatingly brilliant wit directed by one poster at another; it said [sic] “your ugly”.

Any moderator treads a fine line between stifling debate and plucking out offensive posts and their authors, while opening themselves to accusations of all sorts of partisan attitudes. Just as I was concluding this post, I happened to see this tweet by @Documentally. I felt it encapsulated in less than 140 characters what I have been endeavouring to say in more than 1,000 words…