Two days which saw Twitter exposed as a shallow cesspool of ignorance, vulgarity, and pure mob vitriol PHILIP NOLAN

BARRY Walsh is a young man who is very fond of the word ‘bitch’. We know this, because Barry writes it frequently on Twitter. Of Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, he tweeted: ‘What a stupid bitch.’ He turned his eye to US politician Nancy Pelosi and wrote: ‘The brass neck of that bitch.’ His is a broad church, because others who have been on the receiving end of this vile name-calling include French National Front leader Marine le Pen and Social Democrat Róisín Shortall.

More recently, he has targeted comedian, actress and author Tara Flynn, a prominent voice in the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that deals with abortion. As it happens, Tara is a friend, and I’m not going to add to what I know is her deep hurt by repeating here what he said, but I assure you it was so far beyond acceptability, it was actually as disturbing as it was offensive.

Twitter is full of Barrys, wounded little boys who see a great big feminist conspiracy to emasculate men, where none exists. In their world, women are either to be subjugated, ridiculed or feared, not to be appreciated, or even to have their humanity acknowledged when the insult of choice is to refer to them by the name we reserve for female animals.

In the past, the seething resentment of the Barrys would have been well hidden, because physical human contact used to act as a brake on casually demeaning and reductive insults. Nowadays, though, in the darkness of a bedroom, with a phone, tablet or laptop computer to hand, they can say anything they like, freed from the need to see the consequences of their vitriol.

The majority of Barrys have a handful of followers, and their words either are not seen at all, or are easily dismissed. This Barry, though – Barry Walsh – is a former chairman of Young Fine Gael and still sits on the party’s executive council. After weeks of the party being asked online what it proposed to do about the nastiness of Walsh’s tweets, it took three senior figures – Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty, Senator Catherine Noone and, especially, TD Kate O’Connell – to intervene. At a Fine Gael meeting on Wednesday, Deputy O’Connell presented a dossier of his tweets. The matter is now under investigation, although I hope that by the time you read this he has been suspended by the party.

This was not the only incident this week that caused me to wonder why I bother to stay on Twitter at all. On Wednesday, the head of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, Eileen Gleeson, took to the radio to elaborate on a presentation she made to the city council the night before. She had raised the notion – an interesting one worthy of contemplation – that volunteer groups helping rough sleepers might inadvertently be keeping the people they helped from engaging with the services they actually need, saying that the ‘bad behaviours’ that lead to homelessness cannot be solved by a cup of tea, a sandwich and a tent.

No one denies that was an ill-considered choice of adjective. The reasons for homelessness are many and they are complex, and she apologised for what she said. That was not enough for the mob though. Far from listening to, or considering, the opinion of a woman who has direct experience of the homelessness problem, they immediately knew better, and gave her quite a kicking on social media, especially Twitter.

Raptures

Many of these were the same people who went into raptures last year about the Home Sweet Home initiative in Apollo House. At the time, I questioned its effectiveness, and received a pummeling myself. The point I was trying to make was that a holistic approach to the crisis was, and is, needed from local authorities and central government. I warned that once everyone felt good about themselves for standing outside Apollo House singing Christmas carols, they would return to their middle-class suburbs and move on to the next cause du jour. I have seen it many times before, and it is a pattern endlessly repeated.

I don’t doubt that the motives of those concerned were decent and valid, but they have lives of their own they must return to. The people best equipped to deal with the homeless problem are those who are resourced to do so by the State, and if they fall shy of their targets then, yes, by all means criticise them. There’s just no need to do so with targeted personal abuse.

On Twitter, though, no one plays the ball. They play the man – or, much more likely, the woman. I’ve been on Twitter for almost nine years, and at first it was a lot of fun. I made real-life friends there, and met people I would not have come across in the course of daily life. Many are from parts of Ireland where I never had friends at all, and offered an insight into life in their own counties. Other online friends live in faraway countries, and open a window on different cultures and on the issues – some familiar, others unique – that affect their own societies.

As Twitter grew, though, a nastiness crept in, a deeply repugnant inability to see issues in anything other than black and white, when real life is so much more nuanced than that. Whether there was Russian influence in the US presidential election or not, it became a bile-filled orgy of malice, a cesspit in which attitudes we thought had long since faded away suddenly festered again and exploded in pustules of rage on Twitter.

Now, anything goes – outright racism, threats to homosexuals and transgender people (my Twitter feed during Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on last Friday’s Late Late Show was stomach-churningly hateful), and misogyny. The pioneers of the site might well have seen it as a force for good, a forum where knowledge and information would be shared, but the law of unintended consequences kicked in.

Nowadays, instead of the cosy kitchen table that is Facebook, where friends share photos of family and holidays, Twitter is the car park outside the pub after closing time, with everyone squaring up to each other to throw the first punch.

Even President Trump, who has made it his preferred means of communication, resorts to insults, earlier this week referring to North Korean dictator Kim Jongun as ‘short and fat’. So now, not only is Twitter killing discourse, it is killing diplomacy too.

The company itself is slow to react to requests to remove offensive content. Many times, friends who have complained about abuse receive messages that the content they protested about did not violate Twitter rules, even though if such utterances were made to a stranger in a bar, any decent publican would kick the offender out on his ear.

So, for now, the Barrys will be allowed continue spewing their bile. Defenders of free speech – and as a journalist, it would be counter-intuitive were I not one of them – will act fey and say ‘well, that’s the flipside of the same coin’.

Except that it’s not. In real life, defamation is actionable in court and hate speech is a crime, and the internet should be no different. We are, or should be, better than this.

And the irony is that for even writing this, I fully expect to wake up this morning and find myself on the receiving end of abuse yet again. If you want to pile in, feel free – I’m a big lad. You’ll find me on @philipnolan1.