Sadly, Twitter is no longer friendly – it’s a cesspit of bile and vitriol

IJOINED Twitter in February 2009, the month my father died. If you’ve ever been to the Bunratty Folk Park, then you’ll have an idea of what Twitter was like back then: friendly, folksy, sparsely populated.

I had never ‘done’ social media before, but my friend Graham Linehan bossed me into it as a way to easily keep in touch with friends and make new, funny ones as well.

He said it was a bit like a warm hug and back then I was in the market for all the warm hugs I could get.

For people like me, working at home, this shiny new micro-blogging site was great. It was like a virtual workspace, in which people shared information, jokes and water-cooler moments.

There wasn’t an awful lot of noise on it, and the people I followed and who followed me back were an erudite, funny mix of journalists and arts practitioners, some of whom I knew well, most of whom I knew a little, and some more complete strangers who were making other people laugh. One of the latter had a book launch that I went to, purely because of Twitter.

We had our first proper conversation at the launch and agreed Twitter was a wonderful, welcome development.

He’s long gone. Most of those 50 or so people who I followed back then have long abandoned Twitter or, if they’re still on it, are largely silent.

My first inkling that the blue bird mightn’t be the purveyor of pure happiness it initially promised came on the morning after Gerry Ryan died. Overnight, I picked up more than 200 new followers, pretty much trebling the size of my tribe. Where had all the people come from? I wondered. Was it possible that people had followed me simply to observe my grief?

Fast forward seven years and what I once regarded as my happy place is a vicious, toxic pit, populated by malcontents, all poised to wield poisonous comments. In the past month alone, we’ve seen Ibrahim Halawa, an Irish citizen, subjected to horrendous racist abuse on Twitter. We’ve watched Cyrus Christie, dealing with the trauma of narrowly missing out on World Cup qualification, wade through racist taunts on Twitter. We’ve had a member of the Fine Gael executive call several named politicians ‘bitch’ on Twitter. We’ve seen numerous allegations and slurs on the characters of people, some named, others readily identifiable.

When Mel Gibson was on The Late Late Show last Friday, he might as well have announced he’s moving to Skellig Michael and giving all his money away for all the difference it made to the Twitter mob, the tines of their pitchforks already sharpened and primed to inflict the most damage possible in 140 characters.

I am not in the business of defending Mel Gibson, or, indeed, any of the other recent targets of the mob’s ire.

But I will point out that an RTÉ producer was charged with grooming a child in a court in Leeds on Monday. Once that person was charged, the old-fashioned – now the folksy, friendly – media is legally prevented from commenting on the case. That might occasionally frustrate journalists and columnists, but we all understand that in a justice system predicated on the principle of innocent until proven guilty, it’s a necessary precaution.

On Twitter, though, these sort of legal restrictions put no obstacle to people keen to pass judgment and sentence. That has to stop because, one day soon, guilty people will walk free from courts because of prejudicial comments on Twitter.

As it happens, I got off pretty lightly on Twitter. I’ve only ever had to block one person for hateful remarks. But that’s one more person than I’ve ever had to block in my real life. I know there are loads of lovely, funny people on Twitter. It’s just they’re not the ones shouting loudest; in the cacophony of damnation coming from the site, their reasonable voices are lost.

It’s not really for personal reasons that I have gradually withdrawn from what used to be my favourite waste of time. These days, I only check in with Twitter on days when I’m writing this column or Callan’s Kicks, and I rarely post anything. Twitter once kept me sane: now, for the sake of my sanity, I turn it off whenever I can.

It has become a reactionary cesspool, which is why decent people – even the lovely, funny ones – need to turn away from it now. As to the baying mob that stays, they need to be policed, they need to be cautioned, and yes, when they trample all over the legal boundaries, they need to be charged. Because lawlessness isn’t just unpleasant; it’s downright dangerous.