If Twitter was a drug they’d have banned it

Anti-toBAcco and alcohol campaigners are always telling us that if we had known how harmful these drugs were they would never have been allowed on the market.

So what if someone invented a powerful new narcotic that could destroy lives, cause mental breakdown and incite terrorism, rape and murder?

And what if the manufacturers gave it away free to get people hooked, even targeting vulnerable schoolchildren?

Well, such a drug already exists. it is so addictive that it spreads like wildfire around the world, enslaving hundreds of millions of people, from the poorest to the highest in the land.

it can reduce users to gibbering wrecks, and is responsible for broken marriages, ruined careers and a spate of suicides. Side- effects include sleep deprivation, delusions of grandeur and paranoia.

this drug — which pathologists call ‘social media’ — has a variety of street names, the best known of which are twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and instagram. Anyone can get their hands on it, 24 hours a day over the internet.

it’s more addictive than crack cocaine and does more damage than heroin, marijuana and Spice put together.

You can always tell a Spice addict from a twitter user. Spice addicts go into a catatonic, zombie-like trance before falling down in the street. But they rarely hurt anyone other than themselves.

the twitterati wander the streets with their heads down, staring at their mobile phones, before spewing hatred or self-serving drivel on the internet.

You can spot them a mile off, glancing anxiously at their handsets and mobile devices for their next fix. occasionally, they manage to wean themselves off the drug when they realise the damage they are doing to their own peace of mind and the wellbeing of others.

But the rate of recidivism is high and they soon return to their old habit, deprived of their regular injection of selfrighteousness and virtue signalling. Stephen Fry is a repeat offender.

Like other so-called ‘legal highs’ this is all very well when it is restricted to personal use. But when the drug ‘ goes viral’ it can be devastating.

ONLY last week a pop star addicted to twitter caused mass panic on the streets of central London when he told his eight million followers that he was trapped in a department store under siege from a terrorist attack.

the reported ‘attack’ turned out to be nothing of the sort, but could have proved fatal as thousands of his ‘followers’ ran for their lives.

it was a false alarm, but demonstrates how people who become hopelessly dependent on twitter and other forms of ‘social media’ are prepared to believe anything. it makes users highly susceptible to adopting and expressing extremist views, more often than not hidden behind a cloak of anonymity.

A bit like cocaine addicts, social media junkies convince themselves they are invincible and believe their every thought and utterance is endlessly fascinating, no matter how outrageous, unpleasant or simply gormless.

the drug is notorious for encouraging its addicts to threaten violence, often issuing rape and death threats against unsuspecting women who have been foolish enough to experiment with twitter.

teenagers have taken their own lives because of attacks by friends who have suffered severe personality disorders after falling prey to the temptation of social media.

excessive use makes addicts shed all their inhibitions, often with disastrous consequences.

thousands of men and women have lost their jobs because of bad behaviour while high on social media — for instance, taking intimate photographs of their private parts and sending them to complete strangers.

countless marriages have ended in divorce because addicts who thought they were talking to their lover on an encrypted app pressed the wrong button and sent a graphic image to their missus instead.

Widespread abuse of social media is also blamed for helping to spread violent jihad among sexually frustrated young men, who have been brainwashed under the influence of Facebook into believing that there are 72 virgins waiting for them in Paradise.

this epidemic is putting a huge strain on the police, already struggling to cope with reduced budgets. You never see a bobby on the beat any more.

they have given up investigating crimes such as burglary and shoplifting so they can free up officers to sit in front of computers all day scouring social media for ‘ inappropriate’ comments and ‘hate crimes’ committed by twitter addicts.

Journalism has changed beyond all recognition, too. not so long ago, reporters would leave the office, meet contacts and gather real stories. today, most of them are reduced to gawping at flickering screens, waiting for the next ‘twitterstorm’ to erupt.

Politicians and celebrities are not immune, either, and have seen their careers crash and burn after overdosing on twitter.

the highest-profile addict in the world today is Donald trump, President of the United States, who can’t survive without a twitter fix every couple of hours.

He became hooked on social media while working in television, where substance abuse has traditionally been a problem.

now that he is in the White House, his dependency is becoming a matter of national security. one of these days he might just start World War iii with an intemperate tweet.

Aides report that he rarely sleeps, spending much of the night staring at his screen and spitting out ever more deranged and dangerous outbursts.

Yesterday he was under fire for sharing three dubious anti-Muslim videos circulated by an obscure far-Right group called Britain First, which had posted them on, you guessed, twitter.

other twitter addicts went berserk, demanding that his state visit to Britain be cancelled. naturally, they took to twitter to express their disgust.

trump became so confused that he even tweeted a 41-year- old woman from Bognor Regis called theresa May Scrivener, thinking she was the Prime Minister.

We only know this, of course, because theresa May Scrivener is herself a recreational twitter user, which simply goes to prove how widely this menace has spread its tentacles.

Don’t take my word for it. the broadcast mogul Peter Bazalgette warned yesterday that the online tech giants such as Facebook represent a ‘ clear and present danger to civil society’.

He was thinking primarily about Amazon and netflix, which threaten traditional television production companies. But he’s also worried about the unregulated internet corporations in general and their amoral approach to what they publish — even though they refuse to accept that they are, indeed, publishers.

Bazalgette said Facebook and others have turned the internet into a ‘latter- day tower of Babel, the home of rumour, gossip and paranoia’. Like South American drug lords, these mega-corporations operate from high- security compounds, generate billions of dollars annually and move money around the world so that they pay little tax anywhere. the U.S government spends billions fighting the colombian and Mexican cocaine cartels, but if they really wanted to tackle the true 21st- century narco-kings, they would be better off sending the helicopter gunships into Silicon Valley.

A number of authoritative psychiatric studies have found that twitter, Facebook and other social media are highly addictive deliberately, because they are designed to cause the body to produce a rush of dopamine, which delivers a high just like cocaine and sex.

And the University of chicago recently published a report which concluded that social media is more addictive than alcohol and tobacco. if twitter really was a drug, it would have been banned years ago.

there’s already talk in the U.S. of classifying social media addiction as a mental illness. if they can’t impeach trump, maybe they will have him sectioned.

Social media is even more addictive than tobacco and alcohol