Louise’s right to silence the trolls
RNOW I’ve heard everything. Sharon Stone – Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct, Casino, etc – is using a dating website. Why would a woman with the face, figure, poise and, let’s be frank, fortune, of Sharon Stone have to look for love online? She may be 61 but she’s still a catch. Has Hollywood run out of red-blooded men?
It’s a New Year mystery.
RLOUISE Minchin seems a pretty inoffensive sort to me. She does a solid job co-hosting BBC Breakfast, not that I watch it much – I’m a GMB man, and not just because
I sit in for Piers Morgan. It’s simply the livelier show.
But Louise hit the headlines this week when she announced she’s decided to turn her back on social media. It’s the usual reason: abuse. Minchin says she’s “had enough”. She doesn’t go into detail, but it seems she’s relentlessly trolled on websites such as Twitter and Facebook.And it’s finally got to her.
“I can read a hundred nice comments about me, but it’s the nasty one I remember, try as I might to shrug it off.
“The level of acrimony on social media has reached unnerving levels.
“I realised I’ve had enough of reading it and being drawn into a cycle of negativity.”
She says she’s rediscovered the joys of reading books and watching box sets (“much better than falling into a rabbit hole of darkness”).
Why anyone would want to abuse, threaten or otherwise troll someone as harmless as Minchin is beyond me. But there are more than enough of these warped individuals to go around.
I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances who live in the public eye and every single one of them, without exception, is regularly and routinely trolled online. I am too.
Death threats are two a penny; wild accusations and bizarre
JWHAT a lovely start to the New Year to see little Archie MountbattenWindsor beaming with his besotted dad by a Canadian lake. A photo... a happy one! That, with the Christmas tree snap, makes two in a week. Things are looking up.
It looks as if Harry and Meghan have been persuaded to share Archie with us at last. If so, they’ll find us eager to make up. We’ll forgive their Hollywood delusions as long as they stop, now. Here’s hoping the Queen will have one less thing to worry about in 2020. insults a background chorus.The difference between me and Minchin is that, on a personal level, I couldn’t give tuppence.
I have a vivid image of a typical Twitter troll.
He’s fat, in his late forties and still living at home with his parents. He sits in his boxroom in grubby
Runderpants, tap-tapping his keyboard with one hand while the other repeatedly dips into a jumbo-sized packet of Doritos.
Online abusers are a bit like wasps; if you simply ignore them, they’re not a problem. But that’s not to say we have to tolerate them indefinitely.
The problem here is anonymity. Anyone can be anyone on Twitter or Facebook. It’s virtually impossible to track abusers down.What we need is a proper system of registration.
If you want a credit card, or a driving licence, or a passport, you HAVE to give proof of identity.Why not introduce the same levels of proof for anyone wanting to go on social media?
The information could be held in a secure database, and accessed when cases of abuse are reported.
Threatening to kill or injure someone is a criminal offence.
So is cyber-stalking.With anonymity stripped away, the trolls would vanish overnight. Most are cowards, anyway. Have you noticed that when one is caught and dragged to court, they usually blub and say they didn’t mean it?
Online anonymity has traditionally been justified by social media tycoons as being vital for free speech.
But when free speech is abused – and on a scale as great as this – we need to act.Trolls have corrupted a significant segment of society.
Enough degradation; time for regulation.
GOD preserve us from “woke” public servants. The latest to spout supposedly enlightened waffle is the head of the Lake District National Park Authority, Richard Leafe.
In what one newspaper accurately bulls-eyed as “gnarled logic”, he bafflingly states that the Lake District needs to “confront its bias against millennial and non-white visitors who are put off by its backwardly rugged terrain”.
All together now: “UHH?”
What on earth is
“backwardly rugged terrain”? Whatever.
You can’t force people to climb mountains, Mr Leafe.
Here’s a bit of old-fashioned wokeness for you. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”