Mice with megaphones

Stephen Daisley (Mail) talks about Mhairi Black suffering online abuse.

All too often I am called to help folk reduced to sorry states of anxiety following negative comments sent to them or about them on social media. Such electronic traffic can be the most cowardly form of communication, a cruel platform for what I term ‘mice with megaphones’ folk unable or too timid to have reasoned and reasonable debate face to face.

I urge everyone to actively challenge abuse of social media in the name of human dignity, report it and hold the cash-cow social media platforms accountable.

One such platform is described by its founder as ‘a community’, to which I would humbly offer 1 Thessalonians 5:11: Therefore encourage one another and build each other up.

CANON ALAN Hughes, Berwick upon Tweed.

I AGREE with Stephen Daisley (Mail) that Mhairi Black ‘deserves credit for standing up to the bullies’ and there is no excuse for the sort of abuse she has faced.

The reality is that the independence referendum coarsened politics, yet the ugly reality was covered up.

A baying mob outside the BBC ‘was civic and joyous’ and nakedly tribal us-and-them politics is somehow now ‘civic nationalism’.

Miss Black telling a fellow Mp she ‘talked s **** ’ and threatening to ‘stick the nut’ on opponents is part of this coarsening and although it does not excuse her being called vile names, it shows how far we have fallen.

A. gLOveR, glasgow.