We are now living in a digital Salem – as Lionel Shriver found this week
The treatment of the author proves that, in the court of social media, to be accused is to be guilty
About a year ago, The Spectator’s staff met to discuss who we’d most like to sign as a new columnist. The conversation was over in minutes: everyone wanted Lionel Shriver. Her writing has it all: humour, insight, variety, elegance and – perhaps most of all – courage. Unlike most novelists, she has something to say on every topic imaginable, from psychology to cryptocurrency. My pitch: that we would not be able to shower her with money but we could offer her complete editorial freedom – and readers with a decent sense of humour. That swung it. To our delight, she accepted.
There wasn’t much sign of humour in the social media lynch mob that has been pursuing her in the past week, furious about her latest column. She had mocked Penguin for its new policy of hiring authors based on whether they reflect a “diverse” society. This diversity is established by a tick-box exercise so long that it contains (to Ms Shriver’s amusement) options for both “bi” and “bisexual”. Proof, she said, that “diversity” has been “removed from the language as a generalpurpose noun”. What about seeking good writers, in whatever shape they come? Her column was funny, rational, and argued with her usual gentle fearlessness.
Uproar then followed and she was plunged into the court of Twitter, charged with ableism, classism, homophobia, racism, transphobia, and worse. After a few days, the mob got its scalp: she was dropped as a judge from the fiction awards run by Mslexia magazine. The magazine’s editor says she was aware that quotes had been taken out of context. But “the way it has been taken up by the media” meant that the damage had been done. An “atmosphere” had been created that’s “very discouraging for particular groups of women writers” – so Ms Shriver had to walk the plank. To be accused is to be guilty: a digital Salem.
This is another landmark in the ability of social media to shape and distort debate in the outside world, with chilling implications that are still not properly understood. It did not matter that Ms Shriver said nothing to discourage women writers, or that she is a living inspiration for many of them. It only mattered that she had been accused with enough force, by people seeking to cast her as a bigot. Her army of readers will not be so persuaded, but her treatment sends a message out to others: if you have reservations about the orthodoxies of the day, best keep them to yourself. Anything you can say can be amplified, twisted, held as evidence, and used to convict.
You’d be surprised how many television producers anxiously check Twitter after their shows. Or how many in public life, whom you’d imagine to have the thickest of skins, reach for their social media reviews as soon as they come off air. The historian Niall Ferguson has spoken about how startled and taken aback he was after the first online attacks – to be taken to task not for ideas or evidence but for being a covert racist, Islamophobe or homophobe or worse. If you’re used to handling critics by reasoned argument and facts you can have no idea how to handle a Twitterstorm.
As he has found out, the social media mob is at its most lethal in the world of academia, with a ready audience in a generation that is worryingly relaxed about the idea of people being hounded off campus. I was at my alma mater, Glasgow University, earlier this week and heard Sir Anton Muscatelli, the principal, speak about how the importance of free speech needs to be rediscovered from time to time. He quoted from a 1974 report from Yale University, commissioned after concern that too many invited speakers were being no-platformed and hounded off campus. Intellectual growth, the report said, depended on the ability to “discuss the unmentionable and challenge the unchallengeable”. Free speech, it said, guards against the “tyranny” of “majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines, or thoughts”.
A new type of this tyranny is now emerging from the digital world, with “wrongness” of thought being rigorously policed and victims swiftly punished, whether guilty or not. My colleague Toby Young, a writer so committed to education that he set up an all-ability state school, found his career in school reform ended by the discovery of a few daft comments he made on social media almost a decade ago. Ought a 3am comment outweigh a decade or more of experience? Those who sacked Toby Young over his ancient tweets saga gave an answer: yes, it does now.
As Michael Gove said in a speech last week, the same pattern can always be seen: any original thinking which challenges fashionable norms is scrutinised for political acceptability. If it fails this test, the author is then attacked personally. The aim is to use social media to cast slurs and portray the target as toxic. An offending sentence can be found, taken out of context and twisted for damaging effect. Then the mob can move on to whoever might be inviting their target to speak. Once this formula works on one victim, it’s tried on another.
In a strange way, the hysteria has made Ms Shriver’s point perfectly. Take one of her critics, Amrou Al-kadhi, who recently signed a six-figure deal to write a book about becoming a drag queen. They (to use the preferred pronoun) said that when publishers are more open-minded, people from such diverse backgrounds can be signed up. But a point was omitted: the author is also an Old Etonian with a Cambridge degree, so is furnished with the sort of CV that always serves as a fast-track into the establishment. So does this make them an embattled member of minority group, or a product of extraordinary privilege?
Ms Shriver was simply saying that a writer’s background should not matter, because quality of writing should speak for itself. People like good, interesting books, which is why even the trolls on Twitter will not be able to inflict any serious damage on her career. But what of the other writers who are just starting out, seeking a publisher, and share her general persuasion? They will have learnt from this imbroglio that it’s best to keep certain opinions secret. And that when it comes to diversity of opinion, there is still a battle to be fought.