Thanks Twitter... it’s been the best decade ever for bullies

MY FIRST encounter with Twitter was in 2011, when I was on the border of Kenya and Somalia, visiting the starving who had washed up in Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world. I was staying in a one-room hut, with no running water, no bathroom, little food. Babies were dying around me. Dental floss seemed the most outrageous luxury I could think of, like owning a yacht.

One tiny, filthy tot, like something out of a Dickens novel, was scraping at her teeth in front of me. I asked how old she was, maybe four or five? She was 13. As she scraped with the twig, making herself pretty, she dislodged a tooth, and calmly took it out of her mouth. She was disintegrating before my eyes, at once impossibly young and improbably old.

I had my smartphone in the pocket of my Maharishi combats, and the juxtaposition of the medieval and the state-of-theart was not lost on even me: a fashion journalist with a BMI of less than 12 – two facts that enraged the chattering classes, who campaigned to prevent me from being allowed to report on the famine. On the way to Africa, I received death threats from male Muslims: on my phone, in my post box, and via Twitter.

I wasn’t even on Twitter, about to celebrate its tenth birthday. I had signed up, garnering 2,000 followers in an hour, before I was shut down by my bosses on this paper who felt that I had to be protected from the abuse.

Even if I had been on Twitter while in Africa, what would I have written about such a scene in 140 characters? ‘It’s really hot, saw chickens being slaughtered in front of other chickens, a little boy beating a donkey with an iron pole, Angelina J…’

There would have been no time for contemplation, for editing, for context. I would have belittled the people I met.

But I needn’t have worried. Someone was tweeting for me.

I was in the UN High Commission for Refugees bar – like a scene from M*A*S*H, only it was unclear who exactly was the enemy – when a photographer who had been looking at his phone told me I’d apparently been tweeting furiously. I’d been complaining that there was no fizzy water. That my Louis Vuitton case was being spoilt.

I felt confused, then sick, then angry. I was on a difficult story, with no pay (I donated my fee to Save The Children; oh, and I donated a new Mulberry bag to the charity, too, and filled it with special stuff, but I guess that gesture, too, is ripe for satire), thousands of miles from home, with people I had never met (one of whom commented, after I needed two translators due to my profound deafness, that I was ‘useless’), and someone was tweeting as me.

I felt as though I were back at school, being bullied for not requiring a bra, for not having a boyfriend, for my crooked teeth, cheap clothes and explosive, weeping acne. Occasionally, in periods of self-flagellation, I read tweets between women I used to be friends with. They are full of tales about how on earth they can transport a giant turkey across London in a cab. They tweet about how much they hate me, how I pretend to be friends with them but they hardly know me, about how they laugh at me, how I used to be a passable writer but am now rather rubbish.

In the proper world of writing, ie here, in this column, we aren’t allowed to write things like that.

WE ARE not allowed to make up that someone has taken cocaine, or had sex with their pets. But the tweeters do it, and there is no recourse. If I had been transgender, or Muslim, there would have been outrage when I was abused by a highprofile female member of the press. But because I’m a white woman from Essex, it’s deemed OK to call me, because of my age and gender, rather unimaginatively, ‘Nana’, and far worse.

So that’s why I won’t be baking a cake and lighting ten candles to celebrate the birthday of the beast that has ten fingers and an internet connection. Far from opening up the world, I see Twitter as a bully. Home of the extrovert and the chippy, the arrogant and the self obsessed. It has quietened the quieter among us.