How Twitter almost destroyed me

Last year, my old sparring partner George Monbiot got himself into a spot of bother. ‘Why not stick the knife in on your blog?’ various people suggested. But I didn’t because George’s travails had nothing whatsoever to do with his wrongheaded political views (which I’m more than happy to attack at every turn). They had to do with a libel he’d repeated about someone on Twitter. About this, I refused to gloat.

This is not because I’m an incredibly decent, warm and caring person. Well, not just. It’s because, as a fellow Twitter user, I recognised a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Of course I felt terribly sorry for the poor fellow he’d libelled. But if the fault lay anywhere, I thought, it didn’t lie with George; rather it lay with the perpetually gaping maw of the gigantic elephant trap that is Twitter.

Twitter is a publishing medium more dangerous than any that has ever before existed. The problem is that it is once trivially ephemeral and hideously permanent. Whatever your state of mind, whether you’re drunk or sober, depressed or euphoric, it’s there waiting to capture your every thought from the moment you wake up to the moment you check your Twitter feed one last time before you go to sleep.

‘Shock me! Thrill me! Entertain me!’ Twitter pleads with you. And because it’s so easy and quick to do — only as long as it takes to type 140 characters and press the send button — you rarely pause to consider that your joke or retweet or throwaway one-liner might have any real consequences. After all it’s only Twitter.

Most of the time, it’s true, it is only Twitter. More often than not your remark gets ignored, either because it’s too dull or because there’s a more interesting story about a Twitter character called @Pontifex resigning or because it’s just one of those days when the fish aren’t biting.