Since posting some of my research into the RSPCA on Facebook, I now better understand the way social networking works.
Social networking is local as well as global. So if you live in Surrey and ride horses you can join a Facebook group full of people in the same area doing the same thing. Only because these people are not speaking face to face, they can be tremendously rude to each other.
The upshot of my spending a couple of days on one of these sites plugging my investigations into the RSPCA, including its role in the seizure of 123 horses from a farm down the road from my home, was that all these people started arguing and fighting with each other online in a way they would never dream of doing if they were standing in the same room.
Of course, the main point was that so long as they were arguing, it kept the issue going, and so on balance I was so grateful to Facebook I could have kissed Mark Zuckerberg. Talk about people power.
It really was quite astonishing, the response I had. But I had to get used to the rudeness. At one point, a lady put up a post so confrontational, complete with swearing, it made me wonder if she was really who she said she was. As I couldn’t see any pictures of her because she and I weren’t ‘Friends’ (and neither did I want us to be), I emailed an actual friend of mine who I suspected might know her. And she emailed me back to say the swearing lady was lovely. And she included a picture she had of her to prove it.
I am rarely shocked but when I saw the petite, pretty, glamorous woman smiling sweetly back at me I was even less able to marry her with the foul-mouthed tirade she had posted.
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