Earlier this week I was seriously tempted to call the National Bullying Helpline. Ever since I wrote a blog for the Daily Telegraph questioning whether Alexander McQueen really was a ‘genius’, I’ve become a whipping boy on Twitter, the social networking site. The strange thing is, my chief tormentors are fellow journalists.
‘Alexander McQueen: a thundering f***ing pr*** has his say,’ tweeted Alexis Petridis, the Guardian’s chief rock critic, on the day the blog appeared. This prompted a reply from Caitlan Moran, a Times columnist: ‘Toby Young hasn’t done ANYTHING other than be a c*** since 1993.’ Janice Turner, another Times columnist, agreed: ‘I’d love my kids to go to that school set up by T Young. Timetable: double Latin, perving & insulting dead gays. V trad.’
Okay, nothing too demented there. Not the sort of remarks that would prompt the head of the Civil Service to issue a verbal warning. The problem is, journalists tend to have a lot of followers on Twitter and these fans instantly ‘retweet’ anything controversial their heroes say. Alexis Petridis, for instance, has 4,954 followers and his original comment was retweeted dozens of times.
Caitlan Moran was at it again last Friday when I appeared on BBC2 to do battle with Germaine Greer. ‘God, the reliability of Toby Young to be a total C*** could be used to power the atomic clock,’ she tweeted. This was then retweeted by some of her followers — she has 16,508 in total — and their followers then retweeted it to their followers, and so on. Soon a second eruption spewed forth from Mount Moran: ‘Oh, Germaine Greer. You’re still F***ING MAGNIFICENT. Please end this brilliant monologue by running a sword through Toby Young’s face.’ This caused another tidal wave of repetition. At one point, Moran’s tweets acquired such velocity that the words ‘Toby Young’ started ‘trending’ on Twitter, becoming one of the ten most popular topics on the social network worldwide. Quite something when you consider that Twitter has 75 million users. All thanks to one woman’s vituperation.
Does this constitute cyber-bullying? I’d love to get up on my high horse about this, but the only reason I know about Moran’s bilious rage is because I did a search on my own name on Twitter to find out what people were saying about me. Ego surfing, in other words. Like Googling yourself. Can you accuse someone of bullying if you only hear the wounding remarks by eavesdropping? Surely, to constitute ‘bullying’ the person in question has to say it to your face.
Oddly enough, this issue comes up all the time in schools. A 16-year-old girl will discover what her classmate is saying about her by visiting her Facebook page. She finds herself falsely accused of having slept with somebody else’s boyfriend and her world begins to cave in. She tells her mother in floods of tears and the mother then complains to the head teacher, demanding retribution. What should the head do? Facebook, like Twitter, straddles the public and private realms, being neither one nor the other. When you write something on Facebook or Twitter it isn’t like a private conversation between two people. Rather, it’s like a conversation between you and all your followers. In the case of Caitlan Moran, I was eavesdropping on an exchange between her and 16,508 others. Public or private?
Another complicating factor is that I can’t accuse Moran of orchestrating the hate campaign against me. After all, she doesn’t instruct her followers to retweet her remarks. It’s entirely voluntary — and the reason they repeat them, I suspect, is because they think they’re funny, not because they have any particular animus against me. (I may be flattering myself there.) And, let’s be honest, they are quite funny. This whole experience wouldn’t be so painful if I was being insulted by a bunch of morons.
The disappointing conclusion I’ve come to is that I can’t legitimately claim to be the victim of cyber-bullying. I’ve just been ‘flamed’ on Twitter, in much the same way that Jan Moir was when she wrote her notorious Daily Mail column about Stephen Gately. Perhaps if I was a private individual, like the poor boy who got ‘flamed’ after daring to say Stephen Fry was a bit boring, I might have grounds for complaint. But as a journalist I’ve just got to take it on the chin. So fire away, Miss Moran. And, please, try not to be so funny.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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