Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever

This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know, but this is not to be another one. I promise.

Time was, though, it was actually quite hard to find out what people thought, if they weren’t you. I mean, you could go out and ask them, but the process always ended with you being in a supermarket car park, and them being mental and not knowing what the Working Time Directive even was anyway. Twitter is a pipe of views coming straight to your screen. So explicitly not writing about it can feel like going out into the world with a bucket on your head, simply because you’re a bit bored of people writing about what they’ve seen with their eyes.

Anyway, the thing that happened this week on Twitter that this column, which is not about Twitter, is to concern itself with was a bunch of people threatening another person with rape. She was Caroline Criado-Perez, a woman who had campaigned to put Jane Austen on a banknote. They were… well, I don’t know. That’s rather the point. One of them, a 21-year-old man, has been arrested. Potentially he was almost all of them. Potentially not. Who knows? There was lots of outrage, either way, and lots of angry columns about how bad it is that people are bad. And this, just so we are remaining clear here, is not to be one of them.

The thing is, it strikes me that when a person goes online to threaten another person with rape for wanting to put Jane Austen on a banknote, there can logically be one of two things going on. Either this first person genuinely feels that making somebody scared that they might be raped is a justified and measured response to his sense of irritation about a presumed feminist victory over a banknote.