As Twitter turns 10, is the Twittocracy out of control?

In comparison to the world that exists in the comment sections of online articles of the Daily Mail, the 'mood slime' oozing through New York City in the Ghostbusters films is relatively benign.

Should you make the fatal mistake of going to the Mail Online for anything other than its excellent sports coverage, and you then click on a story - really, any story - you will be, at a glance, rewarded with the most frightening representation of modern society. It is one which makes Faustian visions of the underworld look beatific. It will remind you of Jack Crawford's advice to Clarice Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head", such is the insanity let loose in these forums.

The Daily Hate is where the unmoderated go to dispense their batshit-crazy opinions, their apalling spelling and even worse grammar (be warned if easily offended by "your" instead of "you're"), and their utterly noxious views on celebrities that have just appeared in a miasma of covert bikini pictures (supported, as the paper's 12-year-old caption writers invariably write, by descriptions of "a leggy display" or "a busty display", or pointing out "plenty of side boob" and its escapist cousin "under boob"), and to generally contribute to a seeping wound of unsolicited bile about people they would never otherwise be able to engage the world at large with directly.

Twitter/Danny Baker

The simple solution, of course, to taking umbrage at this somewhat unsolicited and mostly anonymous bile is to not "go directly to comments", as appears to be the activity name for people who see one of the newspaper's crackpot headlines (such as one once hilariously announcing that Goebbels was paranoid about Adolf "Hotler" - HOTLER! - sleeping with Frau Goebbels) and make straight for the veritable cuckoo's nest below the main story.

In this regard, the Mail is rather like Australia. Knowing, as you do, that throughout its landmass and coasts lurks most of the world's things that will kill you, you are empowered with the knowledge and good sense to avoid it. By the same token, you know that anything directed by M. Night Shyamalan will render you in need of clean underwear, and anything with Mrs. Brown's Boys in the title will leave you reaching for the will to live. So the Mail's readers forum, and indeed the Mail itself, is put sensibly off limits.

Twitter, however, is another matter. Depending on your popularity - and, face facts, it is your perceived popularity that determines this - you are completely at the mercy of the world. Twitter is like actually visiting Australia and spending your entire time naked as the day you turned out, coated in honey, while attending a meeting at the corporate HQ of the entire wasp species before scheduling a restorative dip later in the country's tiniest body of water known to harbour crocodiles. Who haven't dined in months.

This may sound a tad over-dramatic, but there have been times - moments of idleness you could characterise them - when I have been drawn to individuals' tweets and then gone crashing foolishly into the "conversations" that have either preceded them or come afterwards.

A recent example concerns Al Murray, a figure known to British audiences, mainly, as the ironic 'Pub Landlord', a standup comedy character based on the boorish, right-wing UKIP-loving barkeeps who, like Londom black cab drivers, will opine on many things that get liberals hot under the collars of their hair shirts.

Whether in character or not, Murray - an Oxford-educated descendent of the 3rd Duke of Atholl and a great-great-great-great-grandson of the novelist William Thackeray - appears to take great delight in engaging Twitter fascists to the extent that you actually see their little rubber bands going snap. It is an art, and an intelligent one, and one in which - credit where due - Murray will march straight into his own online Agincourt without so much as the blindest concern for his own safety. A recent engagement by Murray on the not-too-light topic of anti-semitism was like watching Jason Bourne take down allcomers in an alley, except even now I can't recall who was fighting whom about what, largely because it was a Saturday night and I was in decent supply of gin, tonic and ice cubes.

Another admirable troll jouster is Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for the Birmingham consituency of Yardley. I mention Phillips not out of any political affiliation, but as an example of how Twitter has gone too far in giving people an unbridled voice. In October last year, Phillips appeared in a House of Commons meeting to discuss a debate about International Men's Day. "As the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day," she commented. "When I’ve got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate. And that will take an awfully long time."

Cue the River Styx itself breaking its banks, with Phillips facing threats of rape - yes, rape. On the one hand, you can rationalise it by saying that such people use the anonymity of Twitter as their shield. But on the other hand, you have to recognise that someone capable of making such a threat could also live right next door.

I really have very little interest in or regard for politicians (who are largely self-serving egos on legs, sorry), but in Phillips I genuinely admire her integrity to speak freely and with authority (her recent brouhaha comparing New Year's sexual assaults in German with an ordinary night in in Birmingham had the sound basis of Phillips having worked closely with womens' abuse charities). Quite understandably, on this occasion she lost her sense of fun: "No internet today. Being told that 'I asked for it' regarding threats to rape me is not fun. Its not 1st time in my life I've heard it." she tweeted, adding: "Today my son is 7. I'm glad he is not old enough to go on internet and find all the people threatening to rape me."

Most of the nonsense Phillips puts up with on Twitter is deflected with good humour. But on this occasion, lines were crossed. This, of course, raises the question about why anyone would want to put their head in the proverbial lion's mouth on a platform as public as Twitter when such swivel-eyed, foil hat-wearing lunacy lurks predatorially in the bushes. Least of all celebrities. There are many questions one might ask of Lindsay Lohan for posting lascivious pictures of herself on Instagram, but is there any - any - justfication for members of the populace to openly call her a "junkie whore", just because there's a button beneath her post that allows you to write something?

As with the Mail, looking up replies to celebrity tweets can be a frightening, faith-in-humanity-sapping experience. I'm very serious when I say that you simply should avoid them. Because you will wonder what sort of society we live in. You will question what absence of civility allows people the belief that even with their Twitter identity completely unguarded, and their name and profile photograph on show, they can say anything to anyone, let alone the famous, via this passive-aggressive medium than they would have the bollocks to say to their face?

For those of us in the communications game, Twitter - unlike Facebook - has been a boon. Companies and corporates have leapt upon it for its instantanious immediacy. Celebrities have embraced it in a way that, as someone who used to court the PRs of the famous, I find quite refreshing.

There are many celebs out there who do Twitter just right: Gillian Anderson, an actress who by my book can do no wrong, is one of the funniest celeb tweeters out there, especially when she's baiting David Duchovny.

But even she can't put out something of genuine interest to her fans without some dipshit tweeting something juvenile to her. So is it right that they can, or should "@GillianA" just ignore the serious invasions of her public image that she often has to put up with?

My point here is that in the olden days our contact with the famous was strictly controlled by their publicists. We only knew what they were saying or thinking because a journalist, or a magazine or a TV interviewer had been granted annointed access to the schleb, and even then under some threat of violence, or worse, if agreed terms of reference were breached.

Now, we don't have to wait for showbiz hacks to describe the mood of a Hollywood star as they wilt from that day's umpteenth interview. Because, thanks to Twitter, we know that Johnny Famous isn't the surly hack-hating git an interview might portray him as, because he's just tweeted a Vine of his cat doing something cute, leaving us under no misapprehension that JF is, actually, normal and a bit of a laugh in real life.

Sometimes, however, it works against them. Stephen Fry has been, without doubt, one of the most prolific users of Twitter and one of its earliest celebrity proponents. However, he has also fallen vulnerable to its darker side, and has taken himself off it three times in sensitive reaction to twiterverse reactions to things he's said and done, including last month's BAFTAs when do-gooders thought he'd caused genuine offence by describing costume designer (and, actually, close friend) Jenny Beavan as "a bag lady".

Despite stressing his longstanding friendship with Beavan and that he was indulging in nothing more than joshing, Fry closed down his account on February 15 following a night of trench warfare with people accusing him of mysoginy and worse. In a post on his personal blog entitled "Too many people have peed in the pool", Fry wrote that he hadn't so much slammed the door on Twitter as "stalked off in a huff throwing my toys out of the pram as I go", adding "It’s quite simple really: the room had started to smell. Really quite bad."

He described Twitter's early halcyon days as "a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest", noting how "we chattered and laughed and put the world to rights and shared thoughts sacred, silly and profane. But now the pool is stagnant. It is frothy with scum, clogged with weeds and littered with broken glass, sharp rocks and slimy rubbish. If you don’t watch yourself, with every move you’ll end up being gashed, broken, bruised or contused. Even if you negotiate the sharp rocks you’ll soon feel that too many people have peed in the pool for you to want to swim there any more. The fun is over."

Of course, Twitter remains what it is to its 300-plus million active users. But Fry does have a point, if a tad melodramatic, when he said "Let us grieve at what Twitter has become, a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined...the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much."

Ending his post by quoting Martin Luther King ("I am free, free at last"), Fry left no one in any doubt that he was glad to be rid of a beast which he, in some part, helped to build. When I joined Twitter in February 2009, it was because celebrities like Fry and Jonathan Ross had been raving about it. And, yes, part of the attraction was indeed the somewhat voyeuristic proximity with which it brought us mere mortals to the famous.

But there is a genuine argument that, with Twitter, you had to be careful what you wished for. In the ten years to the day since Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet, it has brought about a global emancipation, even if - as an early market research study found, it is still predominantly split between a predominance of "pointless babble", conversations, items of interest, self-promotion, spam and news.

Unless you hold a position of great prominence, you can tweet in the manner to which the concept was born - 'microblogging', which to all intents and purposes means "stream of consciousness". It can be funny: got a good joke? Tweet it. You won't even be bothered by the tumbleweed blowing through your timeline as you get zero likes or an absence of retweets. And then again, you get lucky and your under-the-influence bon mot about the Eurovision Song Contest gets launched into orbit and the retweet count goes berserk.

Twitter does put you out there. If you're prepared to commit yourself to the Twittersphere, be prepared for unsolicited reactions. I admit to have indulged in a little light trollery myself recently when Lord (Alan) Sugar tweeted his barmy idea that José Mourinho got himself fired deliberately because he wanted out of Chelsea.

I was prompted - pint in hand, it must be said - to repost his tweet with the comment that it was "either the dumbest theory since Mourinho said he could revive [Radamel] Falcao's career, or Lord S is on to something". This then prompted Sugar - who doesn't suffer fools gladly at all (and manages his own tweets accordingly) to reply "Shut up". And, I think, he blocked me.

You can't blame him. However, here began the beginning of a painful afternoon. Retweets of my post, comments to it, comments to his retort - Sugar and I were dragged unwillingly into other people's personal dramas. It very soon became the worst 'reply all' nightmare you could muster. Three days on, like remote outposts returning their ballot boxes, comments, retweets and likes were still appearing like random aftershocks, all from what I'd thought was a measured piece of smart-arsery, albeit from the relaxed confines of the saloon bar.

And that is how it happens. I would still maintain that my banter with Sugar was just that, and he is more than grown up enough to not take offence (in fact my exchange was quite mild in comparision to his baiting of Piers Morgan...). But such is Twitter's openness that there isn't much between light ribbing and the kind of wholesale billiousness the likes of Jess Phillips and Stephen Fry have endured. And there's worse, much worse. In fact, there are times when Twitter emulates the darker spaces of the Internet with some of the exchanges people become embroiled in, of a breed that makes the Mail Online's comment sections look as serene as a summer's day on the Serptentine.

Working as I do in corporate media relations, I recognise that social media has its boundaries. Even though anyone in a position of responsibility will make clear "views are my own" in their account bio, you can never, ever cross a line. Even my invariably grumpy missives about Chelsea, written within Guinness-sweetened distance of the pub's big screen, must submit to the social media breathalyser before I commit them to the general public.

It's called self-restraint, something clearly lacking in the nefarious ocean that bubbles just below the apparent freedom of speech Twitter provides. Before the age of social media, I'm sure people led more civil lives. Nutters who wrote to newspapers or public figures would do so in green ink (this is not a myth, by the way) but there was moderation, not to mention a good deal more respect at large. Now, there are no such screens.

The Internet has democratised society, but there are occasions when you wonder whether it has become overly emancipated. And in the process, you do wonder who who - or what - is lurking out there...and possibly only next door.