Social media has moved the goalposts

MAN’S capacity for savagery, man’s capacity for unimaginable cruelty, man’s appetite for revenge may seem inventions of our time, but they are as old as man himself.

It is probable these impulses helped us climb the evolutionary tree. The opportunity for those who would give vent to these appalling characteristics to use social media to achieve their objectives is, however, an invention of our time. This was graphically seen this week in the Sonia Blount murder trial after which the grotesque and violent Eric Locke was found guilty of her murder and sent to jail for life.

Locke had invented a Facebook profile to lure the 31-year-old mother-of-one to a Dublin hotel after she cut off contact with him. She was “in fear of him” because of his reaction to the breakdown of their short relationship.