Online personal attacks - Privilege of free speech is abused

Last weekend Ireland’s rugby team visited Edinburgh and contrived to lose a match they should have won easily and, as is usual when something like this happens, the commentary can be pretty stark, some of it even unforgiving, more utterly disproportionate.

The most strident assessments usually, sometimes gleefully, rub salt into an open and tender wound. Coaches, players and managers — and their family and friends — may not always respect the views expressed but if they are given honestly and the author is identified, as they always are in the traditional media, they can force themselves to accept that negative commentary sometimes goes with the territory. Some even learn from it.

However, the tsunami of anonymous, poisonous and — frankly — deranged online commentary directed at some of those involved with the Irish team last Sunday, especially coach Declan Kidney and to a lesser degree Ronan O’Gara, crosses a line and is utterly unacceptable. These bullying, angry, incoherent and deeply offensive attacks show the very dark, destructive side of social media. Unfortunately, the tirades directed at Kidney and some of his players are just part of a too prevalent characteristic in out-of-control, anonymous commentary on social media. Kidney and O’Gara are not by any means the first — and they won’t by any means be the last — individuals to be unfairly eviscerated by the unaccountable and cowardly.

Tens of thousands of individuals, many of them children, less hardened to the cruelties of the world than professional sports people, have had to cope with very hurtful and inaccurate online attacks. In some instances this has been at the root of terrible tragedy and lives have been lost. The stakes can be that high.

The vast majority of traffic on social media is pretty harmless, innocuous tittle tattle, but the nasty kind is cancerous and rampant. But what can be done about it?

Little enough it seems at a corporate or legislative level, or at least little enough that can be as effective as our libel laws are for curbing unfounded allegations in the identifiable and accountable media. The multi-national nature of the companies who provide the online services needed to support these slander-and-hide sites are at best indifferent to the idea of social or personal responsibility, especially if it might curtail revenue opportunities. Mercurial corporate structures and the way — deliberately — some online services are engineered or provided from less rigorous legislative areas, not to mention their relatively bottomless war chests, put them beyond any idea of accountability that would be recognised by an ordinary individual.

For those who object to the idea of online anonymity facilitating the kind of personal attack they would not tolerate in any other forum there is of course the seeming small but potentially devastating censure if enough people embrace the idea — a boycott of all sites, and products advertised on them, that facilitate completely anonymous diatribes against individuals. That may seem an old world response to a new world problem but it might just do enough to bring some sanity, decency and personal responsibility back into how we communicate. It would underline too that the principle of free speech carries some responsibilities too and that they are worth protecting.