Fergus Finlay: Good people are being driven out of politics by malice and bile on social media

Tech makes communication immeasurably faster and more effecient — but also facilitates the proliferation of dark forces online 

Technical progress enables immeasurably speedier and more efficient communications — but has also changed public discourse for the worse, not least through anonymous social media accounts.

By the time I’ve finished writing this, I’ll have spent a couple of days at it. It will take a tiny fraction of a second to transmit all that blood, sweat, and tears to the Irish Examiner’s office by email.

It will occupy 20 kilobytes of data on my computer — an infinitesimal amount of space, smaller than a speck of sand. Never mind the computer — in terms of data size, I could carry more than a million of these columns on the phone in my pocket.