Beware the Angry Mob…

There can be no doubt the Internet has helped cultivate a level of transparency and accountability within both the corporate and political worlds that is unfamiliar, but on the whole positive. Blogs, websites, social media spaces and tweets have all provided an clearly audible voice where once there was only a whisper. And yet it is also a trait of human behaviour that we take the best of what we create and manipulate it into something far more dangerous than we had originally intended. Sadly, today much of what constitutes “protest” on the Internet is, at best, little more than ill-considered rabble-rousing and, at worst, straightforward abuse, amounting to not much more than a superficial hostility to an event that the “protesters” have neither the inclination nor the will to explore in depth. It is a shallow and empty form of dissent.

The Pillars of Democracy by Profero Global

Worryingly, however, it has a very serious impact. There can be no delusion that Jan Moir’s article in the Daily Mail, following the death of singer Stephen Gately, was anything other than an odious piece of insinuation, wild speculation and barely concealed homophobia. But should we really have been surprised? The Mail has been peddling malicious vitriol masquerading as serious journalism for decades. And yet, fuelled by a tiny number of comments, seeded by popular Twitterers with phenomenal reach, offence at the article snowballed into the equivalent of a mass march on Fleet Street and some 22,000 people saw fit to contact the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to object. That level of protest is simply impossible to ignore yet the notion that 22,000 people were genuinely outraged by the article, as opposed to being swept up in the rush of internet-led opprobrium, is almost as laughable as the article itself. The sheer number, and the very notion that this volume of people would have cared enough to have taken to the streets or lobby their MP or relevant representative organisations were it not for the ease and accessibility of the Internet, is absurd. This is vanity protestation. So, when Marks & Spencer’s feels compelled to pull advertisements that appeared in the Mail in protest at the Moir piece, or rather at the perceived level of moral outrage among offended citizens, and online editions re-edit content in response, we find ourselves walking through very dangerous and uncomfortable territory.

The Internet enables the mobilisation of a vast and unprecedented number of individual voices but it also both threatens to both undermine the authenticity and validity of the collective voice and to determine the outcome of events long before any rational assessment of proceedings. Brands, institutions, companies and even individuals are issuing apologies and retracting articles and work solely on the weight of numbers alone, and with an increasingly regularity (see also, The BBC and “Sachsgate“, Jimmy Carr, A.A. Gill and The Daily Politics Show.) This is fundamentally wrong. Whether rampaging through the streets or surging across the Internet, an unruly mob is exactly the same thing in both real and virtual terms.  To allow that mob to determine the content of the press, either on- or off-line, is not accountability in any form but a fundamental threat to basic tenets of free speech.