I have had a number of direct messages from hacked ids. If the hackers could get into reputable and trusted, much followed accounts a real large scale tragedy could ensue.

You said: “Nor did anyone turn up outside Moir’s house with pitchforks, ffs.”

Also not defending Moir, but does that make the reaction any less intimidating? What if Jan Moir had been a coimplete innocent who had her reputation trashed? Would she feel better that it had been done online rather than by people shouting outside her house? In fact, the former can lead to the latter in any case.

My Chambers dictionary lists one of the definitions of “mob” as: “ordinary people; the masses”. This is exactly what this was, a group of individuals who coalesced for a single purpose, and then disbanded, having achieved their aim. It is the online version of of taking to the streets, and can have even more far-reaching consequences, because of how wide the net can be spread, and because it can be done from the comfort of your own home, at very little personal risk. Mobs are not by definition anonymous. Unless you mask your face when you take to the streets, you can be recognised. It’s actually easier to hide your identity on-line.

I agree that this was in no way anti-free speech or any of the other nonsense that is being bandied about. But I think it makes sense to look at the parallels between how the masses react on-line and off-line, how and why these coalitions come about, and whether the fact that being on-line dramatically changes the dynamics of protest. And if it does, how do we stop real abuses and innocent people being victimised because, say, someone starts circulating on line that the local paediatrician is a paedophile because they don’t know the difference between the two?

Thanks so much for your post. I am grateful to you for taking the time to post so eloquently about the response to Jan Moir’s article.

I also agree with you that to say that people leapt anonymously on a bandwagon and formed an anonymous mob is not a helpful thing to say. I hope you don’t mind me pointing out that I did not use the word “mob” in my post or my subsequent comments. “Mob” is an emotive word. I don’t think it’s appropriate either and I think what happened is far more interesting and sophisticated than some people would like to paint it.

I also agree with you that Jan Moir has a case to answer with the PCC (specifically with regards to Section 12 of the code). At the very beginning of my post I hope I made it clear I wasn’t defending her.

What I wanted to understand was, looking beyond the offending articles in this instance, what is this form of action that we now have? What are its implications? Why, when I can see all the fantastic benefits of it, do I also have a sense of unease about it? I think unease usually comes from a lack of understanding, hence the point of this post – to ask others to help me understand this better.

I am in the mainstream media and I know I’m not going to get away from the labels that is likely to place upon me. I understand it might seem that I’m trying to belittle the response. I don’t know how I convince you that isn’t the case and that, truly, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What’s interesting here is that you’re right, it wasn’t organised action, not in the traditional sense. It was the action of lots of different individuals using different platforms and coming across the article in different ways. Yet the end result closely resembled what we would have once described as organised action.

This is new. Once upon a time it just wouldn’t have been possible for 25,000 people all acting as individuals to protest to an organisation about the same issue all within 24 hours.

It’s an incredible, wonderful, powerful thing. It is also a bit of a scary thing. What makes it scary is something I want to understand better.

‘The appearance of collective action is remarkably easy online, with many individuals able to contribute in small ways (a retweet, joining a Facebook group, writing a short blog post). But this also means responsibility for this action is fragmented…’

Twitter was just one part of this. Please look at the facts.

25,000 people *complained to the PCC*.

Some of them were alerted by Twitter, others alerted by Facebook status updates expressing horror at the article from FB friends, others read the article at source and googled ”how to complain about an article”.

They bothered to complain to the PCC because – and this is significant – they thought that Moir’s article had breached the PCC’s Editor’s Code which the Mail has voluntarily signed up to and agreed to abide by. What is the point of having a code is it is breached and ignored? Why is this, as some MSM commentators have tried to say ‘an attack on free speech’? Is a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority an attack on free speech? Is a complaint to OfCom an attack on free speech? So why is this, please?

What else are people to do if they think an article has breached the Code – in ergard to accuracy, intrusion and discrimination? The Mail has no reader’s editor to direct concern to and answer complaints in public; writing to the Mail gets you an automatically generated email, as does writing to Dacre, as does writing to Moir. So people wrote to the PCC to complain, as they are properly supposed to do – and then they soon found out it is a toothless body, and Paul Dacre sits on the PCC standards committee!

What else to do? Using their initiative, people also began to contact the advertisers on the page, all of whom were easy enough to look up contact details for – and spoke to their press officers and media buying departments and said, look, do you really want your brand next to this kind of homophobic content? How do I know this? Because I was doing it by 9.40am the day the article came out and so were my friends. Via a message board as it happens, none of us are on Twitter.

And the advertisers thanked us for alerting them, and took immediate steps, after having read Moir’s piece, to get their ads away from the foul piece. I know this because I personally spoke to P&G, M&S, and Nestle the morning Moir’s piece came out. Then I complained to the PCC and joined a Facebook group where people where sharing advertiser info and explaining how to complain to each other.

To complain to the PCC you have to give your name, address and contact details and fill out a lengthy form explaining – with quotes and links – exactly where the article has breached the PCC’s Code.

So you have to read both the Code – which is several hundred words – and the article again – which is also several hundred words – and then go to the bother of filling in the form, with your real name and details – in order to make a complaint.

That is not anonymous.
That is not mindless, or quick, or easy.
That is not a ‘mob’.
Nor is it an attack on free speech.

Nor did anyone turn up outside Moir’s house with pitchforks, ffs.

It makes me really, really angry to see this canard being wheeled about in the MSM – that complaint is just a click away, that the article wasn’t even read properly, that it’s easy to complain but hard to take responsibility, that it was orchestrated, that it was organised, that it was a ‘lobby’. Bollocks.

Go and look at the damn form for yourselves if you want. Go and look at how much of a hassle the process is.
http://www.pcc.org.uk/complaints/process.html

And just to prove the point, traffic to the Moir page went up 22%. The idea that people just leapt anonymously on a bandwagon and formed an anonymous mob is stupid, and wrong, and misrepresentative.

I’m not particularly having a go at the author of the blog here, but my goodness, after a week of pontificating from the MSM commentators who seem to have accepted this canard without bothering to check the facts, I am really fed up. You still don’t get it, a lot of you.

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned my own view. The reason I put that caveat at the beginning is that, when I first wrote this post, emotions were still running high about both these issues. Understanding that most people who read my blog know I work in mainstream media, I (maybe wrongly) assumed that people would think I was trying to attack those who criticised Moir and Gill.

I hoped by adding that caveat people wouldn’t get the wrong end of the stick and assume that the post was about defending or denouncing those involved. Or, indeed, denouncing online protest. (Uneasiness is on a different level to saying something is wrong, don’t you think?)

It was actually about none of the above. It was about exploring my own feelings about online protest as a new influence on society. I wanted to understand my response to it and didn’t feel just labelling it right or wrong was appropriate.

Unfortunately it seems I didn’t put that across clearly enough.

I personally certainly DO condone the opinions or actions of Jan Moir and AA Gill.

Got it? Good. Right

Moir simply asked some questions that no one else dared ask. Gill only did much the same sort of thing as Ernest Hemingway, both in his actions and in brilliant writing. And I think Nick Griffin is an OK sort of bloke (the kind of guy I enjoy having a pint with or taking a taxi ride from).

In fact, I praise them all for braving to take a stand. And I’m NOT going to tell you more about what my private thoughts are about them. You shouldn’t think you have a personal, secret window into my soul.

The problem is that everyone who tries to oppose ‘Twittermobbing’ is going to nervously try to distance themselves from the person they are defending.

Balls to that. If one think twittermobbing is wrong, one shouldn’t have to qualify it with weasel-y get-outs.

@Sam: When you talk about the legal system “that we agree to live by”, I think you get very close to the nub of issue for me.

The action and the reaction involved in these events shows, I think, our society hasn’t figured out how to deal with effects of distributed communication yet. We haven’t agreed any rules of engagement, we’re using ones that evolved to cope with different mediums and a different era.

There seem to be so many questions:

How much credence should we be giving to such protests? How much influence should distributed group actions have over others? What about protests on different platforms? How much personal responsibility should we take for being part of such protests? What redress (if any) should those who are unjustly wronged have?

This is really Clay Shirky’s area of expertise.

My feeling is that online protests are not democracy, they are examples of groups of individuals using a new and interesting tool in the democratic process and making their protests known.

In many respects this is a superior tool for democracy than traditional mass communication as a greater number of individual voices can be heard. But, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suffer from some of the same bad points.

We despise “the media” when it hounds those who turn out to be innocent or when it is not in the public interest. Society puts laws and codes in place to try to regulate that sort of action. Indeed, we applaud our legal institutions when a news organisation is successfully sued for breaking such laws.

Why do we think users of Twitter, or Facebook, or any online communication tool are not capable of doing exactly the same hounding? The difficulty is when the culpability is so dispersed, how does society deal with its effects?