Britain’s gold-medal-winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington has announced that during the Olympics she will not be looking at Twitter or any other similar site because she gets upset by remarks about her appearance.
What kind of person looks at a picture of Ms Adlington and thinks, “I know what I’ll do today. I’ll go online and let the long-legged, blue-eyed, world-beating blonde know that her conk’s a bit on the large side. And then afterwards I’m going to leave a message for Uma Thurman saying she’s got thin hair”?
You may think that if this is happening there must be a lunatic on the loose. But you’d be wrong. There are, in fact, tens of thousands of lunatics out there, all of whom spend their days going online to insult a selection of people they’ve never met.
When a newspaper prints a picture of a pretty girl, comments are invited from readers, all of which follow a pattern. Savagery. Just last week the television presenter Melanie Sykes was described as a “sleazeball” for finding a boyfriend. Somebody called Hilary Duff was accused of having a “man’s shoulders”. And Keira Knightley was told she looked like a “famine victim hours from death”.
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My wife has been subjected to this as well. She was photographed recently while out running, and you simply wouldn’t believe how much bile this prompted. One person was so cruel that I was tempted to go around to her house and cut her in half with a sword. I also wanted to set fire to her photograph albums and boil her pets.
But therein lies the problem. She’s anonymous. She’s known only as a stupid user name — “Fluffykins” or some such. She could be in Birmingham or Hobart. She’s a microbe in a fog of 7 billion particles and she knows it. Which is why, as I write, she’s probably telling Bruce Forsyth he looks like a Russian icebreaker. With a moustache!!!!!
Would she walk up to a person in the street and say, “God, you’re fat”? No. And yet she sees nothing wrong with getting the message across just as clearly on the internet. Because that’s the sad truth. The only people who read these comments are the people to whom they refer. And they are powerless to reply.
When Rebecca Adlington is abused online she should be able to locate the culprit with a couple of clicks If I say something that offends you, either here or on the television, you know where I am. You can find me. You can shove a pie into my face or throw manure over my garden wall. These things happen and, in a way, it’s to be expected.
But the person who ignores Adlington’s remarkable achievements in the pool and concentrates only on her nose? She has no idea who they are or where they live.
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This has to stop. And we know it’s possible from the recent conviction of a Newcastle University student who was given two years’ community service for bombarding the football pundit Stan Collymore with racially abusive tweets. This showed that if you are a racialist and you use the n-word, you are not anonymous and the police can find you.
We should be able to do the same. Easily. When people call from blocked numbers in the middle of the night to sing unpleasant songs, I should be able to get their number from Vodafone in a heartbeat. When Adlington is abused for having a daggerboard on the front of her face, she should be able to locate the culprit with a couple of clicks. His name. His address. The name of his boss. The lot.
Fans of the internet boast about its openness but, actually, it isn’t open at all. It’s a web of secrecy, full of dark corners that can be probed only by government agencies, and sometimes not even then. There are tens of thousands of lunatics out there, and the problem could be solved at a stroke if they were forced to step out from behind their user names and bask in the ice-cold glare of retribution.
This is not just a solution for Adlington. It’s a solution for Lord Justice Leveson as well. For what feels like the past 200 years this poor old man has been made to sit in what appears to be World of Sport’s old studios, listening to a bombastic man in silly spectacles questioning every single person who has ever been, met or seen a politician, journalist or celebrity.
He is charged, among other things, with trying to recommend a code of conduct to which newspapers must adhere. But whatever he comes up with is pointless because clamping down on newspapers in the digital age is like worrying about a cut finger when you have rabies.
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Newspapers are already covered by the laws of libel, which don’t affect those on the internet to anything like the same degree. Because even if you can find the online culprit, what’s the point of suing a penniless fat man who lives with his mum and spends his day spouting bile from his porn store in the loft? Even if he did turn out to be loaded, you’re still up a creek with no boat because the only people who read his bile were you and your immediate family.
Privacy? There’s a big debate here, too, but again I must ask why. Why is it not possible for a newspaper to dig around in your dirt when “Buttcrack775483” can go through your bins and your knicker drawer — even your stools, if it takes his fancy — and describe exactly what he finds on his blog, knowing that he will get away with it.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that you should not be allowed to laugh about the vastness of my stomach. Within certain bounds of reason, you should be entitled to say pretty much what you like about whomsoever you like. But only if you do so in full view.
In short, we need to get rid of web anonymity. And if there’s one recommendation I’d make to newspapers, it is this. Only accept readers’ comments if they are prepared to divulge their name and address. That way, we could choose to visit the person who thinks it’s hilarious to make fun of Rebecca Adlington. And give him a comedy nose as well.