Web spies know where you live

Generally, they make comments which – at best – should be confined to a drinking session down the pub with a few mates.

Sometimes they deliberately target someone in the news with vile and abusive rants.

Occasionally they simply reveal their own immense stupidity for all the world to see.

Often, though, they make their comments in the full knowledge they can be identified but they don't seem to think about the consequences.

For some reason they think that doing this via their mobile phone or sitting in their smelly bedroom at their computer means nobody knows who they are or what they're up to.

Of course, mostly they're talking to themselves and a handful of 'friends' or 'followers'.

Unfortunately if you make a remark that is particularly stupid, appalling, idiotic or rude, it can spread round the internet – and around the world – in moments.

Various UKIP candidates have fallen foul of this after issuing various nonsensical or racist comments on Facebook and Twitter.

As if to prove this is not confined to the insurgents, mainstream parties have fallen foul of the curse of Facebook as well.

Take Carl Husted, a Conservative candidate at the Wolverhampton Council elections.

He posted Facebook comments back in 2012 about a video of thugs beating up a pensioner.

He said: "Anyone else want to follow me out of Wolverhampton? The disproportionate number of scum to regular people is now such that they should be abandoned and left to kill one another while the decent people move somewhere nicer. Like Sudan or Syria."

While we might share Mr Husted's anger at an attack on a pensioner, it's not very clever to insult your potential constituents.

Mr Husted says: 'Anyone with a double digit IQ would understand it (the Facebook status) as hyperbole or ironic.'

Yes but these brief statements on the internet don't allow for any subtlety, let alone sensible discussion. They can – and will – be taken down and used as evidence against you by your opponents.

It's possible to debate the pros and cons of any subject in a sensible, measured and respectful way.

But not on Twitter, where your comments are limited to 140 characters, or on Facebook.

Even if you use social media sensibly, you can be swamped by torrents of abuse. Social media cuts out the possibility of intelligent disagreement and friendly argument.

It's not just politicians who get it wrong. Indeed, most of them employ people just to Twitter for them as do most celebrities.

This creates the illusion they're talking directly to us, it ensures they never see the abuse they get and, best of all, it means they can escape responsibility if it all goes horribly wrong.

Most people don't have the resources to employ their own Twitterer-in-Chief. So they go it alone and make twits of themselves.

Consider the 20-year-old Blackpool beautician Gemma Worrall. The poor girl was worried about the situation in the Ukraine and felt the need to let the rest of us know. She wrote: 'If barraco barner is our president, why is he getting involved with Russia, scary.'

If she'd made this comment while she was doing a customer's nails it wouldn't have mattered. Alas, it was twice round the world before she realised what a fool she'd made of herself.

A rude remark might get you a punch on the nose down the pub. On social media it can land you in prison.

During the 2011 riots, Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, separately created Facebook pages aimed at spreading unrest. They may well have been shocked to discover it cost them four years in jail.

Even worse, social media has spawned 'trolls' – unfortunates whose sad little lives lead them to pour their bile over anything and anyone.

When Stephen Sutton, who has incurable bowel cancer yet has raised millions for charity, was allowed home from hospital, someone Tweeted ex-footballer Stan Collymore saying: "Stan. That kid you raised £1,000s for left hospital – how'd that happen? Lots feel duped."

Stephen, from Burntwood, responded in a dignified way: 'Sorry to disappoint you! So you know, I still have my cancer and it's incurable, if that makes you feel less 'duped' x'.

After the terrible murder of teacher Ann Maguire, Twitter troll Robert Riley posted sick comments about her. He's now pleaded guilty to sending 'grossly offensive, abusive or malicious messages' and had to be kept in a police cell for his own safety.

What were these people thinking when they posted these things?

Once, such missives would have been written in green ink and sent via the Royal Mail. It would have been hard to discover where the letter came from.

The internet has created a whole new world for nutters, racists and scumbags.

What they forget, though, is that nothing on the internet is anonymous. They – GCHQ, the police, Google – know where you live.

By Nigel Hastilow