An American Lion

This herd can stomp on your garden, sir

It's been my experience that rude behavior on Twitter is swiftly punished. That's what that "block" option is there for--to effectively block the behavior of others that is anti-social. If you're getting on Twitter to screech at people and fight, you can count on losing your account within hours--it's really that good at effectively destroying the "trollery" of others. Twitter has seen various examples of this, and it really boils down to children getting on there to curse at adults, nothing more.

Last week, a 're-tweet' called for help in defending @RealScottBaio from a bit of trollery, so I added my two cents worth:

@xryk It's been my experience that @RealScottBaio is an upstanding gentleman, so please allow me to formally block you for being a #jackass

@Cynicor You're a scumbag. You're the worst kind of troll there is--no ethics or values.

I took my shots, and I blocked the users that were behaving like trolls, and then I let it go. It's really that simple. When someone is being a jackass, you hit them and block them and go about your business. Always maintain your composure, where possible. Mr. Baio was attacked by a man who used various documents to publish Baio's mother's home address--how sickening is that? I added my parts because I wished to defend a member of the community. I had my say, and it was freely offered. Mr. Baio does not need to be defended, but he was defended by a community enforcing standards of conduct. That's fair to me.

In Britain, a tweet got a man into trouble when he called Stephen Fry "boring." The abuse leveled at him by the larger community was virulent and cutting. This is because Mr. Fry has a massive "herd" of followers while Mr. Baio has himself around 3,500.

And the matter would have rested there, probably, if not for the fact that Mr. Fry, a much-loved figure who has spoken openly about his crippling depression and about being bipolar, has more than 934,000 followers and is one of the most widely read Twitter users in Britain. His much-publicized tweetsin February, about being stuck in an elevator for 45 minutes, did as much to raise Twitter’s profile here as the photograph Ashton Kutcher posted on Twitter of the rear end of his wife, Demi Moore, did two months later.

When Mr. Fry’s followers heard of his distress, they tended to do two things: offer their support and criticize his perceived antagonist. And suddenly Richard from Birmingham, who says on his Twitter profile that he writes “one-line movie reviews, and more,” found himself the target of a stream of unpleasant, even abusive, tweets. Among the most upsetting, to him at least, were those from the well-known British actor and comedian Alan Davies. Mr. Davies, who is a friend of Mr. Fry’s and has more than 104,000 Twitter followers, called Richard a “moron,” and worse.

The story was then picked up by a variety of news outlets, including the BBC and The Sunday Times.

The ganging up on Twitter against people who have somehow run afoul of others has become increasingly common here. The same thing happened last month when the journalist Jan Moir wrote a column in The Daily Mail criticizing the lifestyle of Stephen Gately, a gay member of the pop band Boyzone who was found dead at 33 in his vacation apartment in Majorca.

Many people — including Mr. Fry — believed that the article had homophobic undertones, and said so on Twitter, where Ms. Moir then became one of the topics of hate du jour. An organized campaign helped ensure that her article led to about 23,000 formal complaints to the Press Complaints Commission of Britain.

I've already covered that story, and while I decry any kind of herd mentality in social networking, I do note that sometimes the herd gets it right.

Is Fry boring? That's not my call to make. If I were to say it, I would offer some evidence and back it up. What would that prove or accomplish? If he were to release something that especially offended me, I would criticize it, and try to do so fairly. Or I would defend him from such criticism. That's all done within the greater boundaries of blogging and civil discourse. I wouldn't use a picture of him being used to give an enema to an elephant--that would go too far, plus, that would take several hours of fooling with Photoshop, and I'm not inclined.

I wouldn't run from a screaming mob if I did take an exception to his work. I never have, and I never will. I do think that people who love his work and admire him can sometimes go too far--this is called a fanboy mentality. I would add, though, that it takes a lot to gin up the outrage of fanboys. Putting the lid back on that boiling pot is next to impossible. No one should incite the herd to attack. In Fry's case, I think it evolved more from how wrong people perceived the criticism to be. That's all well and good when you only have a few thousand followers. When you have nearly a million, that herd can stampede on a moment's notice. Even if only a few hundred people become actively engaged in hurling insults, it can feel like a tidal wave.

Sometimes, the self-regulating social community can fairly and quickly enforce a behavioral standard that is missing in much of our interaction. Any idiot can go on any blog, and I know this because I've done this many, many times, and unleash a string of invective and hurl insults at someone just because they're weird or wrong. This anti-social behavior sometimes find a way to get corrected fast when a community of people enforces a certain standard. Is that a good thing? Or is it a tool for wannabe-Fascists? Well, that depends on the herd, doesn't it?