The horrible knife-murders of those very young children at a dance class in Stockport the other day, and the violent riots that followed them there and elsewhere, the latter exploited if not directly incited by the far Right, are deeply depressing. I’d hoped that with the election in Britain of a superficially less ‘nasty’ new government a month ago this sort of thing would have begun to die down. Not a bit of it – yet. But then the grievances behind the rioting, real and imagined, and the hatreds that have been stoked by people like Farage over the last fourteen years of Conservative rule, are too ingrained to be eliminated by a few million crosses on ballot papers. They run too deep and wide. Labour needs time.

One of the (many) villains of this piece identified currently is (or are) the ‘social media’: internet-enabled discussion and propaganda platforms owned by rich millionaires but open to everyone, and hardly policed at all, it seems, by any kind of moderating authority. It’s the social media which has been disseminating most of the lies that are used to justify the attacks that have been launched against mosques, the police, and more indiscriminately; on the grounds that the knife-murderer is a refugee, even one of the small-boat Channel-crossing asylum seekers that Farage has particularly in his sights, and a Moslem: none of which appears to be true. Millions of people soak up these lies; with the results we’ve just seen, and may be repeated later. Many young men apparently just love having an excuse to smash things up. (That – toxic masculinity – is another area that needs to be explored if we are to get to the bottom of the Southport shenanigans.)

I’ve nothing useful to contribute to the discussion on this, apart from one idea – and that not a terribly original one. A key feature of the social media is that people’s contributions to it are allowed to be either anonymous, or pseudonymous (written over pen names). The arguments from principle for this are that it encourages ‘free speech’, which might be cramped if you have to attach your name to everything you write; and so attracts more people to offer their opinions, which makes it more ‘democratic’. These were the points that were put to me when, ten or a dozen years ago, I first objected to this practice either on the LRB blog, or on my own blogsite in its early days. (I’ve searched back for this particular post, but can’t find it now.) I remember that I made a good case there for outlawing ‘anonymous’ posts altogether, except in certain specific and narrow circumstances, like ‘whistle-blowing’, or where it might lose one one’s job. Otherwise anonymous blogs, tweets and the like should be regarded like anonymous letters usually are; in other words, as a mark of sheer cowardice, absolving the perpetrators from all accountability for their actions and views.