It's not every day that I find myself rooting for Frank Lampard or indeed any man who pulls on shiny blue shorts and plays for that blingy cash emporium known as Chelsea FC. But credit where it's due. What Lampard did a few days ago took more balls than taking a penalty kick in a World Cup final with an inguinal hernia. He called a London radio station where the subject of that day's phone-in was his own fractured private life and, for 11 electrifying minutes, gave the show's host the hairdryer treatment.

Lampard is separated from his fiancée, Elen Rives, and listeners had been invited to consider whether he was “scum” because she is living in a flat with their two young daughters while he swans around the £8 million family home.

So distressed was Lampard that he bared his soul to reveal that he is in the process of buying them a new house, that Rives had chosen to leave him, that his children stay with him half the week, that his relationship had failed partly owing to his grief over his dead mother and that this was the first anniversary of her death, so great timing, thanks. Like most agitators confronted, the show's host apologised. But this didn't stop people ringing in to give Lampard more stick, or West Ham fans from taunting “Fat Frank” from the terraces with chants of “You've let your children down”.

Lampard deserves respect for biting back. But that abuse was nothing. Wait until he sees what people inevitably will have written about him online. Because it's here that things get really nasty.

Few beasts are more merciless than the great British public when snarling behind the petticoat of anonymity. As long as they're identified as merely “Ron from Sussex”, or some silly pseudonym, the venom flows like cheap cider.

The internet is wonderful for many things, but it's also a stinking spittoon for the spewing of impetuous human bile. What people post on websites about others whom they do not know and will never meet, often for the most trifling reasons, leaves you opening and closing your mouth like a disbelieving trout.

You think Susan Boyle missed a couple of notes on Britain's Got Talent? You're a stupid moron who deserves to get cancer. You believe in bringing back grammar schools? You're a fascist.

I'm not exaggerating that much. You don't have to be a millionaire footballer to be verbally lynched by the public any more. You just have to say or do something with which they don't agree. Then you are accused of having a face that could curdle milk and a predilection for having romance with sheep.

You'll no doubt think this a bit rich coming from a journalist who spouts opinions for money. Well, yes, but at least we put our names to what we write. Our unlovely photographs sit atop the page, we have to qualify statements, check facts, our lawyers monitor what we write and beat us with a wet slipper if we mess up. Many readers post delightful, intelligent comments (to which I say “gawd bless you - will you take a cheque?”) but others could write that I'm a gun-running paedophile who eats live kittens and there's little I could do about it.

This is a culture in which everyone is urged to “have their say”; act as judge and jury. We decide the fate of reality-show contestants, bellow from the audience at dysfunctionals, the internet throbs to our righteous rants on anything from fathers aged 13 to Ulrika's boob job. “Having your say” is a global pandemic and it isn't always edifying. As one commentator said this week, it is “the Jeremy Kyle audience with its finger on the send button”.

If you doubt it think back to when Kate McCann was questioned by police over Madeleine's disappearance. The invective disgorged upon her and her husband via internet comment sites surely bottomed the pit of human vileness. Kate McCann was capable of great evil because she had the temerity to “change her earrings”. The couple's local newspaper website had to shut, so vicious were some remarks.

Though some newspapers deported themselves badly over that story (for which they were censured), it was the public that raised the bar on abominable behaviour. This weekend marks the second anniversary of Madeleine's vanishing and the witch-burners will no doubt surface again - cowering behind their pen-names. The coward, Goethe said, threatens when he is safe.

New technology is eroding human empathy and blunting social inhibitions. Hunched over their computers, remote and anonymous, people write things that they'd never dream of saying in “real” life. We have evolved to read the feedback from our interlocutor's body language and adjust accordingly. But in cyberspace we are desensitised.

A journalist friend recently wrote about a bureaucratic nightmare that he had experienced. A reader replied with a repulsive, expletive-ridden effusion of bile. By chance he also left his phone number, so my friend rang him. “I'm the person you just character assassinated,” he said. The man, whiny-voiced and gobsmacked, instantly morphed into Uriah Heep and began an obsequious tribute to my friend's fine upstandingness as a journalist. Funny, that.

Anonymity is vital for people to disseminate information in the public interest without fear of censure. If you're a blogger writing about certain government dictatorships, for instance, anonymity helps if you don't like being tortured. But what about the blogger who wrote that the Vogue model Liskula Cohen was a “a psychotic, whoring, still-going-to-clubs-at-her-age, skank”. Is it OK to just get away with that? As the public joyfully piled into the kicking, Cohen took Google to court in an attempt to unmask the author. “I guess because I'm a model, people feel they're allowed to hurt me,” she said. No, pet, they'll hurt anyone. Online, victims cease to be real.

Next time you're about to write something malicious on a website, ask yourself a question. Would you have the balls to say it to your target's face? If so, then put your name to it. If not, hold your chicken-hearted tongue and make a cup of tea instead.

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