Miami, Monday, and one of the big stories on the US networks is the disappearance of Oprah Winfrey from the Obama campaign trail, where once she was a highly visible platform-booster.

The back story has been that Winfrey and associates have taken fright at the flak that her pro-Obama stance has been attracting from fans on her website, oprah.com. “Hundreds” of angry e-mailers have followed up an original posting from a woman who accused Winfrey of having put race before gender and therefore of being a traitor to women. The tone of these postings ranges from regretful, through reproachful to vituperative. And although most observers here expect Winfrey to re-enter the campaign, the e-mails have, at the very least, caused her to pause for a moment.

Such an important moment of doubt, based, as it seems to be, on what folk write on the internet, comes exactly a decade after the most celebrated blogger in US politics then, Matt Drudge, broke the Monica Lewinsky story. Since then, and in an accelerated way in Britain over the past couple of years, I have sensed a mixture of doubt, defiance and weird deference when it comes to the way that media people, politicians and public institutions treat what emerges from cyberspace. We variously attempt to grasp it all, to use it, to hold it back, to defeat it, to colonise it. We hold online polls, open ourselves to comments, count the hits on our sites and, here at The Times, even provide for our journalists a ranking of the key words used by readers searching the online site.

For the most part it is sensible for organisations such as the BBC or newspapers to use and develop new communications technology. The problem lies not in the use or the development of the internet, but in evaluating what it really is, and in assessing its ethics and etiquettes.

A few weeks ago someone sent me a link to the website belonging to Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Last year I found myself debating against him at Trinity College, Dublin, on the Middle East. Though I didn't agree with him on much and wondered why he was wearing a kilt, I found him pleasant enough, especially when, afterwards, he rather disarmingly admitted that he didn't know a lot about Israel, about which he'd just been pontificating.

So to his site, where Mr Murray was highly critical of me being allowed by the BBC to interview Tony Blair last year on the basis that I was “a leading neocon, pro-war, pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim propagandist”. But if I was slightly saddened to see Mr Murray seduced by the adjectival Pavlovianism of the anti-war movement, I was staggered by what he said about me personally, describing me as “that sleazy fat neo-con slob Aaronovitch - someone should buy that man a picture for his attic”. Of course, I am too fat; “neocon” is the new all-purpose political accusation; though scrupulously clean, I occasionally underdress - and if Mr Murray feels so obviously superior in physical aesthetics, then I am sure The Times can provide the reader with photographs of us both to enable a comparison.

But my point is that Craig Murray - until recently a diplomat employed by the Foreign Office - certainly didn't give vent to this stuff to my face when he had the opportunity, nor, I think, would he ever have said anything so abusive when being interviewed on radio or television or in writing for a newspaper. It could only have been done in the particular atmosphere of the web.

Actually it got worse. Mr Murray's readers then added comments in which I was further accused, along with others, of being a “Jewish racist of the deepest and most awful sort” and of possessing a “Weltanschauung of Jewish supremacy”. Mr Murray's response was “Well, yes up to a point”, before reminding the more excitable and probably libellous posters that they shouldn't forget that were some good Jews too.

Now suppose, that I were to write an article for this paper in which I began by telling readers that Craig Murray was not just wrong and oddly ill-informed, but that he was also - let's say - a chinless, adulterous, anti-Semitic clown whose vanity and incontinence had led to him damaging those very causes that he claimed to care for so much. My editors wouldn't have stood for it, and the readers would have thought less of me for it. Yet in several of the more lionised and supposedly political websites that influence some of our journalists, this is exactly the level of debate.

One reason for this libellous intemperance is the odd anonymity conferred by the internet, and the peculiar sense of indemnity it seems to offer. It is almost as if Mr Murray doesn't quite realise that his abusiveness will be seen as abuse. It's a psychology that means that we should be careful before we assume that we know what this or that internet eruption actually signifies.

Take a recent Times Online presidential primaries poll. On the Democrat side Barack Obama won fairly handsomely. This might correlate to internet demographics, since younger voters tend towards the Illinois senator. But for the Republicans, Ron Paul, the relatively unknown extreme libertarian, got 55 per cent in the poll. And indeed, Mr Paul has a large internet footprint, but when it comes to actual votes in New Hampshire, for example, he was way down the field with 8 per cent.

Such an anomalous result, unsurprisingly, meant there was an immediate suspicion of a “click-in” campaign by the Paulites, and in the same way some in the US believe that the Clinton camp somehow orchestrated the Winfrey deluge. Both are possible, but both miss the point about self-selection under conditions of anonymity. It is simply the case that when it comes to the internet, we don't know what the results of polls mean in terms of their wider significance. We don't know who is voting or why, and we can't know how representative they are. Winfrey has millions of viewers, as compared with the hundreds who posted to criticise her. And what can we do with the information that, over the weekend, the 73rd, 74th and 75th most searched for words on the Times website were, in reverse order, “Nissan qashqai”, “matt skelton” and “man boobs”?.

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