By his own admission, it was a cold-blooded killing. When AA Gill described
last week how he shot a baboon while in Tanzania, he didn’t disguise his
motive. He shot it to see what it would feel like. “I know perfectly well
there is absolutely no excuse for this,” he wrote. “There is no mitigation.
Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard.”
Gill also noted: “Some people say it’s ill luck to kill a baboon.” In a modern
way it was. Online retribution was swift. Comments poured onto the
Timesonline website, and Twitter erupted with outrage. Most responses were
critical and many postings were too crude and abusive for publication in a
newspaper.
In some that were more restrained, Gill was described as “mental”,
“adolescent”, “worthless” and “obnoxious”. Someone using the online name
JD56GG wrote: “AA Gill, you superstar. How did it really feel killing this
innocent baboon?” Another warned: “News! AA Gill now wondering what a
killing spree might feel like.”
Not everyone was critical, however. One poster observed: “I’m glad AA Gill
killed a baboon, those things are scary”. Baboons are often regarded as
pests by farmers and they are culled or shot legally in various countries.
Some are even culled because their maverick habits pose a danger to other
baboons.
Nevertheless, through many of the comments ran an undercurrent of revenge. A
JonathanPyke tweeted: “Okay I admit it. I shot AA Gill to see what it would
be like to kill a dumb animal.” A Jpcooling took a similar view: “In order
to get an idea of what it would be like to kill a human, I am going to shoot
AA Gill.”
Another responder was more subtle: “If AA Gill wanted to experience pain of
death, all he needed to do was read one of his own books.” More
disturbingly, the Animal Liberation Front has now apparently declared Gill a
legitimate target. Gill was on the receiving end of a growing phenomenon:
the instant mob and their instant anger. Thanks to the web, social networks
and chatrooms, people’s responses to events and perceived offences can now
travel at light speed.
When the journalist Jan Moir recently questioned the circumstances surrounding
the death of Stephen Gately, the gay pop singer, it provoked an
international outcry. The Twitterati condemned Moir en masse and, thanks to
helpful links provided on the web, 22,000 people filed complaints to the
Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
Last week the comedian Dara O’Briain managed to entwine both Gill and Moir: “I
was going to get angry about AA Gill until I read excellent Jan Moir piece
about how baboons make questionable lifestyle choices.”
A similar outburst of Twitter-rage was prompted by the BBC’s decision to allow
Nick Griffin, the British National party leader, to appear on Question Time.
It spilled over into street violence.
The Twitter website — which allows users to write posts of up to 140
characters from computers or mobile phones — has become such a forum for
outcry and whingeing that BT has a dedicated team patrolling its pages.
Their job is to nip customer complaints in the bud. You might say that’s
helpful. Your phone breaks down, and you get quicker service moaning online
than phoning a call centre.
However, the surge in people power poses some more complex questions. Is it
simply giving readers and other consumers their say? Or might it turn into a
form of ill-considered mob fury?
For much of the past century deference to authority — and to a lesser extent
the media — prevailed, according to the historian Dominic Sandbrook. In an
essay last week called Trial by Fury, he argued that “what made the liberal
reforms of the 1960s possible was a climate of deference that has now
disappeared . . . Although \ encouraged letters, the idea that they might
post their articles in some public place for the masses to scribble
disparaging comments beneath would have struck them as ludicrous”.
Not any more. Readers and viewers are now used to and expect the right of
reply. At the same time, complaints to Ofcom, the media watchdog, are up
from 10,919 in 2004 to more than 25,000 in 2008. A similar trend is evident
at the PCC, which has seen complaints rise every year for the past five
years.
Stephen Abell, deputy director of the PCC, said: “That could be down to more
people reading newspapers online where you’re only one click away from the
PCC. It could also be down to people feeling they have much more of a right
to express their opinions and have them heard — to be treated as equals to
the media.”
In Abell’s view, the row about obscene comments made on BBC radio by Jonathan
Ross and Russell Brand was a turning point. The public outcry forced the BBC
to take disciplinary action. “The public saw that complaints actually cost
people their jobs,” Abell said.
There is, however, a fuzzy line between people power and mob rule. As
Sandbrook notes, if Britain had followed the will of the majority for the
past few decades, criminals would still be hanged and black and brown faces
would be rare.
One danger of Twitter-rage is that many people appear to learn of supposedly
offensive comments second-hand. The risks of misinterpretation were
reflected in some, presumably humorous, postings about Gill. One read: “So
AA Gill shot a balloon. So f****** what”. Another suggested he had shot a
buffoon, and another read: “I woke up really excited about the AA Gill
scandal. Then I realised I’d misread baboon as Bono”.
In the case of Moir, Daily Mail readers expressed their annoyance at first,
then, as the story spread on Twitter, complaints began to pour in based on
other Tweeters’ anger rather than any reading of Moir’s original article.
That also seemed to be the case with the comedian Richard Herring, who
observed Moir-style rage when a national newspaper journalist accused his
Edinburgh show, Hitler’s Moustache, of racism. Fans of Herring were so angry
that they bombarded The Guardian, which had carried the report, with
comments and e-mails. Facebook pages attacking the claims were also set up.
The outrage secured three rights of reply and grovelling features the
following week. Herring said: “There came a point where I actually started
to feel sorry for the journalist concerned. People were saying he’d done
far, far worse things than the reality — people who hadn’t bothered to read
the original piece — and there was this moral outrage overkill.”
One Radio 4 producer agrees that outrage is more infectious thanks to new
media. “Of course you get the ‘offence-
erati’, the professional complainers who love raging against the Today
programme.
“What’s harder to handle are the apparently ordinary members of the public who
all seem to have been in the same chatroom or reading the same Twitter site
because they flood in at the same time with almost word-for-word e-mails.
“Sometimes they’ve even got the same spelling mistakes, so it’s a case of
‘cut’n’rage’, and they’re often first-time complainers kneejerking to
something someone else has said.”
It’s a phenomenon other broadcasters recognise. “If you look at any chatroom —
especially on sites like Digital Spy or Facebook pages — there’s always
effectively the same post at some point,” an ITV duty officer said. “It
says, ‘Here’s the link to complain to Ofcom and here’s the link to complain
to the broadcaster’.”
Where is the instant reaction phenomenon leading? Alan Redman, a psychologist,
believes it’s volatile and unpredictable. “Traditional crowd theory says
that when groups of people gather together we, as social animals, have a
bandwagon feeling — we find that people agree with us, it amplifies our
views, we’re less likely to say things that disagree with the herd and we
act more readily,” he said. “The internet creates that same psychology but
faster, in larger numbers and with an instant effect.”
Redman sees a feedback loop growing between online and the traditional media,
with each reporting on the other until the size of the virtual crowd spreads
to hundreds of thousands — most of whom have no direct experience of the
cause of the group’s anger.
“In the old days, for a mob to riot, they needed to gather together in large
numbers and usually most of them had to have first-hand experience of the
events that enraged everyone,” he said. “That’s not even close to true any
more. People will take direct action online — sometimes simply because
everyone else is doing so.”
Nor is it always obvious what will cause outrage and what does not. Last
weekend tabloid newspapers expressed anger at a joke by Jimmy Carr about
wounded soldiers: “Say what you like about the servicemen amputees from Iraq
and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a ****ing good Paralympics team in
2012.”
Yet the Twitter mob merely shrugged. The majority of Carr-related Tweets and
Facebook postings supported the comedian, although one critic commented:
“It’s not funny, you’ve been to Headley Court, bad taste is not comedy and
an apology is due.”
That unpredictability has led even prominent users of Twitter to grow wary of
where it might lead. Last month Stephen Fry, who has about 900,000 followers
on Twitter, published an essay on his website called Poles, Politeness and
Politics in the Age of Twitter. In it he says that Twitter resembles the
riotous publishing freedom of the early 18th century when titles such as
Tatler and The Spectator were launched.
But he also seems to fear it unleashing monstrous forces: “This whole thing
has just grown up around me and I cannot help wondering if . . . I have
found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed by
friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the
other.”
He warned against the dangers of such campaigns being driven by the forces of
“religiosity and nationalism”. Yesterday he appeared to say he was quitting
Twitter because of its mob-like tendencies. He posted: “Think I may have to
give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well
it’s been fun”.
Amid the vitriol hurled at Gill last week, a fair number of respondents also
seemed to recognise the dangers of over-reaction. One Twitter poster asked
whether people had read to the end of his article. As a restaurant review,
Gill pointed out, several animals — not just a baboon — had died in its
making. True, he did not eat the baboon he killed, but one might argue that
if killing animals is so terrible, everyone should turn vegetarian.
Perhaps reflecting that view, one Twitterer posted: “No interest in picking
off a baboon, but would quite like to shoot all the self-righteous ninnies
squealing about AA Gill.”
The sharpest response, however, may have been struck by Graham Linehan,
creator of the television programmes Father Ted and The IT Crowd. “Put away
those pitchforks!” he advised the Twitter-mob. “I just find it funny. Orwell
fought fascists, Hemingway hunted lions, AA Gill shot a monkey. Sounds about
right.”
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