Daily Telegraph: Social media is a genuinely revolutionary form of communication that allows people to get close to public figures in a way that was previously unimaginable. When I was a teenager, if I wanted to contact a celebrity I’d have to write to their agent, or find out where they lived; today, as long as you’re a public figure on Twitter it’s impossible to avoid the public’s @ messages (until you block them) and this means receiving heat-of-the-moment thoughts that in previous times would have been quickly forgotten.

As the etiquette for social media has not quite been established, many people don’t yet know what is appropriate. Some people display on Twitter behaviour that seems wildly inappropriate for the public sphere, whether it’s conducting bitter feuds or displaying intimate details about their inner demons; at least five people on my timeline seem to be having public nervous breakdowns at any one time.

Other people think it’s appropriate to send random abuse to strangers, or to make bad taste jokes, which has led to some appalling overreactions by the authorities, who are similarly unsure how to behave. The Twitter joke trial of Paul Chambers is the most absurd example, although the jailing of Liam Stacey for posting unpleasant – but not threatening – comments was as bad (even if he was not as sympathetic a figure as Chambers). Similarly, there was the sending home of the Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou for retweeting some rather lame, slightly unpleasant racist jokes, which strikes me as a ridiculously cruel overreaction spurred by the moral panic de jour, years of training and hard work undone by a second’s silliness (in contrast, Michel Morganella, whose comments were pretty venomous, and against opponents at the Olympics itself, probably deserved his punishment).

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