Vicious tweets exist on same continuum as protesting at politicians’ homes

What was your take on the protest last weekend outside Leo Varadkar’s house? Did you regard it as shameful, despicable and absolutely nothing to do with you?

If you find yourself one minute condemning the rabble outside the Tánaiste’s home – or if you did so previously when it happened at Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly’s or Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe’s – and the next minute, you’re joining the venomous, mocking and abusive internet pile-ons against politicians or public figures, you’re not entirely blameless.

You’re not outside anyone’s house shouting ugly insults, maybe; you’re in their pocket shouting at them instead. You’re armed with memes instead of placards. You are at the soft end of a toxic spectrum that starts with sliding into someone’s direct messages, and ends with screeching homophobic abuse at their front door.

Before you make a beeline for my DMs, I’m not equating online abuse to homophobic far-right rabbles. I am saying they exist on a continuum. Differences of opinion, heated debate, sharp-eyed analysis and public protests have always been vital parts of a functioning democracy. Politics needs an attentive, critical public and a robust opposition. But the nature of discourse has coarsened. Debate these days too often means a bitter attack on the individual. And unfortunately, this has happened at a time when technology ensures that for those on the receiving end, it’s more difficult to escape.

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I can remember when I first observed that 'I don't like your opinion' had morphed into an analysis of why the writer was a terrible/lazy/underserving/wholly stupid person

We have forgotten how to disagree. Somewhere in the last ten years, we began to operate on the presumption of total consensus; that if we are part of a tribe that agrees on this and this and this, then we must also align on that and the other. We must perform this agreement loudly, visibly and on demand. So if some ghastly outrage or just cause is unfolding anywhere in the digital sphere, we are compelled to immediately signal our dissent or allyship, lest our silence be mistaken for “wrongthink”. So we reply and retweet and heap on the pithy expressions of righteous indignation or enthusiastic endorsement. “Bad take,” we shout, when what we actually mean is “I don’t happen to agree”. This, of course, is an environment that lends itself perfectly to the pile-on – the digital-era equivalent of the pointy, shouty, pitchfork-bearing mob.

In her final column for the Guardian last weekend, Hadley Freeman wrote about how there has been a "shift from when readers merely disagreed with a column, to disagreeing and therefore assuming the columnist is A Bad Person". The replies to her on social media were so hilariously useful in proving her point that you'd have been forgiven for assuming they were satire.

Freeman wondered if Brexit was to blame, before concluding it started earlier. It's not just a British phenomenon either. I can remember precisely when I first observed that "I don't like your opinion" had morphed into an analysis of why the writer was a – take your pick – terrible/lazy/underserving/wholly stupid person or, in the case of female journalists, a sexually unattractive woman or a bad mother. It was a decade ago, when I was working on a nascent news website with a then small but vociferous audience. I would arrive alone in the office at 6am, fire up Facebook and brace myself for the comments. My heart would feel as though there was a wrench tightening on it. If I was to look back now, I'd probably find it all very mild.

Vitriol is the currency of the 'culture of suspicion', the language through which we signal our tribal identity in sport, in politics, on social issues

It isn't just politicians or journalists on the receiving end of our love affair with hate. Recently, GAA president Larry McCarthy talked about a "corrosive assault on civility", following an onslaught of abuse of Mayo players after the All-Ireland final. "Words matter, what one says matters, what one puts in the public domain matters," he said, astutely."It beggars belief that people who consider themselves supporters of a team would castigate members... in a crude and, in some cases, personal fashion."

He’s right – it does. That is to say it should. But it’s all so grimly predictable, nobody’s belief can truly be beggared anymore. These days, we live in what philosopher Onora O’Neill calls a “culture of suspicion”. Vitriol is the currency of that culture, the language through which we signal our tribal identity in sport, in politics, on social issues. We shouldn’t be surprised when it seeps out into the real world.

Political parties feed this culture by peddling bogus, simplistic us-versus-them narratives. In the final hours before last election, Fine Gael’s desperate “Big Sinn Féin turnout: Don’t let Sinn Féin in by staying at home” was exactly the kind of populist “mask slipping” its members accuse Sinn Féin of. Mary Lou McDonald rightly condemned the “homophobic, bigoted intimidation witnessed at the home of Leo Varadkar” as “outrageous and shameful”. But she and other Sinn Féin TDs are much quieter when articles critical of their party prompt an onslaught of vicious attacks on individual journalists.

Who is to blame? I posted a version of this question on social media and the answer, unsurprisingly, was journalists, generally, and opinion columnists, specifically. Politicians too. The social media platforms need to do more, as McCarthy suggested. They won’t, of course, because your vitriol is the fuel that keeps their juggernaut running. An angry audience is an emotionally engaged audience, is a lucrative audience.

In truth, the buck stops with all of us. If we’re disturbed by the sight of a far-right mob gathering outside Varadkar’s house, if we want to avoid the divisions seen in the UK over Brexit, if we’re worried about how young people will survive this vitriolic online world, then we need to start seeing all of these things as existing along a continuum that starts with a vicious, personalised tweet. No, they’re not the same. But they’re not totally disconnected either.