During my spell of illness I have spent a long time online, especially Twitter, and I have noticed a lot more heated "tweets" with people throwing really personal insults about because of the most trivial things. I had a few insults thrown at me recently just because I said that Madonna's "MDNA" album "didn't do it for me." Within seconds I was branded a "hater" who "had no entitlement to an opinion" from obsessive Madonna "trolls." I wouldn't mind so much but I'm a huge Madonna fan so I don't really appreciate being branded a "hater" [what a stupid word anyway!] I've had it lucky though as some people have been told to "Die, Die, DIE!" by grown up Lady GaGa fans who fail to comprehend that people like other female singers.

Last week Twitter acknowledged that the amount of "hate speech" on their site needed to be dealt with:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tech/news/a390471/twitter-pledges-to-clamp-down-on-abuse.html Twitter has pledged to clamp down on abuse on the microblogging website. Chief executive Dick Costolo described some of the recent comments he found as "horrifying", and vowed to introduce new measures to tackle so-called "hate speech". The news follows reports of racist abuse directed towards members of the England football team following last weekend's Euro 2012 exit. Ashley Cole and Ashley Young were targeted after the defeat to Italy, prompting a police investigation. Costolo went on to say that any action taken to curb such behaviour will not compromise freedom of speech on the social network. "The reason we want to allow pseudonyms is there are lots of places in the world where it's the only way you'd be able to speak freely," he told the Financial Times. "The flip side of that is it also emboldens these trolls... How do you make sure you are both emboldening people to speak politically but making it okay to be on the platform and not endure all this hate speech? It's very frustrating." Earlier this week, Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati revealed that she was forced to quit Twitter over "violent, vitriolic" racist abuse.

The sad fact of the matter is that there are nasty people about with hateful opinions. Twitter gives them a mouth peace where they can hide behind a keyboard with virtually no recrimination. The chances are that these people would not dream of saying such things in "real life." Twitter though does have many positive things going for it too.

The social network tool played a massive part in last year's Arab Spring:

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/facebook-and-twitter-key-to-arab-spring-uprisings-report

I have also managed to meet many interesting people online who I never would have come in contact with anywhere else. Many news stories also break on Twitter before hitting the main news sites [as well as a few fake ones!] and the site is extremely addictive!

Twitter is what you make of it, the "block" feature is very useful if you don't want to be seeing all the "haters" and if your follow the right people [*cough* @bluejovanka and @cool_manchester] it is also a lot of fun. I don't think I'll be leaving Twitter in near future. Facebook though, that's a completely different story....