Here's a New Year's resolution for those of us in political chattering classes.
In 2015, let's all stop misusing social media to traduce people we disagree with. It's become an obsession.
People in public life trawl the internet to find nasty things that have been said about them by some creep with a lap top. They then present this as a hate campaign against "poor me" organised by those nasty cybernats/unitrolls etc. (delete as applicable). It's tedious.
Social media is a great invention which democratises information and allows ordinary people to become directly involved in the national conversation. But like all forms of mass communication, it is wide open to abuse and misuse. It can become a playground for prejudice and bullying by social misfits who hide behind anonymous Twitter accounts and hound people they don't like.
Political parties now see Twitter and Facebook as a new territory to colonise. In the independence referendum campaign social media became a key weapon of the propaganda war, with tribes of intensely partisan nationalists and unionists exchanging dialectical blows day by day, hour by hour.
In 2015, expect more of the same, translated to the UK. All the parties are tooling up for a social media general election, with the big parties hiring key figures from Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign to advise them. Labour has reportedly signed up David Axelrod and the Tories Jim Messina.
The SNP, thanks to the Yes Campaign, has a head start here and they will be all over Twitter and Facebook in the New Year. The Christmas truce between unionists and nationalists is also likely to be short lived as they seek to turn the general election into a replay of the independence referendum.
Political organisations abuse social media in two main ways. First, they make claims that abusive remarks have been authorised by their opponents.Last June, Better Together's John McTernan claimed falsely that Yes Scotland had "coordinated" hate speak against JK Rowling. Secondly they set up so called "sock puppets", non-existent Twitter accounts which they use to promote their views, make abusive remarks about opponents, or themselves.
This is largely counter-productive. Some prominent social media supporters of Better Together became so obsessed with trying to smear the SNP and Yes campaign as Nazis that they damaged their own case. Alex Salmond is not a closet Mussolini, whatever you think of him.
To their credit, the Yes campaign made a point of not recycling abusive and often racist tweets, and only the most serious death threats and such like were referred to the police. The pro-Yes account @BritNatAbuseBot recorded 6,500 such remarks against prominent nationalists, Yes supporters and Scotland itself during the campaign. They're still there if anyone wants to look.
But why don't we all just agree not to look, or at any rate not to recycle it. For, some of the worst abuse of new media comes, I am afraid, from the old media. There is a school of journalism that now regards news gathering as spending an hour spinning through Twitter looking for offensive remarks about people in public life.
We saw this most egregiously during the referendum campaign when hardly a day went by without some story somewhere about the Yes campaign allegedly organising hate campaigns against unionist celebrities, the Labour MP Jim Murphy or against England itself.
Now I make no excuses for people who make offensive and inane remarks against politicians and public figures on the internet, as anyone reading this column will know. It is stupid and counter-productive. But we must get this in perspective.
Nowadays, any social inadequate with a broadband connection can enter the public realm and start pouring anonymous bile on prominent people. Trolls should not be given the oxygen of publicity - it only encourages them.
We cannot allow these people to pollute our politics. Newspaper editors need to exercise a self-denying ordinance against using the effluent that flows in the sewers of the internet to fill their news pages. We wouldn't report random abusive remarks in the pub as news, so why recycle it from the internet? Just say No.
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