Saddened by the vile menace created by anti-social media

Say this for social media: they serve as a handy reminder of just how unpleasant the species can be. Unprompted, anonymously, seeking no excuse and intending only harm: the worst settle on Twitter much as flies settle on something you wouldn't want to step in.

For many of them, those few characters represent the outer limits of eloquence. They empty their tiny minds into the space allowed and leave everyone else to wonder what became of basic education, never mind social progress. Challenged, they redouble their efforts to insult and injure. Sometimes they claim the right to free speech.

Fans of Twitter are liable to say, of course, that these observations are a misrepresentation. They have a point, up to a point. Most of those 200m users are keeping up with friends, or with the news, or with the activities of people they admire. Sometimes the jokes that fly around are funny – Twitter is a stern editor – and billions of tweets are civilised.

If you are idealistic about these things, you could even argue that Twitter has changed the balance of power in human affairs. It has given a voice to a lot of people. It has improved communications and therefore (in theory) understanding. It has certainly allowed people to organise around issues of common interest.

But why so many creeps? Or rather, why have so many creeps who wouldn't otherwise open their traps in public found Twitter an ideal platform for any type of verbal violence you could imagine? Some have come up with statements you would not easily imagine. Yet they feel no compunction in broadcasting direct from the cesspool to the world. How come?

Caroline Criado-Perez has had plenty of time to wonder about that. All she did was campaign to have the Bank of England put the image of a woman on at least one of its notes. Her victory, as fine an example of official heritage thinking as anyone could contrive, was the promise that Jane Austen would get the nod in two or three years. Ms Criado-Perez would not claim, I think, that her achievement was at the cutting edge of radical feminism.

And what if it had been? Would that have been "asking for" the kind of treatment the freelance journalist received from vicious and (of course) anonymous types thanks to Twitter? As it was, astoundingly, a polite campaign earned her a barrage of death threats and rape threats. A 21-year-old man has been arrested and bailed. Ms Criado-Perez reported the matter to Twitter and received, she says, no help. She went to the police. The Labour MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, gave her support to the journal­ist and also demanded action from the authorities. She got the same treat­ment, the same threats. The attacks on her would be filmed, the MP was told, and placed – where else? – on the internet.

All of this because of Jane Austen. The long-gone novelist is worth mentioning only because you are left wondering about the reaction Ms Criado-Perez would have received if her campaign had involved something more important. But she, Ms Creasy and many others have identified exactly what has been going on. The ostensible issue is of passing importance. The point of this malevolent abuse is simply to shut women up.

So the wonder of the age, the last word in modernity, is put to the service of ancient barbarisms. A medium that will one day break down all social barriers, if you believe evangelists, is harnessed to maintain the oldest iniquity of them all. Meanwhile, there is the reminder that some men haven't changed in the slightest. The least you can say about those who set out to make life hellish for Ms Criado-Perez is that they don't see much wrong with rape.

It might be that the internet in all its forms simply tells us the truth about humanity. Perhaps it simply reveals truths that most of us would rather not acknowledge. There is a sense, nevertheless, that the technology is both amplifying and encouraging behaviour that once lurked in the shadows. Hence David Cameron's inept attempts to "do something" about on-line pornography. Hence the fact that so many recoil from what passes for debate – on any subject you could name – in the digital world.

Grant all the virtues, social, educational, artistic or economic of the net. Accept the proposition (if you must) that all communication is worthwhile. Tell me that Twitter enables revolutions among the downtrodden (then ask what became of the Arab Spring). That can't disguise the resemblance, intermittent or not, between social media and the mob. It also doesn't explain what becomes of outwardly ordinary people when anonymity is available.

For many, an assumed name online might count as a liberating alternative persona. A few – though this excuse tends to be exaggerated – might escape trouble at work or elsewhere because of an invented moniker. For the most brutish and vindictive of so-called trolls, anonymity is the perfect disguise for behaviour they wouldn't otherwise dare risk.

Then they claim the right to free speech. In some quarters even the demand that Ms Criado-Perez's attackers must be hunted down has been met with the claim that the internet's inalienable liberties would then be threatened. Yet her right to free speech was being denied – this was the whole idea – by vile abuse. Some pieces of human garbage wanted to shut her up, yet reality's sanctions are somehow "inappropriate" for the digital world.

One upshot has been a demand for Twitter to exercise more control. This overlooks a problem: the service is not supposed to be controlled. Some say an on-screen "report abuse" button would do the trick. Forgotten is a simple fact. In order to report a disgustingly abusive message you have to have read the thing first. If you succeed in having your attacker banned, meanwhile, he will simply invent another anonymous name.

It might be that digital wonders are coarsening the human spirit, that Babel has reduced us all, paradoxically, to incoherent howling. The truth is that there is no way of knowing. It might equally be the case that as always humanity gets what humanity deserves, with better disguises and the malign ability to reach into every home.

Meanwhile, governments and their spooks prowl around in this parallel world, seeing all, hearing all, and wondering how it can best be controlled and exploited. That truth has done no harm at all to business at Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest. So put the consequences of the fact into 140 characters.