This week’s column is going to need a bit of imagination on your part, readers, so I apologise in advance if you’re battling a Christmas party hangover. Let’s pretend we live in a world governed by the rules and regulations of social media.

You’re a woman, and you’re out in a restaurant with a couple of friends having a pleasant dinner and a tipple. The conversation moves onto topical issues, and you happen to opine that you’re a little peeved about women earning less than men, and you point out that equality has a long way to go.

Suddenly, all the men in the restaurant turn around. You could hear a pin drop as their faces crumple and turn red with rage. They leap from their seats, racing towards you with their fingers wagging, screaming about your stupidity. You’re ruining their dinner with your whining, they tell you, and you really ought to keep your voice down if you expect to frequent such an establishment. A few even mention how much they want to stab you.

You beg staff to get the manager as men surround you, shouting. He appears, and recommends that you file a written complaint, but he explains that the restaurant has a policy of not intervening when customers exercise their right to free speech.

So you leave, hastily. You’re shaken and angry. So angry, in fact, that you decide to stop by the police station on the way home and tell them that some strange men want to stab you. The police politely explain that there’s really nothing they can do because they can’t request the CCTV from the restaurant to identify the men. They don’t have the powers. It’s not in their jurisdiction.

Frightened and confused, you decide to head home and curl up in the safety of isolation. You throw yourself down on the couch, and your 13-year-old daughter comes in for a chat before bedtime.

She’s been having a bad experience, your daughter. Some of the kids at school have been giving her a hard time recently. But it doesn’t stop at school, the kids follow her home and sit outside her bedroom window, taunting her, humiliating her. She can’t escape them. You’ve spoken to the school, you’ve spoken to the police, but they told you that kids will be kids and you must protect their freedom of expression.

However, your daughter tells you that things are looking up. She tells you she thinks she has a boyfriend. You both cosy up on the couch and you ask her what he’s like. He’s 50, she tells you. She met him at a party. It was a teen dating party, but most of the males there were older men. They don’t seem to mind that she’s 13.

She did think it was a bit weird, but the party hosts said it wasn’t an issue for them. As long as people pay to get in, they’re not that fussed about what happens at the party. The police try to shut these parties down, but there’s so many, they’re so widespread. And anyway, you can’t stand in the way of free speech.

You’re flummoxed. You feel defeated. Everywhere you turn, you’re told that someone else’s freedom must be protected. It doesn’t seem to matter that society is protecting the rights of abusive, predatory people to run riot, bullying and violently harming law-abiding members of the public.

This little picture, readers, is what social media is becoming. And don’t just take my word for it. Last week, a former senior Facebook executive became the latest person to go public with his fears about social media. At a recent event, Chamath Palihapitiya said he felt “tremendous guilt” over technology that was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”.

It follows on from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams apologising earlier this year for the platform’s role in the rise of Donald Trump, and admitting that he didn’t see the dark side of social media coming. He naively believed that people would use mass communication and information sharing for good purposes.

The truth is, women are routinely targeted with hate online. Children use technology to mercilessly bully each other, and paedophiles easily target young people on social networks which give them an incredible amount of information about their targets.

And time and time again, the social networks wash their hands of responsibility and law enforcement is thwarted by a lack of cooperation from tech giants and boundaries of international jurisdiction.

This isn’t good enough. We need to heed the words of Chamath Palihapitiya and Evan Williams. It is essential that we demand social responsibility from our social network masters.