1st November 2020

 As vulnerable over 70s, the new lockdown for us is more of the same: stay home, supermarket delivery, daily walk around the park and hours spent online. But there’s the rub. Social media’s gone berserk, giving bored people an outlet for all their simmering rage. Originally, the internet was built so you could find out where Robert Redford was born, how to lay kitchen tiles or find out the symptoms of whichever deadly disease you were surely incubating. Unfortunately, this soon morphed into the more ‘deadly’ social media disease of spouting anonymous bigotry, hate, racism and targetted diatribes against politicians on the ‘wrong’ side. People felt safe under their invisibility, knowing that the only personal come back was advert targetting. And, because FB tends to select only the posts from your own select group, people were convinced that the majority agreed with their own narrow views. Whilst we can’t do anything about the current lockdown, it’s time social media removed the cloak of anonymity to prevent all this pent-up rage spilling out onto our outlawed streets.