Reflections on the online mob

Dogpiling on social media is now the norm. Empathy be damned.

I really never learn. Every few months or so, I get dogpiled on Twitter by one particular political group or another. The last couple of times, it got so bad I ended up trending. Oscar Wilde said that “there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. But as far as I’m aware he didn’t have a Twitter account.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean. Following an article I wrote last year outlining my reservations about the “Progress Pride” flag, I had days of trans activists calling me a “homophobe” and Christian fundamentalists calling me a “degenerate” and a “sodomite”. On other occasions, I’ve had left-wing activists smear me as “racist” for criticising Critical Race Theory, and I’ve had white nationalists raging against my vocal opposition to racism. I’ve had thousands of indistinguishable clones with pronouns in their bios declaring that I am a Nazi. I’ve even had one former friend write long posts on Facebook about how I’m part of a covert Communist organisation that controls the government. I suppose that’s marginally more feasible than being a homophobic sodomite.    

One particularly memorable pile-on took place when a cluster of angry Twitter users starting imagining that I opposed their petition for a third series of a gay pirate television show called Our Flag Means Death. I had never heard of the show, and I still haven’t seen it, but these strangers were adamant that I was somehow opposed to its continuation. This pile-on was genuinely surreal, and it was quite amusing to be bombarded for most of the day with furious messages accompanied with jolly roger emojis. 

It just goes to show that the versions of Andrew Doyle that exist in the heads of Twitter users are wide and varied, and often contradictory. If only I were that complex. Actually, my views are relatively uncontroversial, and I’m not by nature combative or provocative. It would never occur to me to post abuse online about a total stranger, which is perhaps why I find it so interesting when I’m on the receiving end of it. But this instinct for curiosity is, of course, self-destructive. Instead of putting down my phone, I read every comment. I am transfixed by mass displays of hostility and the capacity of human beings to dispense with empathy when gathered in mobs. If an angry horde were to come to my house with torches and pitchforks, I’d be too fascinated to flee.

And when it’s coming from supposed “allies”, it’s more fascinating than ever. That’s why the most recent pile-on from gender-critical feminists – those whose cause I wholeheartedly support – was the most troubling. I won’t go into the details here, but if you’re interested in why all this occurred, you can check out this article I wrote about it for UnHerd.

Social media dogpiling, like all forms of collective hysteria, is often messy and difficult to elucidate. There is no clear narrative, but rather multiple threads featuring both firebrands and peacemakers, a bewildering cacophony of voices shouting over each other, seizing on any misspoken phrase and amplifying it for a fresh wave of invective and bile. Twitter is a wilderness of tigers at the best of times, but to be the focus of this kind of onslaught is quite confounding. 

I’ve been thinking about why internet pile-ons have such a psychologically destabilising effect. I don’t even think it’s the overt abuse, although that of course is a significant aspect. I suspect the reason why so many people who have been the subject of co-ordinated online attacks suffer from mental health problems as a result is due to the sensation of being misrepresented on a grand scale, with no possibility of redress. We all have an innate aversion to injustice, and trying to reason with an advancing horde online is rather like attempting to persuade the tide to retreat. 

Let me see if I can offer a specific example from my own experience. In this most recent dogpile, I noticed that many of the most vociferous complaints could be traced back to a single tweet. I had pointed out that I only use pronouns to denote biological sex, because I simply do not believe in such a thing as “gender identity”. I also admitted that in the past I had referred to trans-identifying friends with the pronouns and names of their choice. 

This stirred a great deal of ire in and of itself, all of which I accepted and understood. As I said at the time, I could very well be wrong about this and am certainly open to persuasion. But one Twitter user decided instead to accuse me of adhering to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, the very ideology that I have been openly criticising and exposing over the past few years on television, radio, public debates and in my articles and books. It would be like attacking Santa Claus for being anti-Christmas. 

In response, I had said that to mischaracterise my position so wildly was “extreme”. My point was made with utmost clarity (I read it back many times to be sure), but it was decided by a number of users that I was suggesting that feminists who refuse to use “preferred pronouns” were “extremists”. What I had actually said was that to restrict one’s pronoun usage to biological sex was an “eminently sensible” choice to make.

But of course, this is Twitter. And so I now found myself endlessly accused of dismissing women as “extremists” for their language choices, even though I had stated the precise opposite. In a face-to-face conversation, such a misunderstanding can be cleared up in an instant. But in the fog of social media combat, whenever I pointed out that I had not accused anyone of “extremism” I was told that I was a liar. And the slur was then echoed and amplified by newcomers to the pile-on. I was called a liar five times, then ten, then twenty, and before long I had lost count. And every time I denied it, this was taken as further evidence of my deceptive nature.

And if a liar, why not a misogynist? That was the inevitable next stage. The accusation came so often that I started having to block accounts; a course of action which, in turn, was taken as proof of misogyny. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to women’s concerns? Well, perhaps it’s just that being continually insulted all evening can get rather grating. 

And so we went from “liar” to “misogynist” to “grifter”. There was a smattering of overtly homophobic nonsense in there too from a vocal and unhinged minority. At this point, there was absolutely no point in engaging further. The mob had developed a collective mind and purpose of its own, like the Borg from Star Trek. As new faces joined the fray, I could see them almost instantaneously becoming assimilated and before long they were chanting the same mantras and misconceptions. 

All of which explains why I’ve launched this Substack, precisely to remove myself from such deranging circumstances. On reflection, I should have done this a long time ago. Even the Italian translator of my book Free Speech and Why It Matters criticised me in his preface for spending too much time on Twitter.

While it’s very funny to be criticised in one’s own book, he was entirely correct to do so. Twitter has always been a cesspit that devours too much of my time. I’m like one of those bluebottles that keeps colliding with the windowpane; I never seem to learn that there might be a preferable route.

If I was mawkish enough to suggest a moral to this story, it would be this: talk to people, but not to mobs. I’ve read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar many times, but for some reason I’d forgotten about the fate of Cinna. Having been galvanised into action by Mark Antony’s spectacularly manipulative speech, the plebeians riot and seek revenge against Caesar’s assassins. They run into Cinna, who happens to share the same name as one of the killers. “Tear him to pieces!” they cry. Cinna explains that he has been misidentified. He is a poet, not a conspirator, and is on his way to Caesar’s funeral “as a friend”. But to the frenzied crowd, this is a trivial detail. “Tear him for his bad verses,” they cry, “tear him for his bad verses!”

Once assimilated into a righteous mob, we surrender our individuality and ability to think. The truth becomes irrelevant. A target is a target, and really anyone will suffice to satiate our bloodlust. It’s as good a reason as any to avoid becoming one of the crowd.