I was going to do a post on ants, really. They have been everywhere this year, as have rabbits and skunks. Hmm maybe the skunks are because there are a lot of ants. But that isn’t what I am going to talk about.

The Globe and Mail this morning had an interesting article by Benjamin Perrin –  “I tweeted about Harper. Then the Twitter bots attacked”. The gist of the article is that bots were used to attack him for a tweet, a quite mild tweet, he did. My first reaction is that once more the dark side of the internet had made itself known. But I, trying to be an informed reader, looked up about bots and realised that, as usual with the internet, bots can be both benign and nasty. http://qz.com/572763/the-best-twitter-bots-of-2015/ has a list of twitter bots which sound really interesting and funny. They are so innocuous and yet lighthearted and fun that I am tempted to follow one or two of them. Perrin’s point, though, is well made. There are bots out there which people can use to indiscriminately attack any one, either through personal targeted abuse or based on keywords the user has selected. As with anything, it is the user which makes something bad and can ruin it for others. (This of course is an opportunity to mutter about guns and how stupid it is not to have some control on them because there are people out there who ought not to have them, BUT I would then be digressing).

When Perrin informed Twitter, they reacted appropriately, ‘vapourising the tweets’.  This form of cyber bullying is not just about twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, it will happen wherever people congregate.  Anonymity on the internet makes it easier for the bully to swagger his/her way through someone else’s life. Perrin’s point about the victim of the attack may not be someone who can discern that it is an automated attack and the world is not attacking them, only a few, count 1, nasty person, is important. There have been a few high profile cases of teenage suicide because of cyber bullying. Which means we really need to teach everyone, children and adults, how to be informed, sceptical users of everything internet based. That will make it harder for that nasty underbelly of the internet to be effective, not impossible, just more difficult.