calling Bernie and Hilary supporters alike "f*cking useless Yankee shills" and seemingly settling old festering scores, sending abusive PMs to random members revealing that the sockpuppet is in fact T_i_B, this is The Long-Awaited Day of Reckoning, and the campaign will continue via a stack of dormant accounts and VPNs while admin and the mods are distracted dealing with other fly-by trolls?
Somebody has posted one of these DMs on GD to complain about it, and a number of others have chimed in on that thread reporting the same abuse, and before a jury could pass judgment, the thread was locked by a host saying "Take it to Creative Speculation, please." The OP, being somewhat new and naive, has done precisely that, the Creative Speculation thread is now alight with replies, and you're just sitting there, chatting away as if nothing is happening ...
WHEN WILL YOU REIN IT IN?!!1!
Seriously, what proportion on the hundreds of thousands of Corbyn supporters do you imagine are behaving in this way? And guess who Smith now has on his campaign team? - John McTernan, Master of Sockpuppets, whose utter disgrace in the Australian elections didn't stop him being employed on Better Together, and who's now participating in the Smith astroturf campaign - always a sign that a campaign's very weak online when it turns to complaining about the conduct of the "other side's" online presence. They need to do it better, as it's a giveaway when accounts tweet the same form of words more or less simultaneously.
Much was made in the media during the indyref, and since, about so-called cybernats, while vicious Better Together trolls like one "Brian Spanner" are adulated. A few months back, said "satirical" troll was revelaed to have sent a vast number of very abusive tweets to female politicians, favouring use of the C-word and casting aspersions on their sexual health, among other things. Making the excuse that the tweets were sent when his account had very few followers, he then tweeted out a long series of "apologies" to those he'd targeted, and is still going strong today, with public figures like J.K. Rowling and a number of Labour politicians and media types among his overt fans.
And as for Facebook, it's an even worse cesspit than Twitter at times - going so far as to facilitate the physical stalking of one of our future female SNP MPs - not least because it gives people the opportunity to extend their abuse over more than 140 characters.
This doesn't even touch on the large number of Unionist/football thug accounts that tweet abuse daily, nor the racist crap directed in bulk at the likes of the SNP's Humza Yousaf, but for some reason they seldom hit the headlines. Funny, that.
Twitter is a small platform in terms of user base. It has its uses, but also very obvious abuses. Most people wouldn't know anything about it if our newsrooms weren't so depleted and lazy that a copy-and-paste story about what whoever's said about whom so often serves as "news".
And as for online comments sections, if you've only just noticed they can attract some extremely strange and distasteful types, you must have been living a very sheltered online life indeed. This all didn't begin with Corbyn or Momentum.
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