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Is it really tougher to be a Tory online?

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‘The cure for online trolling has to be something like putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.’ Photograph: franckreporter/Getty Images

Just how tough is it to be a Tory these days? It must be difficult, if you care about the party, to watch it find new and ingenious ways to chew itself to pieces over Brexit every week, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean the social stigma. The dinner-party buzzkill. The first-date disbelief. The fact that “It’s harder to come out as being a Conservative than being gay,” according to one young activist.

Because if you believe party chair Brandon Lewis, in the current climate, the right is uniquely victimised. “If you look at what happens on social media,” he told the House magazine, “if somebody on the right or the centre puts out a message, the attack from the hard left is sometimes unbelievably abusive and vitriolic.” The risk is that reasonable people are discouraged from expressing their views. “For some ... if they suddenly get attacked by a huge number of hard-left people they’ve never met, that can put them off.”

When it comes to political discussion, there’s never any justification for personal insults or threatening behaviour, in real life or online. People on the right certainly get their fair share of abuse, but I wonder whether crazed Corbynite trolls alone account for Lewis’s impression that his lot are unpopular on Twitter. The fact is that the Conservatives have been in government for the past eight years. They have presided over cuts to public services, increases to tuition fees and a referendum and subsequent negotiation with the EU that has split the country down the middle. They have become an equal-opportunity irritant, pissing off the unemployed, the employed, parents, students, renters, landlords, leavers and remainers. This is what happens when you are the powers-that-be.

That still doesn’t excuse abuse, of course, but it provides plenty of justification for trenchant criticism, and it would be a surprise, frankly, if proclaiming your support for Conservative policy online didn’t lead to a flurry of disagreement. It would be disingenuous of Brandon Lewis not to recognise that.

Setting aside unavoidable bias against the government of the day, is it really the case that the right comes in for more aggro than anyone else? Maybe the demographics of social media, skewed towards the left-leaning young, make it inevitable. But hang on a second. Have you tried being a feminist on Twitter? Have you voiced concerns about Islamophobia, or the treatment of refugees? Have you made remarks to the effect that racism may still be a problem in 21st-century Britain? If you haven’t, I suggest you give it a go. Snowflakes need not apply, because you may find that the response is “unbelievably abusive and vitriolic”. Remember, the internet gave birth to the alt-right. Social media turbo-charged it. And the real-world effects have been momentous. To sustain the idea that the behaviour of left is the worst thing about online discourse you have to ignore a pretty hefty elephant in the room.

The poison extends beyond the internet, by the way: headlines that screech “Crush the Saboteurs”, “Enemies of the People” and “Proud of Yourselves?” have the distinct ring of the Twitter pile-on about them. They do not, you will note, fit snugly into Lewis’s narrative of rightwing victimhood.

The truth is that no one gets out unscathed. There may not have been a coarsening of the debate, exactly – there have always been newspaper hatchet jobs and bullying campaigns. But there is so much more debate now that everyone gets to be coarse.

I won’t pretend there is a straightforward remedy. At the risk of sounding like Thought for the Day, the cure for trolling has to be something like putting yourself in the other person’s shoes – and the internet, where the other person may be thousands of miles away and visible only through his or her keyboard strokes, doesn’t exactly make that easy. I am confident, however, that the solution doesn’t lie in suggesting, as Lewis seems to, that any one group is uniquely subject to abuse – or that the problem lies in everyone else’s conduct. All that does is draw the battle lines ever clearer.

  • David Shariatmadari is an editor and writer for the Guardian