The online highway code: three simple rules to solve the internet

Last week, thousands of Twitter users presumably rushed to their keyboards to frenziedly delete anything they had ever said or implied about Lord McAlpine, desperately trying to mop up any evidence of gossip before his legal team could harvest their details as part of The Biggest Libel Case Ever. It's safe to assume that none of these users contemplated the possibility of being sued by a peer of the realm when they originally signed up to the service but nonetheless, for good or ill, that's where they find themselves.

 Remember the Mogwai from the movie Gremlins?

 It was a fun and harmless companion, unless you got it wet (which caused it to multiply), or fed it after midnight (which turned it into a destructive, sociopathic demon). It was easy to inadvertently "misuse" – and doing so could quickly spiral out of control and ruin your life. Every Twitter user has, in effect, been sold a digital Mogwai minus the instruction sheet. Actually perhaps – to return to the wheel for a moment – a car is a better metaphor than a Mogwai. A car is a powerful machine that can also be dangerous, but you're implicitly aware of the risks when you sit behind the wheel, having seen The Dukes of Hazzard and, yes, what happened to Richard Hammond. But God knows what it was like in the early days of motoring. Maybe some people simply didn't understand how cars worked, and tried to drive them up trees at 90mph. Maybe there was no agreement on which side of the road to drive on, so people used to engineer head-on crashes just to make a point. Maybe it was legal to mount the pavement and squash anyone in a bonnet. Fortunately, our predecessors gradually got better at driving, got a feel for the rules of the road, and then passed this knowledge down through the generations in the form of an arcane text known as "the Highway Code". Maybe it's time to start compiling a friendly "highway code" for social media to alert future generations to potential dangers:
 Rule No 1 is: don't form a mob on the basis of anything you read less than a minute ago.
 Rule No 2: accusations of child abuse don't go down very well, even if you try to "lighten the mood" midway through them by typing LOL.
 And rule No 3 is: don't be a dick.
 Not sure you need any more rules than that, to be honest. That's the internet solved, then.
Next week: Palestine.

By Charlie Brooker / The Guardian