Toby or not Toby: why Twitter shouldn’t be blamed for the stupid things people say

There's one big difference between the Twitter scandals of Toby Young and Mason Holgate, says Tim Cooper
Rex
Tim Cooper12 January 2018

We hear a great deal about the power of social media don’t we. And there’s no denying that power. Careers are launched and millions made by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Launched and, as this week demonstrated effectively, ended. Or at the very least sidelined.

But let’s get something straight. When someone starts a row by saying something stupid on social media, the blame lies entirely with the person who said something stupid, not the method they used to say it.

Step forward Toby Young, whose infantile and offensive tweets came back to haunt him this week. And, in the opinion of many I’ve spoken to, not before time.

Let us compare him then with the week’s other victim of social media, namely the young footballer Mason Holgate, who may well be facing retrospective punishment for much the same reason as Young. Their parallel stories are instructive because both have been hung out to dry for things they said in the past on social media - specifically Twitter.

One of them (Young) has already paid the price with resignation (of the ‘jump before you’re pushed’ kind) from a big government job; the other is awaiting judgement with the Sword of Damocles, in the shape of the notoriously inconsistent Football Association, dangling over him like a high cross above a nervous goalkeeper.

There’s one fundamental difference though.

While Holgate was a child when he sent his, Toby Young is 54 and the tweet that finally did for him was sent nine years ago, when he was already a middle-aged man and should have known better.

Back in 2009 a woman he didn’t know – a Welsh mother of two called Jane Williams – tweeted that she had “gone through about five boxes of Kleenex” watching a harrowing film of starving children on Comic Relief. It was an emotional response that was probably being shared at that time by millions.

Apart from Young, who responded with a repulsive tweet about self-gratification. Then, in case his bons mots might get lost in hyperspace, he hashtagged his comment with #comicrelief so that millions of TV viewers might find it more easily.

There is, I’m glad to say, a happy ending to this story... another happy ending. It transpires that Ms Williams, a musician who plays in care homes for residents with dementia, never actually saw his reply because she’s not much of a Twitter user.

Unlike Young, a compulsive tweeter who claims to have sent – and subsequently deleted – more than 50,000 of them.

Anyway, as you probably know, Young finally resigned from his post on the board of a new university regulator, the Office for Students, but it’s hard to see how he could have stayed after an online petition to sack him collected more than 200,000 signatures.

Mason Holgate (L) and Roberto Firmino (R)  
Liverpool FC via Getty Images

Meanwhile, over in Liverpool, Everton’s young defender Mason Holgate found himself in hot water after a bust-up with rival Liverpool forward Roberto Firmino – the man with the brightest teeth in football. During the recent derby game, Holgate gave his opponent a shove on the touchline, sending him crashing over the hoardings and into the crowd, sparking one of those face-to-face “rutting stag” confrontations before the ref stepped in.

Although it was clearly Holgate who provoked the incident with his two-handed shove, it was Firmino who came a cropper after firing off a stream of invective at Holgate. I don’t know whether Holgate, who grew up in the Yorkshire town of Doncaster and joined Barnsley as a boy, speaks Portuguese but I do know that Firmino does, because he’s Brazilian, and because The Sun hired a lip-reader who was able to inform readers that he said: “Es maluco, filho da puta?” (which translates as: “Are you crazy, you son of a b***h?”)

Anyway, it was all over in a few seconds but afterwards Holgate complained that the tirade had included the racial slur “negro” and now the FA is investigating, even though the referee did not hear it, because we have been down this road before with lovable Luis Suarez and his chum Patrice Evra, and that did not have a happy ending for anyone concerned; especially Luis.

Football fans being tribal by nature, some Liverpool supporters subsequently unearthed what purports to be Holgate’s Twitter account and found some homophobic tweets from 2013 and 2012 containing terms like “fag”,“faggot” and “battyboy.”

Now I’m not going to defend that, except to say that Holgate turned 21 in October and was still at school in 2012. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t like someone to dig up some of the things I said and did when I was 15 or 16 and I don’t think it’s fair – or even remotely relevant - to hold a footballer to account for what he said at that age.

You might also observe that Holgate comes from a very different background to Young. One of them comes from Doncaster and joined Barnsley FC at the age of nine; the other grew up in Highgate with a father who sat in the House of Lords.

On the other hand, only one of them was appointed to a government post involved in higher education and therefore, it seems to me, only one of them should be accountable for his past public pronouncements. But there’s a moral here for both of them, and for anyone else about to press the button on a spur-of-the-moment comment – think before you tweet. It might come back to haunt you.

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