It is a given that effective communication takes skill. But if all that is effectively being communicated is…

FU and FO

the skill set is so low as to be non-existent.

The simplicity and ease of use, which technology offers 'keyboard-enabled psychopaths' to spread their bile actively works against such people giving any consideration to the content of their so-called ideas.

If communication required the effort needed to carve a message into stone – maybe they would think more about what to say and how to say it. Even if they still ended up saying, FU, it would at least have been well considered.

I suspect the average age of old media 'journalists' and editors is itself very old. Every story where facebook or twitter is even incidental to events, facebook or twitter is reported as the central element to events.

It's just so ridiculous. Man bites Dog isn't news, but Man bites dog after browsing twitter is somehow the story these days.

It's almost as if they are from the marketing department of Facebook, or else they are so old that the very existence of Facebook is so fascinating to them that they must report on it, or they think if they omit this social media angle people may discover they are so far behind the times they don't really grasp what a troll really is, as evidenced recently. Perhaps Macquarie dictionary will redefine it to be the same as flaming now.

They are just smitten by the whole thing, when it really isn't such a remarkable phenomenon. Why didn't people have stories about people committing suicide after a nasty email, with the headline 'EMail abuse leads to suicide'?

Toilet user commits suicide: A man committed suicide today shortly after taking a dump. He posted it on Twitter....