Edinburgh Cowgate: social media reached a new low for me. I fear it still has further to plummet

The weekend saw a truly distressing death in Edinburgh’s Cowgate. The pictures and video which circulated in the immediate aftermath are simply not printable in any newspaper or their websites - but on Twitter and Facebook, hell, anything goes. The bar seems to be set so low for those who administer these pages it is positively subterranean. Ultimately, they have to be held accountable for the content they allow to post. It may not be their words or pictures, but it is their platform.

I cannot comprehend how someone could see something so shocking that their first instinct was to pick up their phone, take some pics and post them with a flippant comment or a shocked-faced emoji.

And once on social media, those posts are grabbed by bots and fake news sites and regurgitated endlessly. The same thing happened when ice hockey player Adam Johnson was killed on a horrific on ice accident. A video of the moment he died played on a loop despite hundreds of accounts being reported. No sooner was one removed than another bot created a replacement, and on and on it goes.

One year on, the video can still be found with a simple search, so the tech companies which run these platforms clearly do not care about the real damage they cause and the distress and toxicity they spread.

Social media is a cesspit that brings out the very worst in human nature too often to be allowed to continue unregulated or unchecked. That police had to appeal to people to stop sharing images from the weekend tragedy said it all.

A plea from a news website not to share the images and, even worse, the video, sparked a response “if you don’t want to see it, don’t watch it.”

Leaving aside the fact Twitter autoplays videos as you scroll through your timeline - giving you no time to avoid seeing the footage - is this what we have become? And, if it is, then presumably the person who wrote that would be entirely comfortable if one of his loved ones was the subject of the same images being shared?

Another blamed the police for a lack of information, hence all the wild to quash the speculation.

What the hell happened to decency?

We have gone from rubber-necking at the scene of a car crash to actively filming it for, in too many cases, some witless ‘banter.’ It has to stop.

We live in an age when every road incident - from a flat tyre to a badly parked car - is fair game to be snapped and uploaded to social media, inviting the inevitable pile-on from the mob who can sneer and mock without any comeback. It’s ugly and horrible, but I fear it is now ingrained in how we behave and communicate.

The media are rightly called out for appalling behaviour - our industry can be indefensible at times - but much of that criticism now comes from social media which which clearly has no understanding of the laws surrounding defamation, contempt and privacy, let along the issue of taste. It certainly doesn’t do irony.

If I published the graphic images from the weekend tragedy on my front page, I’d be sacked. Simple as that. Social media reached a new low for me at the weekend. I fear it still has further to plummet.