IF Longshanks has got you all in a tizz over those nasty bullying cybernats then you need to pop out and get yourself a copy of the Daily Mail today, or nip over to Wings Over Scotland and read the cult leader's frenzied response to this attack on his followers..
Or - if you can't be bothered, then I have reproduced the article from Wings in full below.
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The bully pulpit
Posted on January 25, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s mainly hilarious, if we’re being honest. Today’s hysterical “unmasking” of “cybernats” (in fact a collection of perfectly normal and varied people, using the internet under their real names and mainly with photographs of themselves) by the Scottish Daily Mail as part of its ongoing “Cybernat Watch” smear campaign is like a one-stop beginner’s guide to the paper’s lurid modus operandi.
But much as we chuckle, there are deeply sinister undercurrents to the article.
We’ve attached the entire text of the piece in its full deranged glory below as an appendix. But it’s worth pulling out a few highlights.
A lovely piece of pure fantasy to start us off. (Incidentally, computer monitors don’t “flicker” when you’re typing. It’d be very distracting.)“HUNCHED in front of the flickering computer screen, Brendan Hynes is hard at work, despite the late hour. The divorced father of three has a look of intense concentration as his fingers race across the keyboard.”
[quote]“But Hynes – and many like him – are turning Twitter and other online forums into ‘no-go zones’ for those who want to engage in a rational debate on the country’s future.”[/quote]
This is a weird angle. If you don’t want to read any tweets from Brendan Hynes, don’t follow his Twitter account and you won’t see any. If you want to engage in a rational debate, neither he nor anyone else on Twitter has any conceivable way of stopping you. Any Twitter user can “block” another person’s account so that messages from it will be screened and stopped from reaching the first user.
The Mail, however, isn’t interested in “watching” any of those. Which is a little odd – if you’re concerned about debate being “poisoned”, wouldn’t you want to eliminate all the sources of poison, rather than just a subset of them?“Some Nationalists have rightly pointed out that there are offensive tweeters, or online activists, on both sides; and there will always be those who pour out abuse unthinkingly, solely to cause offence.”
Intriguing phrasing there. The “or” in the second sentence is a classic weasel word. It’s a bit like saying “All supporters of Partick Thistle enjoy football or abusing children” – it creates a negative impression while not actually being defamatory, because the “or” means that no one individual is actually being accused of paedophilia.“But what marks out the cybernats is their modus operandi: from their disparate locations around the country, on smartphones, laptops and desktop computers in lonely bedrooms, they operate almost as one homogenous body.
There are central figures who spur on or co-ordinate this activity, binding them together and providing inspiration and moral support.”
The Mail knows that there’s nobody “co-ordinating” pro-independence Twitter users (quite aside from anything else, such an activity would be akin to herding cats), so it uses a cowardly disclaimer that allows it to imply it without actually saying so.
IMMIGRANTS!“Some don’t live here and can’t vote in September’s crucial referendum, or aren’t even Scottish”
Apparently if you’re on benefits you lose the right to object to the government.“And some, like Jason Dolan, rail against the UK Government, while openly admitting they depend on its benefits system.”
“Other cybernats don’t fit this profile of the bitter, lonely blogger, spewing bile in the small hours.”
Hang on – didn’t you just tell us they were “one homogenous body”?
We’re not sure why this is surprising. We’re sure the Mail must have already been aware that some people in Scotland were born in other nations. And didn’t the USA fight its own war of independence from the UK? Why would it be a shock that one of its citizens backed self-determination in other countries?“Melissa Murray is a director of a management consultancy – Darkstar Resources – living in the affluent Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. More surprisingly, the 45-year-old mother of one is from the United States.”
Well, okay, we can’t have people suggesting that others hate their own countries. Fair criticism. Such language would clearly be disgusting and unacceptable behaviour, and anyone using it should be made to issue a public apology immediately.“Among her tweets, read by more than 1,200 followers, is this observation: ‘sorry but anyone who professes Scotland is #bettertogether truly must hate Scotland’.”
Oops.
Hello!“One of those she corresponded with this week on Twitter – the favoured medium of the cybernat – was a blogger called Wings Over Scotland.”
As far as I’m aware, I’ve never been to Denny in my life.“Wings is in fact ‘Reverend’ Stuart Campbell, 46, a former video games journalist from Denny, Stirlingshire, who has built up a following of around 7,000 subscribers on the micro-blogging site after nearly 50,000 tweets.”
You may have thought you were normal people reading a website, a fairly common modern-day pursuit enjoyed by many respectable members of society. In fact you’re cultists. Everyone’s got their tickets for the debauched orgy followed by the mass suicide, right? Tuesday night at Bellahouston Park, indoors if wet.“‘Followers’ is an apposite term, as Wings has grown into something of a cult – so much so that many of them willingly donate cash to the blog to fund ventures such as opinion polls – and some of Campbell’s ‘wages’.”
This is a nasty little line. Why only ask the Church of Scotland? Why not the Catholics or the Wee Frees or any other of Scotland’s many denominations? The implication seems to be that it only matters that someone isn’t a Protestant. Or, put another way, that they might be a Catholic.“But nothing is quite as it seems with the ‘Reverend’ (a claim no one has yet verified; last night, the Church of Scotland told the Mail it had no record of Campbell as a Kirk minister).”
It means no such thing, of course. It means that I couldn’t vote in the referendum if it was tomorrow, which it isn’t. The deadline for someone to be resident in Scotland and entitled to vote is September 3rd, still more than seven months away. (I’d pointed this fact out to the Mail when they asked, but for some reason they declined to include that answer in their piece.)“Campbell lives in Bath, Somerset (with his pet rats), which means he cannot even vote in the independence referendum.”
Also, people who keep pet rats are WEIRDOS!
Sadly the Mail doesn’t see fit to include the rest of the joke to which that was the punchline. But its choice of poor innocent victim is intriguing.“Perhaps it’s no wonder, as Campbell is prone to the kind of intemperate rants that have helped to turn Twitter into such a toxic environment.
This week, he tweeted pro-Union campaigner Andrew Skinner on Twitter: ‘I’d just like you to f*** off to Ireland’ (and then shamelessly revelled in the fact his tweet had been highlighted as an example of cybernat trolling).”
According to his Twitter bio, self-confessed troll Mr Skinner is one of the administrators of one of the more popular Unionist pages on Facebook. “Vote No 2014″ is a hotbed of high-class reasoned political debate like this:
Populated by a ragtag of angry right-wing immigrant-haters, Ulster loyalists, army fetishists and Labour activists, the page is mainly concerned with attacking the SNP (in the person of “Wee fat Eck and Fishface Sturgeon”, as one recent commenter put it, while another noted that the First Minister was apparently “a power crazy racist who hates the English”) and fretting about the price of lager.
Poor, delicate, bullied Mr Skinner. But anyway.
We’re not quite sure in what way that constitues a “concession”.“Last night, a Yes Scotland spokesman said: ‘Stuart Campbell is not part of Yes Scotland and we do not have any direct contact with him.’ But he conceded that ‘as the country becomes more engaged with the independence debate, it is likely that speaking events and debates will be proposed by a variety of groups and individuals’.”
“In Campbell’s orbit are lesser – but no less vociferous – cybernats.”
We’re also uncertain quite what being “in orbit” entails here.
These damn slippery cybernats, refusing to be “homogenous” again.“One of them is Tommy Ball, 29, who recently called a Unionist commentator ‘Uncle Tam’ and has branded the British Army ‘scum’. Yet Ball hardly conforms, at first glance, to the stereotype of the cybernat – he’s a lab technician who lives alone in Govan.”
Because Scottish people aren’t allowed to live anywhere outside Scotland.“Andrew Ellis, 52, on the other hand, is proud to be called a ‘cybernat’. He is helping to promote Scottish independence – from the unlikely location of his home in Chichester, West Sussex.”
What’s he doing in this article, then?“Mr Ellis, a commercial manager for computing firm Hewlett Packard since November, moved from Yorkshire to his present home in 1992 with his English wife, 51-year-old Debbie. The Edinburgh- born former politics student appears to be one of the more temperate cybernats”
The vicious cyber-bullying BASTARD! Lock him up!“though at times he is a near-fanatical supporter of Wings, in many of his near-17,000 tweets to about 800 followers.
He told the Mail: ‘I am not a member of the SNP or a supporter, even though I find some of what they say and do quite attractive.”
Clearly running short of “endless bile and vitriol” at this point, the Mail wraps the piece up. But the piece (which is also accompanied by a front-page story, an editorial leader column and another “Cybernat Watch”) marks only the latest salvo in a two-week onslaught of one-sided vilification of independence supporters.
And when a newspaper issues such a stream of relentless propaganda directed only at one half of a debate, even while admitting that both sides are culpable, it’s transparently only trying to achieve one thing – ironically enough, the intimidation and silencing of its opponents.
The people the Daily Mail doorstepped aren’t used to being castigated in the national press and having their faces published like a rogue’s gallery of wanted criminals. (It’s water off a duck’s back to us.) The purpose of articles like this is to bully them and to scare others who don’t want to get the same treatment.
The average “cybernat” reaches only a few dozen or few hundred people, mostly like minds who’ve chosen to follow them. The Daily Mail sells almost 100,000 copies a day in Scotland, meaning a likely readership of around a quarter of a million. It doesn’t actually directly incite violence against the people in the feature, but paints a picture of them as despicable sub-human menaces to society and provides enough information (location, occupation, picture and even in some instances a description of their house) that some lunatic could track them down and assault them.
In nearly 50,000 tweets, we’ve used the occasional bit of industrial language, like most humans do. We’ve told a few trolls and Tories to f*** off, and we’re not ashamed of it. But when it comes to bullying, we’re just not in the Daily Mail’s league.
THE ARTICLE IN FULL
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CYBERNATS UNMASKED
A retired oil executive, a jobless man of 41 who lives with his mum and a Bath-based video games writer. Meet just some of the agitators whose online poison is shaming the Nationalists
‘Spilling endless bile and vitriol onto Twitter’
HUNCHED in front of the flickering computer screen, Brendan Hynes is hard at work, despite the late hour. The divorced father of three has a look of intense concentration as his fingers race across the keyboard. Like a lot of retirees, the internet has provided him with a hobby, a useful way of keeping in touch with relatives. But the former oil industry executive isn’t tapping out friendly messages: from his flat in a housing complex in a sleepy Aberdeenshire village, he is spilling endless bile and vitriol onto Twitter, the ‘micro-blogging’ website.
Hynes has quickly established himself as a ‘cybernat’ – the army of online supporters of Scottish independence notorious for their provocative and often abusive comments and now at the centre of a growing political row.
Last week, Hynes, 64, tweeted prominent Unionist commentator John McTernan: ‘You are an outright collaborator, conspiring to put Scotland in subjection.’
Defending his comment later, Hynes tweeted: ‘So what would you call a person who seeks to give his country to another country to be lorded over – friend of the people?’
He has even posted altered pictures of David Cameron in a Nazi uniform alongside quotes from Auschwitz’s Angel of Death, the Nazi medic Josef Mengele.
When the Scottish Daily Mail tracked him down to his home in Peterculter, Hynes, responsible for nearly 11,000 tweets, many of them hate-filled, was unrepentant.
‘I send as many tweets as I want,’ he said. ‘I can put out as many as I like – that’s what it’s for. I’m retired, that’s what I do.’
It would be easy to dismiss these outpourings as irrelevant to the national debate on the independence referendum.
But Hynes – and many like him – are turning Twitter and other online forums into ‘no-go zones’ for those who want to engage in a rational debate on the country’s future.
Many commentators, including some of the Mail’s own writers, have found themselves facing a tidal wave of abuse from cybernats who seek to poison political debate in this country.
Unlike Hynes, many cybernats are more cowardly and hide behind aliases.
Some Nationalists have rightly pointed out that there are offensive tweeters, or online activists, on both sides; and there will always be those who pour out abuse unthinkingly, solely to cause offence.
But what marks out the cybernats is their modus operandi: from their disparate locations around the country, on smartphones, laptops and desktop computers in lonely bedrooms, they operate almost as one homogenous body.
There are central figures who spur on or co- ordinate this activity, binding them together and providing inspiration and moral support.
In a show of defiance, they have even produced their own ‘cybernat’ logo for online use.
The Scottish Daily Mail set out to unmask some of them, with surprising results.
Some don’t live here and can’t vote in September’s crucial referendum, or aren’t even Scottish; some are outwardly respectable, professional people, reserving their bile for the internet.
And some, like Jason Dolan, rail against the UK Government, while openly admitting they depend on its benefits system.
When the Mail visited his small terraced house in Cumbernauld, Dunbartonshire, he had been asleep for most of the day, only waking at around 6pm.
Dolan, 41, lives on state handouts (he has bad circulation and claims he cannot work) with his 73-year-old mother.
It is here that he crafts some of his sickening tweets, such as: ‘ Be prepared for the Scottish Revolution if you #UK loving c**** try to stop the real Scots from getting independence. #SNP’
In another broadside, he says: ‘@antitoryparty Great tweets! And so true about # Tory scumbags! #IndyRef they are like the #NAZI party. Cameron won’t get in on 2015.’
Dolan is rather more reasoned in person, saying he would be ‘disappointed if people didn’t vote Yes, but I wouldn’t go all Braveheart about it’. His advice for victims of online trolling is simply to ‘move on’.
Other cybernats don’t fit this profile of the bitter, lonely blogger, spewing bile in the small hours.
Melissa Murray is a director of a management consultancy – Darkstar Resources – living in the affluent Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. More surprisingly, the 45-year-old mother of one is from the United States.
In her Twitter biography – which also contains a picture of Edinburgh Castle – she describes herself as a ‘Yank living in Edinburgh [who] supports Scottish independence’.
Among her tweets, read by more than 1,200 followers, is this observation: ‘sorry but anyone who professes Scotland is #bettertogether truly must hate Scotland’.
In another tweet, she claims to be ‘undecided’ about her political beliefs, saying: ‘I didn’t realise so many Better Together folk hated Mandela. As an undecided, I’m shocked by this fact.’
‘Let’s hear it for the cybernats!’ she tweeted this week amid a growing political row over the way the phenomenon is poisoning political debate.
When the Mail visited her home the day before, she was rather less keen to back the cause, saying only: ‘I’m not an SNP person, so I don’t know what a cybernat is.’
Rather gleefully, she also referred to herself, after our visit, as a ‘famous cybernat’.
One of those she corresponded with this week on Twitter – the favoured medium of the cybernat – was a blogger called Wings Over Scotland.
Wings is in fact ‘Reverend’ Stuart Campbell, 46, a former video games journalist from Denny, Stirlingshire, who has built up a following of around 7,000 subscribers on the micro-blogging site after nearly 50,000 tweets.
‘Followers’ is an apposite term, as Wings has grown into something of a cult – so much so that many of them willingly donate cash to the blog to fund ventures such as opinion polls – and some of Campbell’s ‘wages’.
But nothing is quite as it seems with the ‘Reverend’ (a claim no one has yet verified; last night, the Church of Scotland told the Mail it had no record of Campbell as a Kirk minister).
Campbell lives in Bath, Somerset (with his pet rats), which means he cannot even vote in the independence referendum.
‘Wings’ sees himself as a rallying point for the independence cause, urging his readers to try to convert as many ‘undecideds’ as possible.
On his website, he tells his acolytes: ‘they’ll [undecided voters] be hungry for more truth, and then you can send them our way.’
The self-aggrandising ‘our’, of course, is slightly misleading, as Wings is more or less a one-man outfit, though he does sometimes commission and publish proindependence submissions.
A self-publicist of the first order, Wings often boasts about his growing profile and Community Safety Minister Roseanna Cunningham is one of his Twitter correspondents. Yes Scotland chief executive Blair Jenkins has previously replied to Campbell on Twitter and accepted an invitation from him to take part in a public debate, though the Yes camp has since distanced itself from him.
Perhaps it’s no wonder, as Campbell is prone to the kind of intemperate rants that have helped to turn Twitter into such a toxic environment.
Straying from the topic of independence, he once sparred with the sister of Hillsborough victim Thomas Fox, telling her: ‘If people stop when they get to a wall of human beings instead of ramming it, nobody dies.’ He accused those he holds responsible for the crushing of being ‘c***s’.
This week, he tweeted pro-Union campaigner Andrew Skinner on Twitter: ‘I’d just like you to f*** off to Ireland’ (and then shamelessly revelled in the fact his tweet had been highlighted as an example of cybernat trolling).
In December, Campbell asked an SNP councillor: ‘Is there anyone you don’t like? Fred West? Harold Shipman? Anas Sarwar [Scottish Labour deputy leader]?’
Yet Campbell brazenly told the Mail: ‘The term “cybernat” is an attempted smear intended to denigrate anyone who supports independence and can operate a computer.’
He added: ‘The notion of a Great Cyber Control HQ where thousands of internet users are marshalled, co-ordinated and deployed in the service of dastardly separatist overlords is a paranoid fantasy worthy of Joe McCarthy.’
Campbell set out to raise £1,500 from his backers for one poll but took in £6,025 and claimed in an interview this week that he had to ask people to stop sending money.
For the second poll, he asked for £2,500 but received £5,797, hitting his target in 70 minutes.
Campbell also raised just over £33,000 to pay himself a wage and plans to run a second major funding appeal to secure that salary and to pay for further projects.
Last night, a Yes Scotland spokesman said: ‘Stuart Campbell is not part of Yes Scotland and we do not have any direct contact with him.’ But he conceded that ‘as the country becomes more engaged with the independence debate, it is likely that speaking events and debates will be proposed by a variety of groups and individuals’.
He added: ‘We will continue to assess those offers on an individual basis.’
In Campbell’s orbit are lesser – but no less vociferous – cybernats.
One of them is Tommy Ball, 29, who recently called a Unionist commentator ‘Uncle Tam’ and has branded the British Army ‘scum’.
Rejecting accusations from other angry Twitter users that British soldiers had died ‘fighting for the likes of you’ in 2012, he wrote: ‘There’s no British soldier fighting for anything I believe in. Bunch of child killers.’
Ball claimed to have been an SNP organiser in Nicola Sturgeon’s former Glasgow Govan seat – but after a row over his Twitter comments, he quit the party.
Yet Ball hardly conforms, at first glance, to the stereotype of the cybernat – he’s a lab technician who lives alone in Govan.
Speaking at the door of his redbrick top-floor flat, he said he, too, has had had threats ‘levelled against me; people making threats on the internet’.
But Ball then undermined his point by claiming, implausibly, that ‘if someone is threatening on a social network, they’re not likely to pose a threat in real life’.
Andy Inglis, 53, is also an unlikely cybernat.
A tweet from his account this week to a journalist said: ‘U have won “scaring & confusing my mother wi lies & propaganda” award.
‘Uras*** of the lowest order & a disgrace 2 journalism.’
Despite his foul-mouthed remarks, Inglis, the Edinburgh- based divorced father of a teenage daughter, describes himself online as a ‘former UN & UK government official’ who has worked in more than 50 independent countries.
He seemed uncharacteristically unwilling to air his views this week, however; Inglis tweeted that he knew the Mail wanted to contact him but he failed to get in touch.
Andrew Ellis, 52, on the other hand, is proud to be called a ‘cybernat’. He is helping to promote Scottish independence – from the unlikely location of his home in Chichester, West Sussex.
Mr Ellis, a commercial manager for computing firm Hewlett Packard since November, moved from Yorkshire to his present home in 1992 with his English wife, 51-year-old Debbie. The Edinburgh- born former politics student appears to be one of the more temperate cybernats, though at times he is a near-fanatical supporter of Wings, in many of his near-17,000 tweets to about 800 followers.
He told the Mail: ‘I am not a member of the SNP or a supporter, even though I find some of what they say and do quite attractive.
‘I am not a slave to the SNP – there are 800,000 Scots living in England and I’m sure plenty of them would also want independence.’
But he conceded: ‘I appreciate some of the people on Twitter can be quite extreme and unpleasant in what they say – but that is the same from both sides.
‘There is a lot of negativity from the No camp too, which could easily be reined in as well.’
Meanwhile, back in Cumbernauld, cybernat Dolan is in reflective mood. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have written it,’ he admits, talking about one of his more abusive tweets. ‘But you can’t go back and change it.’
It can only be hoped that other cybernats take note of that self-awareness and contrition – however belated.
But many of those who have fallen victim to their vicious broadsides are unlikely to be holding their breath.”
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Why not pay a wee visit to Wings and see for yourself just how 'rabid' this cult of cybernats is. You might be surprised if your only source of information is the Daily Mail.
Have you read the white paper?