Every other media outlet has managed to make some cheap stories from this site, so it must be my turn now.

I’m not however talking about the cases of people being refused a job or sacked after their drunken antics appear. That’s their own fault for posting the photos, and not being bright enough to tighten their security settings so that their boss can’t stalk them. Instead, I’m talking about groups.

Most groups are harmless. Some are rather tedious, some are imcomprehensible, a rare few have a lively user base who form friendships.  However, a worrying trend has caught my eye: The clueless rant group

These groups have different aims, but tend to have one uniting factor. They are usually brought into being by uninformed rantings, and will frequently continue to exist even when proof is found that their premise is complete nonsense. 

One that first caught my eye, the "Get Huntley off Facebook" group. This group claims that the murderer Ian Huntley has a Facebook account and demands that it be shut down. This despite the fact that there is no way he would be allowed to operate one from within a prison cell, and that repeated searches have completely failed to find him. I have known otherwise sane, intelligent people join this group and have wondered why, especially as it seems to attract the sort of people who would have considered Stalin to be "too soft". While Huntleys’ crimes were beyond despicable and he should spend the rest of his life behind bars, those screaming for him to be killed in the most painful way they can imagine are equally disturbing. 

Secondly, a group claiming that UK-born individuals "have less rights than an immigrant". Leaving aside the atrocities against the English language ("fewer", not "less") the premise is a complete falsehood. The various human rights legislation on both British and European Union statute books applies equally to all. There may be several high-profile cases whipped up by the tabloid media in which "immigrants" have secured a particularly cunning legal representative, able to use legislation to secure their clients’ ability to stay, but the fact remains that this is not a problem with human rights or immigration.

I would argue that the same sort of mass hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials is alive and well there. People refusing to believe the evidence of their own eyes, or to do any more research. Instead they happily swallow the pre-formed opinions of the tabloid media, all of which are pushing a political view for their own agenda. We now have a situation where Ministers are terrified to make changes that would be effective due to the screaming response it would get from certain right-wing papers owned by tycoons who have, oddly enough, never held British citizenship. I suppose in that respect we do have fewer rights than one immigrant in particular…