Mark Andrews: Joey Barton is the tip of a poisonous iceberg that is contaminating social media

In a candid interview with Sky Sports reporter Katie Barnfield, Joey Barton confided his innermost thoughts as he was about to be sentenced after being convicted of six offences of sending malicious communications.

"It is what it is," he observed, incisively.

Barton claimed he was the victim of a  'political prosecution' when he was merely trying to provoke a debate. So one might reasonably ask what were the deep-rooted political and philosophical matters he wanted to get across?

He called Jeremy Vine a 'big bike nonce', and branded football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko the 'Fred and Rose West of football commentary'. Not exactly Edmund Burke, is he?

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Yet weirdly, he has more than 2.5 million followers on X, which perhaps casts a darker shadow on the state of society than Barton's juvenile posts.

What does it say about the world that 2.5 million people actually want to read this stuff? 

Then again, why do people spend hours glued to their phone watching endless TikTok clips of obscure people washing their dishes, or eating a sandwich, or whatever it is they do?

Now, by and large, I'm a stout defender of free speech. On the whole, I believe it is not the state's right to be arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable speech, and giving these powers to whichever government happens to be in power at any given time is the beginning of the dangerous slope towards autocracy.

The trouble is, people like Barton - and Tommy Robinson for that matter - abuse that freedom to destruction. And unfortunately it is a behaviour that has spread like wildfire since the arrival of social media. You don't need to scroll far down Facebook or Twitter before you see somebody trotting out the old 'brown envelopes' cliche every time a planning decision doesn't go the way they would have liked. Would these people behave like that if they met somebody face to face, rather than behind the anonymity of a computer screen? I suspect not. But they should be more careful.

What they probably don't realise is that people who write on Facebook or Twitter are subject to exactly the same laws as those who write for newspapers or appear on television or radio. And accusing someone of corruption - and certainly calling someone a 'bike nonce' - without strong evidence is an open-and-shut libel case.

So if you are feeling a bit sore that some plans you don't like have been approved, and you are thinking of accusing the council of taking backhanders, I would caution you to think carefully. Because they would probably be within their legal rights to bankrupt you. 

And I sometimes wish they do.