I've blogged about this before, but it has happened again this week, in a couple of different ways. Enough has been written about Jan Moir's insidious piece in the Daily Mail, and hopefully we all know about the Trafigura super-injunction pertaining to the Minton Report. The mainstream media have also noticed the Twitter effect around these two issues.

The mainstream media aren't sure quite how to report about this, or so it seems to me. How much of an effect did Twitter have on the legal proceedings around Trafigura? Is it fair to describe the tweeting around Jan Moir's bile an "orchestrated campaign"? Organisations that are struggling to find a profitable place in the digital world also seem to be struggling to deal with reporting Twitter.

Let's be honest, a lot of original reporting about the site was quite sneering, talking about banal updates from "nobodies", and preening celebrities tweeting minutiae about their lives to adoring masses of fans. Of course, these same newspapers were printing "scoops", sometimes on the same page as the sneering, sourced directly from a particular person's tweet. Confusion reigns in the newsroom.

Here's the problem. I'm a regular Twitter user (5,600 updates and rising) and I have difficulty explaining exactly what the appeal is to friends who aren't users. It's not a straightforward concept, and it's common to see people open an account, tweet a couple of times, and then let the account gather dust. I did that myself some 18 months ago. This lack of an easy definition is what causes these deep misunderstandings from non-users.

The fact of the matter is, whether we call it 'tweeting', 'micro-blogging', 'broadcast-texting', or whichever not-very-descriptive term you choose, it's an internet communication tool. Less personal than e-mail, less intrusive than Facebook, less downright ugly than Myspace, but just a tool. Its defining characteristic is the 140 character limit, which by turns encourages both brevity and triviality. Various URL-shortening services (and that's a worrying topic for another post) enable us to easily share links to sites of interest.

Given the nature of a single tweet, often little thought goes in to what one says. Retweeting (the process of simply repeating someone else's remark) means that memes, offensive news articles, and all manner of items of interest spread like wildfire. Hashtags (the process of putting a hash-prefaced word into a tweet) give tweeters a simple way of finding all comments on a particular topic. For example, #trafigura shot to the top of Twitter's trending topics (a list, visible to all users, of the most mentioned phrases of the moment). Twitter is almost always the way I find out about breaking news these days. It's incredibly effective at spreading information very quickly.

And there's the problem. On Friday morning, I saw a flood of tweets about Jan Moir's now infamous article. There was outrage, and quite rightly so, about what she had written. There was no "highly orchestrated campaign", as Moir later claimed in a press release. Merely saying that demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Twitter. What there was, however, was the perfect conditions for the formation of a mob. Lots of people, looking around, seeing lots of other angry people who agree with them. In the perfect demonstration of positive feedback, some people got more and more angry, and then angrier still.

As there are millions of people on Twitter, even if most people remain calm, there are going to be enough outraged people to fan the flames of each other's anger. Sadly, a lot of this ire was directed at Ms Moir herself. True, she did write the article, but let's not forget, she doesn't pop into the presses with a USB key containing her article, and commit it directly to print. There was surely an editorial decision to publish, possibly even to commission an article on the topic (that's purely speculation on my part). Still, I'm led to believe that people were sharing her address online (way, way over the line), and I personally saw some really hateful, nasty language directed at her in people's tweets. It was the reaction of the playground, and an embarrassment to those that were saying it.

Sadly, Twitter, and the internet as a whole in fact, lays bare some of the more unpleasant aspects of human nature. Given anonymity, and a disconnection from the object of their words, people often write spiteful, nasty, malicious words about other people. Amazingly, sometimes it's just a book or a film that causes this ire. The immediacy of Twitter has the unpleasant side effect of facilitating these virtual torch and pitchfork groups. It's unpleasant, but I don't know what can be done about it. Maybe a popup box prior to posting; "Are you sure you want to say that? Take a deep breath, count to ten, then press 'Post' again"? Maybe not.

Regardless of some of the uglier aspects of this particular social network, I'm a big fan. I've met (virtually and in reality) some lovely people, read interesting articles, been amused, amazed, fascinated and educated. People can be twats, but lots of them aren't. I just wish people would think before they tweet. But then I also wish lots of people would think before they speak.

Plus ça change.