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 sub-tabloid 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.

“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.”

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 and give you a headache.)

“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.”

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.

“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.”

The Mail, however, isn’t interested in “watching” any of those. In two weeks of solid, relentless coverage of the “cybernat” issue it hasn’t printed a single abusive comment from a Unionist. Which is a little odd – if you’re concerned about a debate being “poisoned”, wouldn’t you want to eliminate all the sources of poison, rather than just a subset of them? Or is there a good kind of poison that makes debates better?

“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.”

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 no individual is actually being accused of paedophilia.

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.

“Some don’t live here and can’t vote in September’s crucial referendum, or aren’t even Scottish”

IMMIGRANTS!

“And some, like Jason Dolan, rail against the UK Government, while openly admitting they depend on its benefits system.”

Apparently if you’re on benefits you lose the right to object to the government.

“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”?

“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.”

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?

“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’.”

Well, okay, we can’t be going around suggesting that other people 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.

Oops.

“One of those she corresponded with this week on Twitter – the favoured medium of the cybernat – was a blogger called Wings Over Scotland.”

Hello!

“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.”

As far as I’m aware, I’ve never been to Denny in my life.

“‘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’.”

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.

“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).”

Now this is a nasty little line. Why only ask the Church of Scotland? Why not the Catholic Church 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. (Or Jewish.)

“Campbell lives in Bath, Somerset (with his pet rats), which means he cannot even vote in the independence referendum.”

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.)

We don’t think ownership of rats affects the voting franchise.

“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).”

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.

According to his Twitter bio, self-confessed troll Mr Skinner is an (or perhaps the only) administrator 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.

“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’.”

We’re not quite sure in what way that constitues a “concession”.

“In Campbell’s orbit are lesser – but no less vociferous – cybernats.”

We’re also uncertain quite what being “in orbit” entails here.

“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.”

These damn slippery cybernats, refusing to be “homogenous” again.

“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.”

Because Scottish people aren’t allowed to live anywhere outside Scotland, or if they do they must immediately cease having opinions about it. Like all the London-based MPs with “second homes” in their Scottish constituencies who never offer a view on the subject, presumably. Or English resident John Barrowman.

“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”

What’s he doing in this article, then?

“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.”

The vicious near-fanatical cyber-bullying BASTARD! Lock him up!

Clearly running short of “endless bile and vitriol” by this point, the Mail wraps things 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 in future.

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.

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