‘Cybernats’ and ‘unitrolls’ are dragging both sides in the country’s independence debate down to the level of the sewer
Scotland has been on a hair trigger these past few weeks as both sides of the independence debate try to prevent their own supporters from fatally damaging their respective causes.
After novelist JK Rowling announced that she was giving a million pounds to the No campaign, there were some abusive comments from the so-called ‘cybernats’ on the internet calling her some fairly predictable words that begin with b and c.
These were not SNP members or people connected with the Yes Scotland campaign. But unionist campaigners hoovered the comments up, reposted them and accused the independence campaign of using intimidation against its opponents.
The Yes campaign were furious at this, as were women in the Scottish National Party – including Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister, who has had more than her fair share of this kind of abuse, and has even had death threats from the people they call ‘unitrolls’. The sad fact is that nearly all women in public life – whatever party or persuasion – find that they are the target of venomous abuse from the darker recesses of the internet.
Not to be outdone, some independence supporters then set up their own unitroll website to compile abusive remarks against Yes-supporting celebrities and nationalist politicians.
This site has now retweeted thousands of the most vile and contemptible attacks – very often against Sturgeon herself.
Both sides insist they will expel any members caught making abusive remarks. But the problem, of course, is that these cybernats and unitrolls are not members of anything. They are sad social misfits, sitting in their bedrooms getting a buzz from abusing public figures.
We live in a free society, and one of the unfortunate consequences of that is that people are free – notwithstanding the laws on hate speak and incitement to hatred – to say whatever they like on the internet. Comments that might never have gone beyond the saloon-bar door are now posted and reposted all over social media.
Better Together took the matter further by accusing Alex Salmond’s office – and by implication the Scottish Government – of organising a campaign of smears and abuse against women.
The claim was made after one of the first minister’s special advisers, Campbell Gunn, wrongly claimed that the ‘carers’ representative’ on Labour’s Shadow Cabinet – a Clare Lally – was the daughter-in-law of a prominent former Labour Provost, Pat Lally. That may not seem to be particularly harsh, but Better Together and Labour claimed that by pointing the finger at Lally, Gunn had invited cybernats to vilify her.
This was hardly credible since the SNP are only too aware of how damaging it is to be connected to anti-English or misogynistic abuse on the internet. The overwhelmingly unionist press in Scotland is on constant cybernat watch. The Daily Mail in particular is ever-ready to recycle social-media nationalist nasties.
The No campaign may have derived a short-term benefit from trawling the sewers of the internet for abusive remarks and then hanging them on the nationalists. But they may now have ignited a cycle of intemperance that could explode very easily, affecting not only Better Together but the image of Scotland itself.
This is all very unpleasant. The irony, however, is that the reaction in Scotland to this year’s World Cup has shown that the kind of anti-English sentiments that used to be routinely expressed even by some public figures in Scotland is a thing of the past.
Scotland has grown up, even if the internet hasn’t.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald
