THERE have been a few corking moments of pure idiocy highlighted by twits tweeting on Twitter while the red mist still clouds their vision.
The danger of posting a tweet without a few hours to restore calm should be obvious by now – who here hasn’t raged in the heat of the moment only to seriously regret it later.
It is one thing doing that in private but posting your angry rant on a global internet forum takes a special kind of fool to carry off.
Someone like Liverpool FC’s Ryan Babel maybe.
The Premiership midfielder has now apologised for posting a mocked up picture of referee Howard Webb wearing a Manchester United shirt on his Twitter page.
The Dutch international uploaded the image after Sunday’s 1-0 FA Cup third round defeat to United, where referee Webb awarded a first-minute penalty, and sent off Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard.
The Football Association confirmed they would be investigating the matter, as Babel also wrote: “And they call him one of the best referees? That’s a joke.”
The problem now is that Babel has extra luggage he has to carry around everywhere he goes – his rant will be preserved in twitter history and is unlikely to be forgotten during his career.
The imminent FA action against him is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
We’ve all been guilty of anger-fuelled rants – it’s a very human condition, raging against what we perceive to be the unjust machine.
These days though, those rants are highly unlikely to be private affairs. I cringe at the number of ill-advised posts I see on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis. And, invariably, the culprits are forced into a potentially humiliating and very public climbdown in the hours, days or weeks that follow.
Have we lost our ability to pause and think before hastily sounding off in public?
We used to fill our diaries with this kind of nonsense and hide them in a trunk under the bed.
So why, now, do we feel the need to hang them out in the shop window of global scrutiny.
Some things are best left unsaid.
By Adam Moss, Brazen News Editor
