Robin Brown

The internet is such a staggeringly useful tool that it’s sometimes easy to forget those dark corners of the web that act as forces for hatred, misinformation, fear and rank stupidity.

These corners even exist on middle-of-the-road, popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and especially Youtube. Presumably somewhere there’s an Idiotic Guide to Social Media.

Youtube is perhaps the most frustrating, as it’s been the most readily-adopted public platform for disseminating lies and propaganda in a form that’s easy to share and most suitable for manipulating viewers.

This brings me to the current healthcare legislation Barack Obama is trying to get through Congress, and the US right’s take on it. Predictably there’s a depressingly lunatic reaction the Obama’s maniacal plans to ensure Americans have improved access to healthcare and preventative medicine.

Whether it’s Palin accusing Obama over his death panels; the claim that Edward Kennedy would have been left to die under Obama’s plans; the muddles claim that the British Stephen Hawking would have been left to die in a gutter if he’d been dependent on the NHS; or the hysteria over the idea that the NHS places a value of around £14,000 on human life, the US has reacted rabidly to the idea of ‘socialised health care’.

This is the sort of deliberately misleading stuff that keeps so many Americans in a state of perpetual fear and ignorance, which in itself is behind such unreasoning hatred.

It’s so utterly barmy it doesn’t really deserve a proper rebuttal, but the anger of UK Twitterers has spilled over into a show of solidarity under the hashtag #welovethenhs, briefly hitting the top of the trending tree.

Where the UK diplomatic corps has adopted a softly-softly approach to tackling the nonsense coming out of US insurance company lobby groups and lunatic right-wingers, UK Twitter users have come out fighting in a reasonable but firm set of rebuttals that have often touched on the personal experiences of the Twitterati.

And the press has come to the party too, even the right-wing press are intent on countering the mistruths with some cool-headed analysis, though the Mail and its readers seem confused about whether they’d rather defend the British Isles or attack the great bastion of the great unwashed.

So bravo the media, and bravo social media, Twitter in particular. Will it shed any light in the darkness? I doubt it, but sometimes it’s nice, indeed vital, to be reminded that sometimes the better elements of the web win out.

• You can NHS-ise your Twitter avatar at Twibbon

• EDIT: And now Gord has joined in.