COMMENT | The venomous attacks in social media against activist Maryam Lee for her stance that both sides of the political divide are not worth voting for reflects the high fever of our body politic.

It is deplorable that she had to be subjected to abuse and doctored sexual images, but that’s the way of the world now.

Social media is a double-edged sword. It links the whole world in a swift transmission of ideas, chat, zillions of pictures of yesterday’s meals, jokes, and sappy greetings.

But it also is a tool for lowlife to trade animal parts, drugs, child porn.

And it gives a voice to the scum of the earth.

When I was working in a web portal a few years ago, a large proportion of the daily thousands of readers’ comments had to be deleted because they were allegations stated as fact, racist rants or suggestions of unimaginative sexual acts.

There was a politician’s wife – the story didn’t have to be a substantive one, but just the use of a photo of her would be the start of a tsunami of comments touching a high five-figures by the time the night subs logged out after midnight.

The portal’s lack of bias in sparing the readers such trash was evident in bipolar mail, some saying comments were not posted because we were running dogs of the opposition, while others said we had Umno moles working in our midst.

There was one particular a******e – daily he persisted with dozens of foul-mouth comments (till we blocked him – twice; he was a persistent pest). After a long day of not seeing his filth on the site, he will fire a rocket, describing the sexual abuse that should be visited on the female members of our families.

He often ended with a challenge to show our testicular potency and post his latest comment.

Not only was he an a******e, he was a dumb a******e. After what he said about my mother? Delete.

What can one do with cretins like that? Try and ignore them.

Social media can’t be muzzled, though not from wanting to try by governments as soon as the internet was born...