As we all know, Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything (YouTube), but he’s especially right about Rebecca Black’s Friday (YouTube) in his Guardian op-ed How to tweet bile without alienating people. Or making 13-year-old girls cry. If you’ve missed the story, a 13-year-old’s parents paid for her to make a vanity pop song and video, which became a YouTube hit and attracted the kind of bile and hatred usually reserved for mass murderers and idiots who don’t indicate on roundabouts. (Seriously, those orange lights aren’t fucking decoration, drivers.)

Having never listened to the track before, I just popped over to YouTube and, once the Flash plug-in deigned to play the video, watched and listened to the whole thing. What I found was a run-of-the-mill pop song with vapid lyrics and pretty horrible auto-tune on the vocals. What I didn’t find, crucially, was:

  • Anything that prompted any kind of outpouring of hate;
  • A song any worse than plenty of crap that regularly climbs the pop charts;
  • Something any worse than the kind of songs I used to write when I was 13, bar the lyrics. (Although, to be fair, it wasn’t written by Black, but by Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, who I’m guessing are somewhat older than 13.)

But the online response has been utterly shocking, and shows how idiots use the internet to insult, bully and harass, while hiding behind pseudonyms. (That even happens on this blog, where people regularly leave comments saying what a total arsehole they think I am, and then sign off with a name like lolcakes—how brave!) What’s particularly great about the Rebecca Black incident is that the hate has resulted in press, and the press has resulted in the song being propelled up the charts. Being level-headed, Black has made a pile of cash that she’s subsequently donated to the Japan relief efforts. One wonders how many of the dickheads slagging her off on the internet have donated.

Even if you only have 140 characters to play with on Twitter, the important thing is to be constructive; just telling someone to die in a fire makes you about one step up from a cauliflower in the awareness ladder. Or, as Brooker rather brilliantly puts it in the aforementioned Guardian article:

In summary: bitch all you like. Just don’t be a dick about it. Poise, people. Poise.