A 2014 study by Pew Research in Washington DC showed that 40 per cent (!) of internet users have been harassed and 66 per cent of those said the most recent instance was on social media. Since then efforts to curb online harassment using human moderation have fallen flat.

Bots can help with block lists, which specify the accounts you don’t want to see in your feed. You can block accounts yourself, but reporting them to prevent harassment of others is a hassle. Apart from being slow, it’s also unpleasant – one has to trawl through hundreds of personal slurs, reporting each individually on a form.

One shouldn’t have to receive abusive messages in the first place. Bots could help by managing block lists of offenders automatically. Subscribe to a blockbot, which continually updates a list of accounts blocked by other users, and you should receive less invective. But that approach only works if someone adds an abusive account to the block list.

It turns out that abusers self-identify as part of racist, or simply vulgar and crude groups, and if you set up a bot that purports to “speak” as a respected member of the group and remonstrate automatically with the abusers, that abuse calms down somewhat. The other approach is to automatically reply to, say, racists in their own language, giving them a taste of their own medicine, but this hardly contributes to calm and pleasant life. Aside from anything it emerges that people can’t even agree on what is foul language. To call a woman a “bitch”, for instance, nowadays barely raises an eyebrow on social media.

What a world we have created! If you seek pleasure, not pain, peace of mind, not stress, then you have to avoid this cowardly and ill-mannered behaviour. I only wish these anonymous bullies felt likewise. Fortunately, this blog has only had one such unhappy person over several years. Long may it be so.