The Lord loveth not a lynch mob. OK, that doesn’t actually appear anywhere in Scripture but it is implicit, from the woman who would have been stoned had not Christ shamed her accusers, to the mob baying for Barabbas, to the crowd cheering on the stoning of St Stephen. Going further back there was the frenzied horde worshipping the golden calf. The next 2,000 years did not see much of an improvement, with huge numbers turning up to witness executions and participating in witch-hunts. But today we have a more insidious form of mob mentality in which the crowd is invisible. We call the phenomenon social media. Unless you are a seasoned politician or someone who wilfully courts controversy, mass hatred can be genuinely frightening. I often wonder how the two 11-year-olds who murdered Jamie Bulger must have felt when a furious crowd banged on the police van taking them to jail. They would have known only that the adult world had gone wild with hate. Think of a lone Jew surrounded by Nazis in the 1930s, then think of a teenager alone in a bedroom bombarded by cruel comments on Twitter, by a barrage of hatred which is often incomprehensible to the target. It is merely a different sort of mob rule, virtually unpoliced, but a “Twitter storm” is often no more than a euphemism for a mob out of hand, with everybody joining in the insults and abuse, which can then descend into actual threats. One problem is immediacy. Before social media let you join in the conversation before you have time to think, people used to mutter darkly in pub corners or work canteens and, yes, they probably did utter such sentiments as “he should be shot” or “I’d like to strangle her”, but nobody believed it because there was a tone of voice which clearly indicated metaphors. If somebody really did sound menacing, people coughed politely and moved away, but a bald, word-limited tweet can carry an undertone of threat. More importantly, the victim wouldn’t have been there and would have been unlikely to hear the stream of bile. But now anybody can see what anybody else is saying at the flick of a thumb and it has driven some poor vulnerable souls to suicide. It is too easy to lose one’s own identity in a crowd, which is why people will behave in a way they would never contemplate if acting alone, and that applies as much to the Twittersphere as to mobs yelling at police in riot gear. Many a clever orator has relied on just that. There is a volley of anger and people want to be part of it. Many will wonder in the cold light of day what possessed them, but the more common it becomes the more desensitised otherwise rational human beings will grow. Take the case of Tim Healey who, of all things, is a behaviour manager at a school and who deals with cyber bullying. According to the Daily Mail, he left an expletive-ridden message on the public Facebook site of a female MP, calling her fat, ugly, creeping, selfish and rat-faced. What, one wonders, would he have said to a pupil who had uttered such abuse in the playground? Once he would have exploded into all these insults in a gathering of friends or maybe even alone and nobody would have been any the wiser. But now, at the tap of a key, the message is sent, irretrievably, to be viewed by multitudes. In this case we are talking merely of some rather cruel personal abuse aimed at a public figure who will be able to take it (not that she should have to take it but we all do). But to some private individuals who have never sought the limelight a sudden onslaught of hate can be devastating when they find themselves for some passing reason briefly in the public eye. For others, particularly the young with an underdeveloped perspective, a raft of abusive messages can sound as threatening and isolating as “Juden” or “witch” did to previous generations: a statement that you are different, that you will not be allowed to live in peace. Monday morning always comes and what choice have you but to walk through the school gates? For others, false allegations, bandied about and attracting self-righteous hostility and threats, can make every day a living hell and, meanwhile, the mob behind it goes about its daily business without a backward glance. Christ told us not to judge others (sorry, Lord, I found that quite impossible when it came to Jihadi John), but social media too often revolves around judgment instantly made and as instantly disseminated. That is the very essence of a lynch mob mentality. Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister