I spend a half hour on most mornings reading messages from people who don’t know me at all. They come via Twitter, rarely by Facebook, and once or twice by email. The one thing these messages have in common — apart from the fact that they are sent by complete strangers — is that they are never nice. They are almost always crude, insulting, obnoxious and sometimes threatening.

The thing is, the hate that lurks inside so many of us simply didn’t have an outlet until a few years ago. Representation pic/ThinkStock