Be sure your tweets will find you out

Tuesday 26 April 2011 2:21 AM

Before the commentariat, Christian and other, condemns the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace as a loony fundamentalist bigot, let's all take a deep breath and consider ...

This is the Twitter age, and we're all still meeting its perils along with its undoubted benefits. Staff and readers of The Age should be especially attuned, given the dismissal last year of an outspoken journalist after a similarly careless post on Twitter, amidst the frenzied online banter occasioned by the ABC's weekly Q&A program.

If, as one of the anonymous millions, you forget who you are while tweeting in under 140 characters at the speed of light, you should consider yourself lucky merely to see red cheeks in the mirror. The same misfortune bears the sword of instant professional death if you happen to have a very public profile. Catherine Deveny and Jim Wallace make the strangest of bedfellows. But they merely share the doubtful honour of learning a most common lesson before a million judges. Let's be slow to condemn either.

Let the twitterer without sin cast the first stone.