For some unimag­in­able rea­son, two weeks and count­ing after the whole Raoul Moat busi­ness kicked off, it’s still plas­tered across the papers. Why? Because some­one cre­ated a Face­book trib­ute page. Face­book refused to take it down. Then the owner removed it. Then some­one made another one. Then the Prime Min­is­ter waded in. And one of Moat’s victims.

My ques­tion is, pre­dictably: why the hell is all this Face­book stuff news?

There is one rea­son and one rea­son only why these Face­book trib­ute groups exist: for the lulz.

Have the Prime Min­is­ter and the tabloid press not man­aged to grasp that there’s not really some sin­is­ter or deranged bunch of peo­ple behind this? Peo­ple join these groups for the lulz; because it’s funny. Do politi­cians really live in such a shel­tered world that they’ve never seen what’s out there on the internet?

The inter­net is context-free inter­ac­tion, a world where you can’t see your friends’ reac­tions or even know if they’ve seen a noti­fi­ca­tion of you join­ing a group. It’s a sin­gle click to join, whether you’re doing it because you believe in the cause or whether you just found it funny. It’s a world where peo­ple try to take down reli­gions just because the idea amuses them. It’s a world where nobody really cares; where “Seri­ous Busi­ness” is only ever used sarcastically.

Gov­ern­ment, media — get­ting offended by Raoul Moat’s Face­book fan club just makes you look ridicu­lous. It’s not just the inter­net you seem not to under­stand, it’s a whole aspect of human nature that comes to the fore in that kind of envi­ron­ment. Hell knows, if Cameron hit the roof about a Raoul Moat trib­ute group, what the hell is he going to do when he finds /b/? They’ll be scrap­ing him off the walls!

I have no mas­sive expec­ta­tion of the most pow­er­ful to gov­ern in a way which every­one would recog­nise as fair and just. But at the very least, can we not expect those in power to under­stand the peo­ple they represent?