Ben Jackson

Twitter has been notoriously bad at dealing with online harassment. ‘We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,’ Dick Costolo, the company’s CEO, said in a leaked memo in February. ‘I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure.’ Twitter’s rules prohibit only ‘direct, specific threats of violence’. Anita Sarkeesian received rape and death threats on Twitter when she tried to raise $6000 for a series of short films examining gender tropes in video games.

At​ the height of spy mania during the First World War, two British agents were sent to East Anglia in a car fitted with a Marconi radio receiver. Their aim was to intercept illicit messages crossing the sea. ‘They left London at noon,’ Basil Thomson, then head of the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, later recalled in Queer People (1922). ‘At three, they were...