I regularly send text messages to friends, and sometimes I am consciously or unconsciously flippant – signing off with something as effusive as “love you lots” when, of course, I don’t. Leaving aside the fact that when you take away the ‘I’ or add ‘lots’ or ‘loads’, the love part is rendered strangely meaningless, such a ‘declaration’, although exaggerated, belongs to a particular moment that may not make sense when that moment has passed.

Even an innocuous ‘I’ve got that thing’ can look suspicious when you can no longer identify the number or recipient.

The other day I was in the middle of an SMS exchange with someone I know well when a message appeared that I might ordinarily have let slip. Only this time it unsettled me, and I did something I probably might not have done a year ago: I asked the sender to delete the message because I felt it was inappropriate. I just knew that anyone else chancing to read it would not have understood its context and spirit of jest – one with which I was not happy to be associated.

Yes, I may have sounded puritanical, and perhaps I was compromising a longtime friendship; but the fact remains that we are living in a world where you can never be too careful. Social networking (Facebook, What’sApp, Texting, Twitter) can land you in very hot water, even when you are merely on the receiving end. And, of course, certain people who revel in this sort of blundering are always waiting for a chance to pounce. So a text, e-mail or status update, written casually and replied to flippantly, is suddenly distorted and wrenched out of context.  And even if it isn’t, it always manages to look so much uglier and more salacious when it’s just out there, subject to everybody else’s misinterpretation.

Alan Montanaro, the face of Melita and Malta’s favourite pantomime dame, is in distress. He’s landed himself in a social media quagmire after an already sticky month of allegations of financial impropriety levelled against The Drama Outreach Project, the Maltese-based NGO that seeks to help disadvantaged children in Cambodia, and of which, until recently, he was president.

The enquiry into that has been concluded, and full accounts have been submitted, but Montanaro will still have to live down a number of caustic and distasteful messages that he and other committee members exchanged in a private What’s App chat.

These have earned him a very stern rebuke from Kenneth Wain, Commissioner for Voluntary Organisations, who clearly was left with little choice but to call rightly into question Montanaro’s motives. Montanaro has since apologised, insisting that the comments were taken out of context and were never intended to cause offence.

Many of those who have elected to defend Montanaro… do not extend their consistent support, sympathy and understanding to the whole spectrum of Maltese society

I deplore the tone and content of these messages but I still sympathise with Montanaro’s predicament. I am even prepared to believe that this was one of those hyperbolic ex­changes that was not meant literally, where you are carried away by the moment. At the same time, I believe the Commissioner was absolutely right to castigate Montanaro. I also acknowledge that Malta Today had a duty and an obligation to report the story.

Which is why I found many of the Facebook reactions so frustratingly predictable. My feelings are now far less focused on Montanaro’s inappropriate comments, and much more on these people’s attempts to condone and indulge his actions while vilifying the Commissioner and the newspaper.

It got me thinking. First of all, about how much simpler, safer and better life was before e-mails and mobile phones; before all this electronica. But more than that, about how selective certain people can be in their ability to overlook transgressions perpetrated by people they may like, admire or revere.

What happened to Montanaro is what has happened to hundreds of ordinary Maltese people for causing far less offence, who over the past eight years, perhaps longer, have been specifically targeted and their private lives unethically exposed, primarily because of their political inclinations or their links to political people. And this has happened while others with similar baggage, only of a different colour, have been conveniently left alone. The underhand disclosure and sharing of private messages, lifting hapless people’s comments out of context, picking on isolated actions, laying lives bare on the blogosphere for public consumption and mutilation, and then sharing these stories with abandon, is an obsessive and vile occupation in certain quarters.

Many of those who have elected to defend Montanaro unconditionally – or who have loftily refused to comment out of respect for his family – do not, I’m afraid, extend their consistent support, sympathy and understanding to the whole spectrum of Maltese society.

When they choose to write, share or comment on nasty posts about people they may not know, people who may not be even remotely as prominent as Montanaro, they forget that these too are good people with fami­lies – spouses, parents and children – people with the same kind of entitlement to a private life and benefit of the doubt. They must also be granted the allowance of context. The fact that they may not be known or rated by them seems to makes aiding and abetting the smear campaign that much easier. And so you get the blood-fest, the public pillory, disdain, schadenfreude without a second thought.

I don’t operate in such vicious, subjective and hypocritical circles, even when I agree with the blog. And I don’t because I understand how soul-destroying and shattering it is to be on the receiving end. The last thing you need is everyone baying for your blood and your life turned into a freak show. So I put myself in other people’s shoes, even if I don’t know their politics, parents or pedigrees.

There is an agenda behind every personal attack made public. I just wish these people would afford everyone the same courtesy they have afforded Montanaro, who once a year reminds us that we should be nice to one another. And that includes everyone.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com