The daily soap opera and general hysteria around Elon Musk's Twitter takeover show no sign of coming to an end.

This is partly because of Musk's endless capacity for self-promotion but also driven by the vast army of social media users who bawl like spoiled children when they don't like someone playing with their toys.

Many talk in panicked tones of Twitter becoming 'unsafe', as if it's some sort of escaped, malevolent beast. Infantile tribalists who like to censor opposing views are always quick to dismiss others with words like 'harm', 'hate', 'fascist' or 'virtue signalling', rather than trying to win the actual argument. (A worrying number of keyboard ranters mistakenly refer to 'virtual signalling', which sounds more like a hi-tech means of directing traffic).

The excessive, misplaced references to fascism in such exchanges always bring to mind Rik Mayall's character in TV comedy The Young Ones - an over-earnest student who thought he was on a heroic quest to rid the world of social ills but whose 'activism' extended to nothing more than shouting 'fascist!' at bemused non-fascists. He was well-observed in the 1980s and even more so now.

"People would rather rub chilli in their eyes than concede defeat in an online spat, which will end with a clumsy reference to the Third Reich..."

Millions have tried but it's genuinely impossible to settle an argument on Twitter, or any social media platform. This can surely be confirmed by any researcher with a vast amount of time to kill. People would rather rub chilli in their own eyeballs than graciously concede defeat in an online spat, which will invariably end with a veiled threat, a wild and unprovable assertion or another clumsy reference to the Third Reich.

Whether Musk changes Twitter for better or worse remains to be seen but, apart from a few pleasant diversions, long ago it became a cesspit of insult-slinging, moralistic grand-standing and all-round unpleasantness, wrapped up in fewer than 280 characters. Musk apparently plans to increase the word allowance further, which will allow a more long-winded and expansive form of impotent rage. Just what the world in waiting for.