It's been said

Nicholas Lezard's facile views on Twitter make you wonder whether he has ever taken time to use the service.

But I just thought I'd add my voice to those emphasising that Twitter is just a medium through which people interact. One might argue that the arbitrary 140 word limit encourages banality, but one would be wrong. It encourages succinctness - brevity, as they say, is the soul of wit, and Twitter is wit personified (it's in the name).

As a Facebook user, I used to be sceptical about Twitter - what's the point of a site that basically just gives Facebook status updates? But when I joined, I discovered a whole different ethos. You can get an insight into celebrities, and learn that John Cleese and Ross Noble are genuinely mental, that John Mayer is a brilliant pun machine, or that Eddie Izzard is sadly boring. You can discover articles and websites and jokes you might never have otherwise come across. You can keep in touch with friends who don't use Facebook, or are Twitterati themselves.

Because updates are all there is to Twitter, rather than the wealth of information of a Facebook page, people update all the time, and not just with the minutiae of what they're eating. You say that the downfall of Trafigura could have been accomplished by an "ordinary online campaign". Which is what, exactly? To match Twitter in this, you'd be talking emails or campaigns reaching or a website visited by hundreds of thousands of people in half a day. Twitter facilitates things like showing Jan Moir as the hateful and misguided slime that she is, or publically outing absurd injunctions like Carter Ruck's.

To summarise in the form of a Twitter post:

Twitter is simply a reflection of its users. So don't rag on a great form of social media just because you're afraid of some human stupidity