David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger and Us, review – this documentary became a self-indulgent gripe

Remember when Friends Reunited was the limit of our social networking? Where the biggest pitfall was the temptation to rekindle an affair with the person you snogged at the sixth form disco? Now we’re living “in an age of anger”, according to David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger and Us (BBC Two). Instead of using the internet to reconnect with childhood friends, we’re going online to shout at strangers.

Comedian and writer David Baddiel is a self-confessed Twitter addict. His stated aim was to find out why social media has brought out the worst in us. He went to see a neuroscientist who monitored his brain activity, which showed that reading complimentary tweets gave him a dopamine hit, but seeing negative ones (and Baddiel gets lots) activated his fight or flight response and made him combative.

He met a family for whom online invective boiled over into real-life violence. The Smithys, a family of TikTok “influencers”, were the victims of an arson attack. The father of the family wondered if social media death threats could become normalised to the point where carrying them out in real life didn’t seem such a great leap.

But from there, Baddiel lost the thread. The programme became a self-indulgent exercise in which he focused too much on his own Twitter use, which is both a tool for promotion and the result of a constant need for approbation. At one point, he took a two-week Twitter break. Four hours after logging out, he looked dreadful.

One contributor, fashion stylist Ayishat Akanbi, ventured that Twitter offers the chance for the formerly bullied to bully others – “the revenge of the forgotten” – which was an interesting idea. But Baddiel segued into cancel culture, a subject which Richard Bacon tackled to much better effect in last week’s Cancelled.

Here he mentioned the fact that, despite apologising, he still gets criticised on Twitter for his relentless mockery of footballer Jason Lee on Fantasy Football League, inverting the old “I’m not racist but…” by telling us, “It was racist but it’s interesting how much apologies don’t function in a straightforward way on social media.” It added to the sense that this wasn’t so much about Social Media and Us, but about Social Media and David Baddiel.