Chris Johns

And I think even you would agree, Jim, that you don't get nothing for your taxes.

But the risk of putting words in your mouth would a better way of putting it be that you just think the whole balance of our societies is tilting too much one way rather than the other.

Yeah, and a lot of that demonization takes place on social media these days, doesn't it, Jim?

It does, of course, yeah.

This morning, you mentioned it's Tuesday.

We've had a report here in the UK from a combined Royal Colleges of Medicine about social media.

in which they compared the harms that social media do to smoking.

And I want to read a quote out to you.

This was written in November 2014 by an absolute genius, I have to say, a man with great foresight and perspicacity and all those other nice words.

And he wrote in a column in the Irish Times,

Like tobacco, social media will one day have to be regulated because of the harm that it does.

I'll bet you can never guess who wrote that in an Irish Times column, can you?

I think I'm looking at them.

Yes, you are, Jim.

You are indeed.

Now, I often berate forecasting and criticize forecasters, including myself, and always own up to getting it wrong, which I do most of the time.

But this column I'm particularly proud of this morning because, as I say, I wrote it 12 years ago.

And I likened, ironically, given the news from the Democratic Republic of Congo these days, tragically, I likened social media to Ebola in terms of the harm that it causes.

And this caused an absolute furore, not least amongst my erstwhile Irish Times colleagues, at least some of them, who, given that it was 2014, only a few short years after social media had come into existence, had completely fallen in love with it and thought that it was the future for everything.

And one or two of those colleagues actually hinted at the idea that my column was inappropriate, it should have been censored, and it should never have been published so much for colleagues.