Chris Johns

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.

The dates of social media relative to when I wrote that in 2014 are interesting because WhatsApp had only existed since 2009.

Instagram since 2010.

Twitter was only a few years old as well.

And so we were all madly in love with it.

So as I say, I was amazingly well foresight, had a lot of foresight.

So enough self-praise.

But this report from the UK Royal Colleges of Medicine, I think is well-timed.

I do think social media is corroding everything.

I've gone off on one of that about several times on this spot, so I won't do it again.

refer to a comment made by Jess Phillips, who has recently resigned as the Minister for Safeguarding Women and Girls.

who, after she had resigned, said all of these problems being caused by social media could be solved by the companies concerned in 10 minutes flat if they wanted to.

And you wouldn't need legislation or regulation if the social media companies just did what their own technology allowed them to do.

But she simply says they don't want to do it because it would hurt their profits.

At least that's what I think she implied, the profitability point.