Mark Textor is probably the best political pollster in the country. He has shaped many election campaigns. He was even busy polling over the weekend. Textor has a sophisticated grasp of politics but is also a Darwin-raised rough-nut with a colourful turn of phrase and is happy to bash around on Twitter.

That was until the death threats and a massive spam attack started coming. And the hate mail. On Friday, Textor's usually busy Twitter account was nowhere to be found. A fake account had emerged in its place. Puzzled, I called him on Saturday. He told me he had suspended his account. ''Too many death threats.'' After talking to him about the threats, which came from Indonesia, I'm sure that they were not figments of his imagination.

When I posted this on Twitter, there was an outpouring of approval from people who either dismissed the threats as untrue or applauded them as deserved, or amusing, or both. Such is the underbelly of Twitter.

Textor had made a serious mistake. Not only had he used Twitter to compare the outspoken foreign minister of Indonesia to a Filipino porn star, it had not registered on him that with Tony Abbott as prime minister he no longer had the latitude for public brawling. He certainly did not help his client, the Liberal Party, whose leader was busy drafting a letter of explanation and atonement to the Indonesian government, demanded by Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, after revelations that he and his wife had had their personal phones tapped by Australian security.