The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson says he is abandoning Twitter because of the abuse he’s received recently over Corbyn.

In a series of tweets posted last night he said:

Actually I think I’m done here. I’m increasingly dismayed by the rancour accruing on all sides, even tho insults are my business.

It’s also my business to pillory the powerful and those aspiring to power, which is my entire beef with Corbyn & the Corbynites.

I was rather enthusiastic about yer man last year, & in depicting him I was certainly far more generous than to any other of my subjects, or than almost all my colleagues.

And yet, even then, I was attacked for being a vile Blairite, it seems for the blasphemy of even depicting Corbyn. That had a deeply alienating effect, like many of the other tactics deployed all round.

I’ve been trying to explain that here & elsewhere, but actually there seems to be absolutely no point. We seem to have collapsed into a kind of rebarbative uiversal solipsism, & social media is massively culpable. I think people don’t understand that this endless stream of opinion is not just in their heads, but published forever.

Well, I’ve had fun ranting for the last few years, & I hope you’ve found it amusing, but I can feel my soul withering within me each time I enter another dialogue of the deaf.

And, to be honest, my colleague &, I thought, my friend @ BellBelltoons telling me publicly to fuck off is too much. If that’s banter, the hell with it.

This place diminishes us all, so I’m off. I might still post the occasional link, but all in all I’ll stick to the drawing from here on in.

It’s been fun, folks, but whatever it’s been, it hasn’t been real. Ciao. Mxxx

You can read the tweets from here.

The ugly side of social media strikes again