If it weren’t for the small matter of Britain going to the polls, 8 June 2017 might be remembered for a very different reason. After a Twitter rampage of unprecedented destruction – harassing the mayor of London just hours after a terror attack, ending diplomatic ties with Qatar, and sabotaging his own supreme court appeal on immigration – it was the same day Donald Trump’s Twitter stream fell silent. The president who singlehandedly weaponised the social media site as a means of state-sponsored trolling, finally stepped away from his phone.

Since this was the day that James Comey testified before the Senate intelligence committee, the silence was not accidental. White House aides were reduced to “counter-programming”, having to stack the president’s schedule with a stream of meetings and public events to keep him away from the TV. It’s a sign of how serious the Comey testimony is for Trump that he took the unusual step of listening to his exasperated staff and exercising Twitter discipline.

Unhinged tweets helped build the brand that made him president. “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here,” he once said, boasting of his 100 million followers. And unhinged tweets – not least the one threatening Comey with tapes of their now notorious conversation – could also bring him down.

But should we regard Trump’s Twitter diarrhoea – one in 10 tweets from Trump’s personal account are rants about the FAKE MSM (mainstream media) – as official presidential statements? Trump certainly seems to regard them that way. “MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use social media,” he tweeted last week. “They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.”

Sean Spicer confirmed recently that Trump tweets are as official as official can be. Yet others like Kellyanne Conway and Sebastian Gorka have desperately – and necessarily if the US government is to retain any credibility with its partners –dismissed them as lighthearted banter of no geopolitical consequence.

Perhaps not inappropriately, on this side of the Atlantic, Britain’s own unhinged reactionary motormouth Katie Hopkins has helped provide some much-needed clarity. When columnist Jack Monroe successfully sued Hopkins for suggesting she condoned vandalising war memorials, the case turned in part on whether Twitter is sufficiently authoritative to cause defamatory harm. Unlike newspapers or magazines, Hopkins tried to argue, on Twitter, anything goes.

“Well-established rules are perhaps easier to apply in the case of print publications … than in the more dynamic and interactive world of Twitter, where short bursts of pithily expressed information are the norm,” judge Mr Justice Warby said. “But it is, to my mind, an inescapable conclusion that the ordinary reasonable reader of the [tweet] would understand it to mean that Ms Monroe condoned and approved of scrawling on war memorials, vandalising monuments commemorating those who fought for her freedom.” That, he said, made it just as libellous as anything set out in a more traditional publication.

As usual the clunky mechanisms of state are slower at getting to grips with social media than the rest of us. I remember trying with exasperation to teach the supreme court judge David Neuberger how to use Twitter in 2011 when I was legal correspondent for this paper. For one of the most brilliant legal minds in the country, composing a 140-character missive on his phone seemed to pose quite a mental hurdle. In the Monroe v Hopkins case, Warby felt Twitter was so unfamiliar he attached an appendix to his judgment called “How Twitter works”.

Trump, on the other hand, has worked out perfectly how Twitter works: as a way of playing to his fanbase, to great effect. But he’s been using it in a legal and diplomatic vacuum, the consequences of which are beginning to catch up with him. Not unlike Hopkins, actually. He could do well to learn from her fate.

Bill Maher backlash

Other high-profile Americans are doing a good job of reminding us that good old fashioned media is quite enough of a platform to make offensive and upsetting remarks. Earlier this month Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time talk show, replied to a senator who invited him to work in the fields in Nebraska: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger!”

There aren’t that many things you can’t say in America, but as a white person, comments making fun of African-American enslavement are definitely among them. Is it really that hard to remember? Maher did apologise, but that did little to dampen calls for his show to be cancelled. Meanwhile his black ex-girlfriend Coco Johnsen told journalists that Maher had form for using racial slurs, having done so to degrade her when they dated in the early 2000s. If political correctness has “gone mad”, as we’re so often told, it’s obviously not gone mad enough.

It’s since emerged that Maher wants to invite Milo Yiannopoulos – the inflammatory and bigoted “alt-right” firebrand – back on his show. Maher already helped lend Yiannopoulos credibility as a mainstream figure in the media by having him as a guest on Real Time back in February. If the plan is to have a guest offensive enough to detract attention from his own racist slurs, then yep, Milo’s your man.

Body-positive movement comes of age

In the body-positive community, working out who is on the side of progressiveness and who is not can be a little more complicated. Ashley Graham, the plus-size supermodel credited with helping shift the fashion industry away from its obsession with skinny women, came under fire last week for an interview in which she admitted she does not always feel great about her figure. “There are some days I feel fat,” Graham said.

Big mistake.

“I AM FAT EVERYDAY STOP SAYING THIS CRAP ASHLEY,” fumed one “radical fat acceptance” plus-size fashion blogger. “Fat women are oppressed every day. It has nothing to do with how we FEEL. It has everything to do with systemic hatred.”

There is undoubtedly systemic hatred towards fat women – challenging as they do patriarchal ideas of femininity and how it can be manipulated for profit. By taking it on, the body-positive movement is one of the best things to happen to western women in my lifetime, I reckon, and is genuinely changing our relationship with our own bodies. It’s confronting the toxic message – perpetuated in fashion and the media for so long – that only white skin, a thin body and glossy hair are attractive. People within the movement attacking each other is probably a sign of its coming of age and diversifying. I’m not sure about the idea that we all have to feel great all the time, though. Isn’t that just as bad as the body fascism it’s replaced?

Helping young journalists

Friends and colleagues of the late journalist Steve Hewlett are to launch a series of scholarships in his name. The Royal Television Society and the Media Society are backing the schemes to help young people across the country from lower-income families pursue a career in journalism. The appeal will be launched on Monday by Steve’s sons Freddie, Billy and Bertie on Radio 4’s PM in an interview with Eddie Mair.