'I would not say that I lost faith in Twitter, I would say that I lost faith in my ability to negotiate it,' says Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, technophile and a "twillionaire" having amassed more than a million followers on Twitter, yesterday explained what almost led him to commit "twitticide" last month and consider leaving the micro-blogging service.

"I would not say that I lost faith in Twitter, I would say that I lost faith in my ability to negotiate it," Fry said at a social networking conference in London yesterday.

"I don't know about you but whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining," he added, getting into his stride and echoing comments made by fellow comedian David Mitchell earlier this year about the standard of online commentary.

"Their resentment, their desire to be heard at the most vituperative level, at the most unpleasant and malevolent, genuinely ill-willed malevolent, level is terrifying and I am very often simply not able to cope with that," Fry said. "Twitter is usually not like that... [but] I found that the @ mentions were just getting... I could see these comments that would just make me upset."

"I have no excuse for getting upset. I am a public figure and should be strong enough and thick-skinned enough to take it but sometimes when I am a bit low I just could not take it and I kind of lost it for a while and thought, shall I commit twitticide? I have slowly eased my way back and it is great, but I just have to be aware of that issue."

His "hiccup" came at the end of a month that saw Twitter hit the headlines after the Guardian was gagged from reporting a question in parliament about the actions of oil company Trafigura and the "twitterverse" rose up in protest at an article by Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. Fry himself used Twitter to voice his own fury at Moir's column saying, "I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane".

Fry was speaking yesterday in a panel discussion about social networking, alongside Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, organised by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). During the debate he was asked by Tom Loosemore, who heads up Channel 4's 4IP innovation fund, whether there was a danger with the micro-blogging site that people would merely use it as a way of speaking to like-minded followers rather than engaging in real debate.

"It's a very British question: this idea that somehow we have a duty to put ourselves in the position where our enemies are allowed to speak to us and we have to hear them," Fry retorted. "There is something faintly disgusting in someone who merely wants to have sycophantic voices cooing in his ear and licking his inner thigh... but on the other hand it is a bit much that somehow people almost feel they have a right to be heard in their insulting of me. If I don't want to hear people being unpleasant about me I should have the right to turn it off."

"It's not like a cold shower: you must have a certain percentage of people telling you you are nothing and it's damn good for you."

Twitter co-founder Stone, meanwhile, was called upon to defend his company against the charge that tweets are pointless musing while social networking sites are making people more isolated as they turn to their computer screens rather than meeting people in real life.

"I may send out a tweet that is seemingly of little value to most people like, 'I am enjoying a beer at Logan International Airport in Boston' and someone may say, 'who cares?'," Stone said. "But someone else who is walking through the airport and receives that tweet on their mobile in real time could join me for a beer, and we could come up with an idea for a company that is wildly successful and we will have turned that lead into gold.

"That is happening a million times a second because people are communicating publicly. It is untrue that we are becoming more isolated because of these tools, I think we are connecting more and we are finding new ways to do good.

"A friend of mine asked me, 'what do you hope people will say about Twitter in five or 10 years?' and my answer to him, which I was surprised to hear myself say, was that I hope people will not consider Twitter a triumph of technology, instead that they will consider it a triumph of humanity."

"The idea that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. If people are more informed then they become more engaged and if they are more engaged then they can become more empathetic."