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In the realm of Twitter insults, it was at the far end of mild. “Much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit ... boring,’’ a Twitter user called brumplum wrote on Saturday, speaking of the tweets of Stephen Fry, the British writer, actor and television personality.

But that little tweet set off a frenzy of vitriolic attacks and counterattacks on Twitter, drawing an untold number of people into an increasingly charged debate and thrusting brumplum — in reality a glasses-wearing man from Birmingham, England, named Richard — unhappily into the public’s angry glare. It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter to distribute information and to sway the opinions of vast groups of people in tiny amounts of time.

It was also an example of how Twitter reinforces the tendency of adults to behave like high school students, passing rude notes, spreading exaggerated rumors and obsessing endlessly — and pointlessly — about who said what mean thing about whom.

In any case, after brumplum sent his mildly critical tweet, Fry somehow found out about it, and it made him feel terrible. It made him feel so terrible, he tweeted, that he was considering quitting Twitter altogether on account of all the “aggression and unkindness around.’’

And the matter would have rested there, probably, were it not that Fry, a much-loved figure who has spoken openly about his crippling depression and about being bipolar, has more than 934,000 followers and is one of the most widely read Twitter users in Britain.

His much-publicized tweets in February, about being stuck in an elevator for 45 minutes, did as much to raise Twitter’s profile here as the photograph Ashton Kutcher posted on Twitter of the rear end of his wife, Demi Moore, did two months later.

When Fry’s followers heard of his distress, they tended to do two things: offer their support and criticize his antagonist.

And suddenly Richard from Birmingham, who says on his Twitter profile that he writes “one-line movie reviews, and more,’’ found himself the target of a stream of unpleasant, even abusive, tweets.

Among the most upsetting, to him at least, were those from the well-known British actor and comedian Alan Davies. Davies, who is a friend of Fry’s and has more than 104,000 Twitter followers, called Richard a “moron,’’ and worse.

The story was then picked up by a variety of news outlets, including the BBC and The Sunday Times.

The ganging up on Twitter against people who have somehow run afoul of others has become increasingly common here. The same thing happened last month when the journalist Jan Moir wrote a column in The Daily Mail criticizing the lifestyle of Stephen Gately, a gay member of the pop band Boyzone who was found dead at 33 in his vacation apartment in Majorca.

Many people — including Fry — believed that the article had homophobic undertones, and said so on Twitter, where Moir then became one of the topics of hate du jour. An organized campaign helped ensure that her article led to about 23,000 formal complaints to the Press Complaints Commission of Britain.

The latest imbroglio seems to have ended a bit more sedately, though. Fry, who said he was feeling “more sheepish than a sheep,’’ has apologized to brumplum for causing him any trouble, and brumplum has apologized for making Fry feel bad.

Brumplum, meanwhile, has been pondering on his blog how in the world he suddenly became famous, and how his fame moved so quickly from the Web to the mainstream media.

On Twitter, he said he was shocked at how many more followers he had picked up since the whole thing started (he now has more than 1,200). He began with “340 followers,’’ he wrote. “Last night just over 800. Now it’s over 1,000. People! I guarantee I’m not worth it! *redface*,’’ he wrote. 


NY Times