MUCH as social media is demonised for its uncaring minority, I still believe that the good outweighs the bad, and that there is much gold to be panned amongst the cesspit of bile.

The collapse of Donald Trump’s Presidency will forever be seen as a landmark event in the story of social media and the ease with which alternative platforms like 4chan and Parler, were used to foment hate and division.

The way that Trump himself deployed Twitter to cultivate grievance and conspiracy theories was a masterclass in ill-will. What we must never forget is that it did not stop there, Trump also used the insinuating power of social media to mobilise a rag-bag army of misfits who within their midst hid a truly dangerous battalion of paramilitary insurrectionists. He used social media to orchestrate sedition.

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It easy to forget just how delusional the conspiracy theories that turbocharged support for Trump were. Amidst all the hectic media in and around the Capitol Building, I enjoyed watching Channel 4’s Matt Frei sitting quietly outside Comet Pizza on Connecticut Avenue reminiscing about taking his children there when they were young, when he was stationed in DC. Frei reminded the viewer that it was thus humble pizza restaurant that had been at the centre of baseless allegations of the existence of a child paedophile ring at the heart of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team. In his wily and evasive ways Trump knew it was a heap of nonsense but like his racist undermining of Barack Obama’s American citizenship, he never distanced himself from the detritus circulating on the web.

Trump’s impeachment is predicated not only on the seditious attack on the ­Capitol but a now lengthy charge-sheet of misdemeanours: moral untrustworthiness, an inherent bigotry and a self-serving ideology that challenged democracy itself.

Just as the web has provided fertile soil for conspiracy, so it has been an environment where people can collaborate to challenge the authors of that conspiracy and expose their enablers in government and the media.

On balance, I have faith that the collaborative nature of web-based social media will always out fox those whose humanity has been left to rot in the basements of life.

We can all play a role shining a torch on the darkness of the web. Janey Godley recently called out a misogynist culture of unionist men who have targeted Scots language activists like Iona Fyfe and Miss PunnyPennie. One of the latent powers of social media is the capacity to answer back and refuse to be cowed in the face of abuse.

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This week an online network of amateur sleuths like Colombo with laptops homed in on the myriad of photos and video streams from the chaos of Congress. It was reassuring to see so many people working in harmony to identify the insurrectionists, but more importantly to expose the darker workings of right-wing paramilitaries within their midst.

One significant piece of detective work was called #earpiece. Its objective was to identify the insurrectionists, mostly white men, who were wearing disguised earpieces or listening devices. The project separated out those who might just be ­listening to music or a podcast from those that had military headsets, higher quality short wave radio earpieces or short-wave ham radio devices.

Inevitably, without names to identify the wired men, the search took on the nomenclature of a spy novel as the sleuths started to access photographs of “two-hat man” and “down look man”, both prominent insurrectionists who were wearing what appeared to be quasi-military earpieces and at times were directing activities. The two hats, one bright orange was the collective choice of the Proud Boys who agree what to wear before every rally, raising the thought that their objective is to be seen, as much as to be effective.

Traditional print journalism has been all over these events. Although publication schedules mean they often lag behind rolling television news and the simultaneity of social media, they are still capable of doing in-depth journalism in a way that other don’t or can’t. The New York Times followed up the riots with a fascinating feature entitled Decoding the Far-Right Symbols of the Capitol Riots, a visual investigation by Matthew Rosenberg and Ainara Tiefentaler which tried to make sense of the bewildering array of neo-­fascist groups and coded language that has given undue force to Trump’s unpleasant presidency.

Borrowing on web imagery and ­amateur photography, the feature unpicked “The dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images … revealing an alternate political universe where violent extremists, outright racists and conspiracy theorists march side by side with evangelical Christians, suburban Trump supporters and young men who revel in making memes to ‘own the libs’”.

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Out in force at the Capitol were right-wing militias like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, whose symbol, the Roman numeral III, was widely displayed on patches and flags among the crowd. There can be no question that some of these groups are populated by naive hangers-on and by bar-room fantasists who get off on the illusion of importance, but it is equally true that among these militias are some seriously dangerous conspirators who would rather tear down democracy than see their leader, an overweight, orange-tanned reality TV star being outfoxed and out voted.

We have all had fun laughing at Jake ­Agnelli, above, the guy in the horns and torn fur jaiket who dominated imagery from inside the sacked building. But we should not laugh too long or too loud, behind the cos-play mavericks that stormed American democracy lurks a dangerous threat to good governance, not just in Washington but across the state capital buildings currently bracing themselves for more disruption.

It is not beyond the possible that a states’ right-wing militia, able to draw on local grievance, could stage yet another act of sedition. As Joan Donovan, the research director Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University said last week: “It’s often all a caricature — it looks like military fan fiction — until it’s not and it crosses a very dangerous line.”

One image that was on near ubiquitous display at the height of the rioting was the Gadsden flag, a yellow banner dating to the American Revolution which has an identifiable rattlesnake and the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me”. It serves two functions romantically linking the protesters back to the earliest days of the founding fathers but also implies that in the ­modern day the protestors feel beaten, betrayed, and subjugated.

The two symbols that hitherto mystified me were Pepe the Frog, the smirking cartoon amphibian with bulging eyes, and the green-and-white flags of Kekistan, the fictional country home to the God Kek, a god of chaos and darkness, who also has the head of a frog. If you think that sound deranged you’re right, its supposed to Pepe the Frog and The God of Kek are designed to infuriate, ridicule, and satirise well-intentioned liberals who the alt-right see as bereft of joy and fun.

In the week that Donald Trump became the first US President to be impeached twice and Washington entered military lockdown in preparation for Joe Biden’s forthcoming inauguration I will be eagle-eyed looking for “two-hat man” or any rogue references to Pepe the Frog.

That a cartoon frog could feature in a seditious campaign to overthrow electoral democracy is about as strange as it gets. We live in weird times.