Carter Reynolds' Twitter spat is a poor advert for social media

A banal spat between two teenagers tells a sorry tale of oversharing, the currency of teenage sexuality, and the vulnerability of growing up in public

I'm always quick to defend the internet against charges of toxicity. It is home to so much that's positive, but there's no doubting it can be a despairing space. Ellen Pao, former chief executive of Reddit, wrote earlier this week in the Washington Post that "the trolls are winning".

There's online misogyny, cyberbullying, hacking, and God knows how many irritating mailshots from political parties. And there's no better marker of how unfun the internet can be than the ongoing Twitter conversation between Vine star Carter Reynolds and his ex-girlfriend Maggie Lindemann, who split in December 2014.