Bono has taken the keyboard warriors to task following a year in which he and the band endured more than their fair share of online invective. In a lengthy post entitled ‘Little Book of a Big Year: Bono’s A-Z of 2014’, the U2 frontman devoted B to ‘Blogosphere’.

“It's enough to put a fella off free speech...” he wrote. “The problem about finding out what people think is...you find out what they think. Who are these people? Well if they put their real names to their invective then I guess they are people like me—people with the audacity to think they have a thought or a feeling that others should hear about… if they are hiding, I'm not interested.”

The post continues: “If you're in an old pub here in Dublin, in fact most places, walk into the gents and further into the stalls; close the door and study the walls... nothing there... clean as a whistle. Where has all the graffiti gone? The bile and spleen, the grotesque drawing, the sexual meandering, the threats of violence to minorities? Where has it gone? It's on the blessed Internet. Scroll down... you know you're looking at your phone in the loo anyway.”