There are times when glibness and jokes are in just plain bad taste and today was certainly one of them.

This afternoon’s tragic incident in which a Porsche supercar crashed into spectators, leaving 26 people injured, and several in critical condition, including a six-year-old girl, at the charity event Paqpaqli ghall-Istrina has shocked the whole island. It was therefore extremely inappropriate for a DJ with Radio 101 to make what he thought were a series of “funny” comments on Facebook.

He eventually realized that he had made a serious error of judgement, deleted the comments and apologised, but not before people had taken a screen shot and his comments had gone viral.  Although I do have a copy of the screen shot, I have decided not to share it out of respect for the victims and their families.

His behaviour, unfortunately, is not unique. It has become symptomatic of the shoot-from-the hip kind of commentary which we see almost every day. Politicians, public figures and other VIPs treat the social media as some kind of virtual living room where they crack dubious jokes with their friends and speak with a looseness which is usually reserved for private conversations. It seems like there are no boundaries any more, no sense of what is done or not done, which should come naturally to us, but which apparently has become so blurred and foggy that many – too many – simply shrug and say, “u iva so what?”

Likewise, the public too has become too quick on the draw to fire off all sorts of speculations the minute something like this happens, jumping to so many conclusions that it makes you wonder why they are not employed by the FBI or CIA to solve its worst cases.

Is it too much to try and show some respect towards those who were injured and just keep silent?

I also think there really needs to be more restraint shown when it comes to the posting of invasive photos and videos of incidents such as this. Everyone thinks they are paparazzi and, unfortunately, with newsrooms encouraging people to send them footage, the line of what is ethically and morally acceptable has been crossed too many times. The thought of people videotaping what happened, with the injured laying there bleeding, in order to be the first to share it online, is just ghoulish.  You, dear public, are not media professionals who are trained (hopefully) on how to photograph and videotape these things and you do not have editors who give you certain guidelines on just what can be published. I dread to think what will happen if this turns into some kind of trend with people whipping out their phones every time they see a car crash.

One positive aspect has come out of all this however: apparently so many people turned up to give blood that the blood bank could not cope and has asked them to return tomorrow.

That is the side of Malta I prefer to see, not the Malta which picks up its smartphone and starts taking photos, or the Malta which rushes to its FB status to tap out the first thoughtless remarks it can come up with.