Below is a graph of the inward tweets to five British journalists, @piersmorgan @bbclaurak @peston @adamboultonSKY @BethRigby on the "media scum" hashtag yesterday. Between 3 and 5pm UTC, just five of them received hundreds of tweets tagged "media scum". This is cyberharassment 
These attacks can amount to what might be called by @RSF_inter as "press freedom predators" - who generally operate according to the following criteria. [And it's not just the right that do this, although the analysis above is mostly right-wing accounts]
@DrPicornell asked if we can identify top predators. We can, to an extent.Within my sample, we can see which accounts sent the most replies and mentions to the aforementioned journalists. Top 5 include @davcol1 @hickeyatwork @bankersreform @Coupdtat4 @DADickinson62 [Includes RTS]
A quick addendum. The media are holding a high level government official accountable, which is fundamental in a liberal democracy. Calling them'media scum' when they are interrogating power as opposed to say, tapping phone calls, is cyber harassment, not the essence of democracy
This is just a sample of a campaign in which I selected five journalists, happening yesterday in a liberal democracy. If you extrapolate this across the world, across all forms of journalism, and you'll see this is endemic. Very troubling cc @RSF_en
note: To be clear, it's hard to say what proportion of accounts here are genuine people, sockpuppets bots or otherwise. It's usually a combination of all three. By definition, they are all engaging in, trolling and/or harassment. It is unacceptable however you cut it.
A lot of the responses to this thread have involved whataboutism or deflection. Mostly, 'what about the scrum of journalists outside Cummings's house'. It's irrelevant to the case at hand, not least because none of them are the ones getting the most abuse on Twitter #CumGate
