THEY say for every action there is a reaction. And a Twitter reaction is quite a thing - just ask David Moyes.

Before I come in for more of the same, I would add what follows here is not to condone Moyes’s at best daft and at worst downright sexist comment to BBC reporter Vicki Sparks, when the Sunderland manager suggested she might ‘get a slap’.

Yet the level of aggressive hyperbole and excessive disdain that greeted Moyes’s 1970s discourse was about as far from relative as it’s possible to get - even in 2017 when overreacting to some kind of ‘scandal’ seems to be the order of the day. Every day.

I’ll be honest. I felt for Moyes as he sat, shoulders down, and apologised for something that used to be known in the trade as a ‘joke’. A crass, ill-advised and wholly inappropriate one, but a joke nonetheless.

And the most baffling part of the whole scenario? Vicki Sparks was laughing when the words left Moyes’s mouth. She may well have been pretty offended, too, however and Moyes apologised to her for the comment. Line drawn, drama over you might think. But you’d be wrong.

Welcome to justice, Twitter-style.

From Sunderland FC’s perspective, bottom of the Premier League, the last thing the club needed was its manager leading the news for anything other than poor results on the field. So they put him in front of the press and he said sorry again.

But the social media mob was not satisfied. ‘He must be sacked, re-educated and tarnished forever more as a sexist bigot. Or preferably all three’, they shouted, with the kind of hysteria usually reserved for Donald Trump and Mexican walls.

The question the ‘Tweet now think later’ brigade neglected to ask, as they linked Moyes’s comments, disgustingly, to actual cases of domestic violence against women, was: Would David Moyes actually have slapped Vicki Sparks? I think not.

To draw comparisons with what Moyes said and those women caught in the sadistic, often unescapable trap of domestic violence is to lower in our thinking and their seriousness the heinous crimes that we have reported, raised awareness and provided commentary on extensively in these very pages during the 15 years I have worked here.

The Alf Garnett age is, thankfully, long behind us as a nation and although they’ll always be the Tyson Furys (look up his comments about women if you dare), if we can no longer see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears when someone is joking, what does that mean we have become?

We’re losing our sense of perspective, our sense of humour. Our ability as human beings to make reasoned, rational judgements, to take stock, is rapidly becoming eroded in a world where the number of ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’ carries more clout than being a well-rounded person.

David Moyes, who I have met for what it’s worth, appears to be a well-rounded person, albeit one who needs to work on his sense of humour. He made an error of judgement in an age when errors of judgement are feasted on. Is that a crime for which he should be publicly vilified and branded a ‘potential domestic abuser’? No it is not, but those taking in vain the seriousness of domestic violence and the domino effect of horror it inflicts on so many prove that, quickly following behind the reactionary old git that was Alf Garnett, our sense of perspective and decency has gone out the window.