Welcome to the latest Shopper Rant opinion column which questions why so much fuss was made about the Raoul Moat Facebook tribute page. Join the debate by adding your comments.

LAST week a northern woman of clearly limited intelligence remarkably managed to hit some buttons in the right order on her computer to create a tribute page on Facebook.

This might ordinarily be considered a great accomplishment for Siobhan O'Dowd but it was overshadowed by what her ‘RIP RAOUL MOAT YOU LEGEND’ page went on to achieve.

Somehow this dappy O’Dowd woman pulled off the feat of becoming a national laughing stock and hate figure at the same time.

She hoped to generate sympathy for the Tyneside killer but instead she set off a tsunami of ridicule in her own direction as people pointed and guffawed at how stupid and misguided one human being could be for branding a killer like ‘Moaty’ a legend.

At the same time people were venomous in their criticism, bewildered by how such a tribute page could possibly be allowed to exist.

Due to the hysteria surrounding the Raoul Moat case, the page rapidly gained huge notoriety.

People up and down the country, including David ‘Soundbite’ Cameron, were outraged that anyone would want to show even a flicker of compassion towards a man who had shot three people, killing one of them.

The disgust went further, with shrieking demands for Facebook to remove the page. The company rightly resisted, though the page was eventually taken down by the founding woman herself – probably when she hit delete by mistake.

Depicting Moat as some sort of anti-hero and setting up a web page in his honour are clearly not the actions of a right-minded person.

But the sentiments expressed aren’t unique to that case.

News Shopper has had plenty of online tributes paid to plenty of similar people in the past.

There have been “fallen soldier” comments about slain gang members while yobs who have gone out, stolen cars and then crashed them have been described as “little angels”.

We’ve seen it time and time again – no matter how terrible the act that has caused someone’s death, no matter how much of an apparent low-life they were, there will always be people queuing up to defend them.

Siobhan O'Dowd and her grubby little followers aren’t the first people to show misdirected sympathy towards a criminal and they won’t be the last.

It’s been a real head-scratcher trying to figure out why such widespread offence has been caused by something which is neither new nor special.

Comments which the majority of people will consider are in bad taste will always be posted. Inflammatory reactions which seek to excuse the terrible deeds of someone who has caused harm to others or put lives at risk are going to happen.

It’s called the internet and this is what it does. Instead of yelling for censorship why not simply try hitting the off button on your computer if you don’t want to see things which are likely to offend you.

This column in no way reflects the official position of News Shopper or its parent company.

What do you think? Can you understand why anyone would ever want to defend the actions of a criminal? Should there by sympathy towards Raoul Moat? Was there an over-reaction to the Facebook tribute page? Add your comments below.

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