HE alone, who owns the youth, gains the future. So said Hitler, who could not possibly have foreseen the invention of the world wide web and how its youthful users would rise to become today’s dictators.

About two-thirds of social media users are under the age of 34 and most internet trolls are Millennials. That is, people who reached young adulthood in the early 21st century and would be aged about, oh, 34 now.

And they’ve got all those years of trolling experience behind them too.

The dreadful thing is that the rest of us are allowing ourselves to be dictated to by these awful people, revealed by a recent study by Canadian academics to have the psychopathy of sadists who get pleasure from making other people suffer.

Mostly men, they have high levels of cognitive empathy that make them adept at recognising what will upset someone, and knowing when they’ve pushed the right buttons.

Trolls will lie, exaggerate and offend to get a response. As the authors wrote: “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun and the internet is their playground.”

We all know that trolls are nasty, that’s why they are named after the ugly cave-dwelling creatures of fairy tales, so why do we all fall at their feet in submission?

Twitter trolls get to decide what we say, what we think and what we do. They affect public opinion and policy on issues such as immigration and Brexit, they control what is considered PC or non-PC, and they also affect what we see on the television.

Jennifer Saunders, one half of the comedy duo French and Saunders, told the Cheltenham Literature Festival that she would not be able to write some of her edgier comedy now because of the “tutting”.

“I think it is harder to write what we used to write now,” said the creator of TV’s Absolutely Fabulous.

“There is always someone tutting in the back of your mind every time you write a joke that is on the edge: ‘Don’t you think someone might be offended?’ It’s very tiring.

“I do look back at stuff we’ve done in the past and think: ‘Oh God, the Twittersphere would go mad’.”

And she has experience of that. When French and Saunders used the phrase “fudge-packer” in a sketch celebrating their 30th anniversary, critics on Twitter accused them of homophobia and using derogatory language about gay men.

It reminds me of the Twitterati watching the mostly last-century American sitcom Friends for the first time when it became available on Netflix, self-importantly pronouncing it racist, sexist and homophobic because they lacked the wit to understand it was made in a different era.

These sadists otherwise known as trolls must laughing themselves stupid at the attention paid to their toxic ramblings. Every time we take what they post seriously, we encourage them more and it increases their power over us.

The saddest thing is that trolls are able to remain anonymous so we are in thrall to complete strangers or a loved one. It could be your relative, your friend, your partner, your neighbour or your colleague, but you wouldn’t ever know it.

We need to grow up and understand that not only are trolls sadists whose words we really shouldn’t take any notice of but also that what they write should not be taken to reflect general public opinion.

If the majority of trolls are men aged 34 and under, it leaves out the vast majority of women in that age group as well as everyone else, both men and women, aged over 34. According to my quick mental calculation, that puts trolls in a minority.

If you accept that we live by majority rule in this country, why the hell are we listening to this small group of warped individuals? They shout the loudest, that’s why. We’re behaving with the kind of intimidated fright you feel when an angry man summons up his loudest voice to shout right in your face. It doesn’t matter what they say, you just nod and do it. He who shouts loudest gets heard.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is “disappointed” that his creation has been misused. He blames the huge platforms that he says “control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared”.

How satisfying it would be if we collectively forced the loud shouting of sadists to fall on deaf ears, if we thwarted their sadistic tendencies by paying them no attention whatsoever and, best of all, revealed their true identities on the same platforms that gave them their voices in the first place. Otherwise, they dictate our futures.