SOMETIMES, words can speak far louder than deeds, even when the deeds are as horrific as those at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris on Wednesday.

As a journalist, I instantly identified with the staff who were just going about their normal day’s work when the gunmen mowed them down. Every journalist and cartoonist knows there will be those who dislike what we publish, that is part of the job. We are not spin doctors pretending everything in the garden is rosy. Each dead or injured member of staff and police officer was as much a human being as you and me, with their hopes, families and friends. No-one had the right to gun them down.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what organisation you belong to or your motivation. It cannot, ever, justify murder under any circumstances in any place at any time. There has been a lot said about the gunmen attacking the freedom of the press and, again, as you would expect for a journalist, freedom of speech is sacred.

I endorse every word about the right of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists and writers to make us laugh and smile at their satire. But it was the use of words by the people of France and many European cities that I will remember about Wednesday, just as I remember a multitude of silent bats and cricket caps across the world.

Let me take you back to a warm November day at Sydney Cricket Ground when a cricket ball hit Australian batsman Phillip Hughes on the head and killed him.

Within hours, a man called Paul Taylor posted a picture of a bat with a cricket cap leaning against his Sydney front door as though left there after stumps were drawn. He used the hashtag “putoutyourbats” on Twitter.

The picture and phrase caught the imagination and in the next few days, thousands of bats were photographed silently leaning against all sorts of places across the world as individuals and organisations showed what they thought of his death. That it shouldn’t have happened.

On Wednesday night, great crowds gathered in squares in Paris and other cities in France and the rest of Europe including London with candles and cards bearing the words “Je suis Charlie”.

During the day the hashtag “’#jesuisCharlie” had gone viral on Twitter as a way of showing support and the magazine’s website displayed the words on black. Again, it was a mass expression against something that shouldn’t have happened.

Would those crowds have gathered had social media not existed? Possibly. Would they have been so large and so similar in their protest? Possibly not. As we saw in the Arab Spring, social media can mobilise huge masses of people very quickly and enable them to co-ordinate their statements as individuals or as crowds in a way impossible a few decades ago.

As an individual, rather than a journalist, I stopped what I was doing and watched those silent crowds on Wednesday night and identified with every one present.

For the deaths in Sydney and Paris, social media provided a way for countless people to exercise their freedom of expression and show what they thought . Thank goodness, the world realised that those gunmen in Paris are not typical Muslims and that their actions are not justification in any way for targeting Muslims. Twitter could so easily have been used on Wednesday to stir up hatred of Muslims in general. But it wasn’t. It was used to show solidarity with the dead.

I hope the gunmen look at Twitter and see what the world thinks of them. I hope it makes them realise they represent no-one but themselves and that they are murderers who need locking up to protect the rest of us.