Twitter was set alight on Thursday after an unedifying and ill-considered exchange between a nationalist MP and a millionaire children's author.

Welcome to politics in 2016, where an instant reaction can dominate the next day's front pages and in the most extreme cases, extend a politician's free time considerably.

Undoubtedly inspired by a similarly dignified beef between Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa, Natalie McGarry (elected for the SNP but currently whipless after a charity donations row) and JK Rowling (Harry Potter author, multi-millionaire and much-vaunted No voter) were yesterday evening's combatants.

The row itself was fairly anodyne, compared to the best examples, with McGarry taking issue with the misogynistic outbursts of someone JK had exchanged messages with.

After a poorly photoshopped screengrab and a hasty threat of litigation, the two parties stood down, but not before almost every media outlet in the country (and beyond) had taken notice.

Ms McGarry is not the first MP to get into a tangle on Twitter they might want to forget. Luckily we are here to remind you (and them) of some of the more rash social media outbursts from our elected officials.

Emily Thornberry was an up-and-coming shadow cabinet minister when managed to create a Twitter explosion with just three words and a picture.

During election campaigning, the Labour MP posted the picture above showing a house draped in the English flag, igniting claims of snobbery and claims of 'London elitism'. It was an ill-thought tweet, which played into the hands of UKIP who were then courting white working class voters who felt unrepresented by Labour.

An embarrassing faux-pas. But then, in the political equivalent of burning your house down because there is a spider inside, she actually resigned.

A textbook example of how not to manage a Twitter row.

Many high-profile tweeters have a "retweets are not endorsements" attached to their profile.

But this was not enough to save SNP MSP Sandra White, when an anti-Semitic cartoon was retweeted from her account.

She claims the action was done accidentally, and it was quickly removed, but still faces a probe over the image.

Michael Fabricant is probably best known by the general public for being the politician who looks most like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.

But he also gained a level of infamy after a tweet in which he joked about punching a female journalist in the throat.

No stranger to controversy, the Conservative MP managed to ride out the row with a garbled series of apologies on the social media site.

Brooks Newmark had undoubtedly the most damaging Twitter exchange on this list.

After exchanging tweets with a what appeared to be a young "Tory PR girl", he sent a number of messages featuring less acceptable parts of his anatomy.

Unfortunately for the Conservative MP, "she" turned out to be a male journalist working for the Sunday Mirror.

A swift apology was followed by him stepping down at the 2015 election after "press intrusion".

The new intake of SNP MPs have faced a number of rows in the months since they were elected in the nationalist tidal wave in May.

MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, Dr Paul Monaghan, has courted controversy a number of times.

Tweets he posted before being elected were found by a number of newspapers, and he was forced to say sorry for the offending messages.

But this tweet from 2012 was possibly the worst of a bad bunch, and Dr Monaghan made a further apology.

While many of the politicians on this Hall of Shame have had their careers significantly damaged by their hasty tweeting, but that does not always need to be the case.

Some have undermined their carefully crafted public image by blurting our their innermost thoughts in 140 characters.

For how to do Twitter right, we must look to the future of our political landscape, and to those who may shape society in years to come.

Enter Mhairi Black, elected aged 20 and the youngest MP for 350 years.

She is one of the brightest stars at Westminster and a tireless campaigner for her Paisley constituency, and committed to presenting a positive case for Scottish independence.

An article about the perils of politicians using social media would not be complete without her, aged 14.