Troll Hunting: a Look at the Dark Side of the Internet

The Telegraph ^ | September 16th, 2011 | Tom Chivers

[nickcarraway]

The word “troll” no longer conjures up a dumpy little plastic figure with brightly coloured hair: nor a monster from The Lord of the Rings. If you live even a part of your life online, you’ll know that trolls today are better known as the angry and usually anonymous commenters on web forums, whose aim is to shock, offend, annoy or upset fellow users.

Trolling made headlines this week when Sean Duffy, a young man from Reading, was given 18 weeks’ imprisonment for defacing Facebook tributes to four dead teenagers whom he had never met. The abuse was vile: on a tribute page to Natasha MacBryde, who had committed suicide, he added: “Natasha wasn’t bullied, she was just a whore.” About Lauren Drew, who died after an epileptic fit, he wrote: “I can’t get out of my coffin, I have scratched my nails to the bone.” And “Help me Mummy, it’s hot in Hell.” Duffy led a “miserable existence” and, according to his lawyer, suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that can make it hard to empathise with others. But his behaviour – while extreme – is similar to that of certain commenters on sites across the internet. Another notorious case, in 2008, saw a young American girl, Megan Meier, driven to suicide, it was claimed, by bullying on the social site MySpace.

India Knight, the novelist and columnist, wrote some years ago of the abuse meted out to Gerry and Kate McCann, the parents of Madeleine, who, as a three-year-old, went missing in Portugal in 2007.

“If you haven’t read what is on the internet about the McCanns, you wouldn’t believe it,” she writes. “Trawling through the sites to find these quotes is like a trip through the darkest recesses of people’s most ungenerous minds.”

[calex59]

This is not out of the scope of free speech. Writing something on the internet is not going to start a panic. He didn’t yell the equivalent of fire. All he did was insult the he** out of people. They may have a slander case against him if they decided to sue him but jail time is over the top. The whole idea of free speech is that the person saying the speech is allowed to say things that may be difficult for others to hear and not suffer any retribution for it.

[calex59]

Free speech means being able to say what ever the he** you want even if the people hearing it are "offended". Law suits are designed to keep slander down to a minimum but jail time is over the top. As one person pointed out yelling fire in a crowded building is not defensible.

Also, going to a funeral and blocking and yelling is not the same thing as typing something on the internet. You, and one other guy on this thread, think someone should go to jail simply because they said something disgusting, that isn't the way this country works, or shouldn't be at any rate.

I was right any way, this happened in GB and not the US. We haven't sunk so low that people's opinions of what someone else said can land you in jail, unless of course you say it about Bozo.

Tell me the difference between Obama not liking what people say about him and wanting to jail people and what you advocate?

[Vanders9]

Woah...hold on. I did not advocate anything. I certainly didnt advocate sending people to jail because they say something disgusting. I just said that you cannot let the right to free speech be an absolute trump over every other right (because otherwise it becomes a kind of tyranny itself).

[Vanders9]

That’s true...they did invite comments.

[Vanders9]

I find your assertions particularly ironic, as my main statement on this (comment #9) has been removed by the moderators! Yeah, you can say whatever the he$$ you like ok...