The Day Leo Traynor Confronted His Troll

McGruber writes "Dublin-based writer Leo Traynor has written a piece about confronting the troll who drove him off Twitter, hacked his Facebook, and abused and terrified his family. Quoting: 'I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DMs, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. ... Then one day something happened that truly frightened me. I don't scare easily but this was vile. I received a parcel at my home address. Nothing unusual there – I get lots of post. I ripped it open and there was a Tupperware lunchbox inside full of ashes. There was a note included, saying, "Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz." I was physically sick. ... In July I was approached by a friend who's basically an IT genius, and he offered some help. He said that he could trace the hackers and trolls for me using perfectly legal technology, which would lead to their IP addresses. I said yes. Then I baited them – I was deliberately more provocative toward them than ever I'd been before.'"

Re:Keywords

[wordsnyc]

There are a lot of people arguing that this whole story is a fable; the IT guy the author presents to defend his account is a feckless bullshitter. Basically it's a case of two guys who don't know that they don't know the technical difficulties in what they claim to have done. The whole thing is embarrassing and annoying.

Re:At what point...

[Kohath]

Paragraph 13 of the original story. It's a good read.

The cops can't protect anyone. They just show up after you're dead and string up crime scene tape. In the UK you're not allowed to protect yourself either -- it undermines government authority.

Re:At what point...

[Anonymous Coward]

would of --> would have

please

Re:Trolling?

[bloodhawk]

yep it isn't actually trolling at all. It seems nowadays any bad or obnoxious behaviour gets labeled with troll, I guess this is what happens when people try to use a catchy term without actually understanding what it means.

The Authoritarian Personality

[microbox]

A good beating will modify the behaviour of anyone dramatically.

Evidence shows that punishment like this only modifies behaviour whilst the threat continues. Remove the threat, and you'll find nothing changed. This has been very precisely studied.

Medieval crowd control methods as practised by the Catholic Church and Vlad the Impaler, still work just as efficiently today, as it did back then.

Gee... you must be an authoritarian personality [wikipedia.org]. People are different. They are not all like you. Most are not like you. You cannot project your experience of life onto others. Perhaps medieval crowd control would be good for you -- but for the rest of us, it will just create a spiral of violence. Like the violence in medieval times.

Re:Happened to me in high school.

[phantomfive]

It's a little worrisome that you've bought into this self-defense thing so much that you are considering wearing body armor everywhere you go. Statistically speaking you will never see an average civilian gunfight. But in any case kevlar is cheap, you can get a real vest instead of some ghetto body armor. It will be better.