The land of trolls

Next legal frontier ... Fighting social media's slaggers and blaggers ... It's a nasty world out in the "carriage service" ... How do you turn it off? ... Sylvia Varnham O'Regan reports 

Charlotte Dawson: hospitalised after being trolled

FOR increasing numbers of people social media is a hard habit to shake.

Once you're "plugged in", hours that could be spent with nose to the grindstone become hours spent trawling Facebook pages, looking at Instagram pictures, or reading nutty tweets.

Not so for Melbourne's Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, who announced earlier this month that he had had enough and was shutting down his Facebook page because of online harassment from internet "trolls". 

Linguistically, at least, the mayor was right up with the play.

In olden days, trolls were ugly creatures hiding under bridges and possibly frightening children. These days even the Oxford Dictionary defines a troll as ... 

"A message to a discussion group on the Internet that somebody deliberately sends to make other people angry; a person who sends a message like this." 

Twitter was also in danger from lord mayoral huffiness.

"I regret that I have had to shut my official Facebook down and maybe Twitter too due to offensive and abusive attacks. Up again ASAP."

Soon afterwards, the Twitter account Doyle had launched just days earlier was expunged.

Most of the online "abuse" Doyle had suffered came from Occupy Melbourne protesters.

Although the movement has lost most of its momentum, these indomitable types have been pushing Doyle to launch an enquiry into the Victorian Police's heavy-handed approach to removing them from City Square, Occupy Melbourne's informal HQ where they took up residence from October 2011.

Doyle had been claiming on his Twitter profile to want feedback from Melburnians:

But he didn't like the barrage of questions and comments that came his way under the #AskDoyle hashtag.

The fallout in the Twittersphere of Doyle's bow-out announcement was predictably scornful: 

Perhaps the Lord Mayor took the criticism to heart.

He has promised to get back in the social media swirl and has now reopened his Twitter account.

He's probably hopelessly hooked on cyber chat, or to paraphrase Decartes: "I tweet therefore I am."

When it comes to being ritually humiliated by tweets and Facebook posts, the Lord Mayor is in good company. 

British Olympic diver Tom Daley made headlines when he retweeted an abusive message he had been sent after coming fourth in the men's synchronised dive category at this year's games: 

Daley's father died of brain cancer last year.

Australia's Emily Seebohm also endured abuse after she won silver in the 100 metres backstroke and cried in disappointment.

The 17-year-old behind Daley's tweet also reportedly wrote:

"i'm going to find you and i'm going to drown you in the pool you cocky twat your a nobody people like you make me sick."

He was arrested in his Weymouth home on suspicion of malicious communication.

Days before in the UK a court had held that tweets fell under the Communications Act 2003.

In this case, a disgruntled air traveller, Paul Chambers, had tweeted that he would "blow up" his local airport out of frustration it was closed.

He was charged with sending a menacing communication in 2010. The High Court later overturned his conviction, finding the mental element required for the offence had not been established. 

There have been calls in the UK for new laws to deal with online abuse, but the coppers are not enthusiastic. According to a spokesman a new law is unnecessary and a "common sense approach" is what's needed. 

In Australia, a range of laws covering online abuse are being put to the test by a growing numbers of social media cases. 

In April, Sydney man Ravshan (Ronnie) Usmanov was sentenced to six months jail for posting nude images of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported this as, "the first social networking-related conviction in Australian history and one of just a handful in the world. 

But it hasn't been the last.

Last week, Bendigo man David McRoy, 22, was sentenced to four months in prison after he and a friend created a Facebook page ranking the sexual performance of women in central Victoria. 

McRoy pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to offend, and publishing objectionable material online.

Internet activity can have a devastating impact on those targeted, and the women who featured on McRoy's "root rate" page - some as young as 13 - were struggling with the long-term effects of his actions.

They are not alone.

On Thursday night (August 30), Australia's Next Top Model judge Charlotte Dawson was admitted to hospital after weeks of Twitter abuse.

The glamour puss had retweeted and responded to many abusive messages that came her way, but in the early hours of Wednesday morning wrote these massages of resignation, "Hope this ends the misery ... You win x". 

According to technology writer Asher Moses, Dawson shouldn't have reacted to her online abusers because it gave them more ammunition to keep at it. 

The problem is that trawling and trolling is just too damn tempting, particularly when it is anonymous.

As Joshua Rozenberg said in The Guardian recently:

"What Twitter users have to understand is that a tweet is not an email; it is a broadcast. It can be seen by anyone." 

@Sylviavarnham