Death of an Internet Troll

[Prime Time]

http://news.yahoo.com/death-british...1337A00371.html;_ylt=AwrBEiRa9TtU40oAoEnQtDMD

Death of British 'troll' sparks debate over Internet bile
By Ruth Holmes

London (AFP) - The death of a British woman accused of a vicious campaign of online abuse against the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann has ignited debate over the growing scourge of Internet "trolls".

Brenda Leyland was found dead in a hotel room earlier this month after being confronted by Sky News over her alleged trolling of Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007.

An investigation is ongoing, but has found no evidence of foul play or third party involvement.

Using the Twitter handle @Sweepyface the 63-year-old reportedly posted thousands of hate-filled messages about the couple.

Her name figured on an 80-page dossier compiled by members of the public cataloguing alleged abuse directed at the couple and their two other children from a long list of Internet users, which is currently being investigated by the police.

It is a trend that has been replicated the world over against high-profile figures.

Zelda Williams, the daughter of US actor Robin Williams, recently quit Twitter after Internet trolls posted fake photos claiming to be her dead father.


In this November 13, 2011 file photo, US actor and comedian Robin Williams and his daughter Zelda

Former model Charlotte Dawson, who was found dead at her Sydney apartment in February after battling depression, had been subjected to a torrent of abuse on Twitter.

- Global challenges -

"Every country is facing these challenges," said British lawyer Mark Stephens.

"What they are doing is meeting the challenges in slightly different ways but ultimately very similar balances are being struck."

The media lawyer said he had seen "a significant upswing" in online bullying cases.

But criminal prosecution, said Stephens, should be reserved for the most extreme cases.

"It is only a very small minority who are fixated, who take it to the extreme -- people who are borderline certifiable," he argued.

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has instructed lawyers that messages sent via social media could be a criminal offence if they contain "credible threats of violence" or target an individual in a way that "may constitute harassment or stalking".

"Grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false" messages could also amount to a crime if a "public interest" case can be made.

These guidelines, introduced against a background of mounting confusion about such cases, have been shaped considerably by public opinion, said Chris Holder, of London law firm Bristows.

"I think people are so fed up with reading things on the Internet that you would not say to people's faces -- abusive messages to people's children, Facebook posts that are completely obnoxious. The public have demanded that the CPS do something about it," he said.

He acknowledges, however, that in the fast moving world of the Internet any guidelines "could become irrelevant".

- Locking up 'trolls' -

Over the past decade the number of successful prosecutions for communications offences has risen in Britain and custodial sentences are not uncommon.

Last month a man was jailed for 18 weeks for what British prosecutors described as "a campaign of hatred" against a female lawmaker.

Peter Nunn, 33, from Bristol, southwest England, bombarded Stella Creasy with abusive tweets after she supported a campaign by feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez to put the image of novelist Jane Austen on the £10 note.

Nunn claimed he sent the messages, which included rape threats, to exercise his right to freedom of speech and "satirise" online trolling.

Barbora Bukovska, a senior director at ARTICLE 19, an international organisation which promotes freedom of speech, said criminal sanctions should be "the last resort".

Bukovska said she did not defend trolling and admitted that some things posted online were "disgusting" but asked: "Do we want to criminalise every social conduct that we find problematic?"

"If you prohibit any harsh or offensive communication then it can be taken to the extreme," she said.

What drove the outpouring of bile about the McCanns by Leyland, a church-going mother-of-two in a sleepy English village, remains a mystery.

However, new research confirms what many victims already know, that online trolls can be a sinister bunch.

A study by Canadian researchers cited in Psychology Today linked trolling to sadism.

"Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun... and the Internet is their playground!" it said.

 

[fearsomefour]

So it goes.
Horrible miserable people acting like horrible miserable people.
Good riddance

 

[Boffo97]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2453609,00.asp

Study: Internet Trolls Are Also Terrible In Real Life

• By Damon Poeter
• February 18, 2014 06:34pm EST

Internet trolls and video game griefers are just as broken in real life as you've always suspected, according to a new psychology paper by Canadian researchers. It turns out that the same folks who love to disrupt online conversations for the"lulz" are likely to also exhibit some pretty nasty personality traits in general.

Two online studies led by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba established "strong positive associations" between "online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures," the researchers wrote in an abstract of their paper.

The upshot was that although Internet trolls are a small minority of overall Internet participants, those respondents to the team's surveys who self-identified as enjoying disrupting online communities also scored highly in the "Dark Tetrad" of personality traits, the researchers found.

"[T]rolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores," they wrote. Which is to say, the respondents who identified themselves as trolls also indicated that they enjoy making others suffer, lack remorse and empathy, and have no problem with manipulating and lying to people to achieve their ends.

The fourth trait of the Dark Tetrad is narcissism, which was also displayed in buckets by respondents who cited "trolling" as their favorite activity when commenting online, as indicated in the graph at right.

Slate's Chris Mooney, who dissected the study last week, noted that the authors "found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable."

Indeed, as the abstract notes:

"Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism."

The good news is that really dedicated trolls appear to be fairly uncommon in the online world, at least in terms of their numbers if not their output. As Mooney noted, the researchers found that just 58.7 percent of survey respondents who said they used the Internet also indicated that they commented in online forums. Of those, just 5.6 percent said they enjoyed trolling.

Still, the fact that even that small number of people self-identified as trolls is pretty disturbing, when you consider the survey hoops they had to jump through to convince the researchers they were dead serious about how much they loved being despicable jerks on the Internet.

Here are some of the questions asked by Buckels and her colleagues in their Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or GAIT survey tool for identifying the truly trollish, as cited by Slate:

• I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.
• I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.
• I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.
• The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.

So can anything be done about the troll problem? Short of eliminating commenting and other forms of interactive participation with users, which some websites have done, there really isn't much that can be done, according to Buckels.

"Because the behaviors are intrinsically motivating for sadists, comment moderators will likely have a difficult time curbing trolling with punishments (e.g., banning users)," Slate quoted her as saying. "Ultimately, the allure of trolling may be too strong for sadists, who presumably have limited opportunities to express their sadistic interests in a socially-desirable manner."

 

[ozarkram]

Read an interesting article on trolls just the other day. Said basically trolls are jerks, SOBs in life just like on the boards. Who knew?

 

[Selassie I]

Several posters' names dance through my head every time I read this thread's title.