Internet Trolls, Illegal Threats & Misogyny Online

Just this week, we saw an example of how social media hacking led to the release of nude photos that humiliated some of Hollywood’s top celebrities. But another major problem with social media is the rising presence of “trolls” who stalk celebrities and ordinary people with hateful messages and threats.

Retired New Scotland Yard’s investigator Laura Richards and TV host and producer Isla Traquair tackle this timely topic and look at some recent cases in which online perpetrators have been caught.

For background on the term, American journalist and author Farhad Manjoo describes trolls this way:

“’Troll is the fuzzy term for agitators who pop up, often anonymously, sometimes in mobs, in comment threads and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, apparently intent on wreaking havoc. The term is vague precisely because trolls lurk in the darkness; their aims are unclear, their intentions unknown, their affiliations mysterious.”

The discussion begins with the panel examining the conviction of Peter Nunn, who was found guilty in the U.K. of sending Labour MP Stella Creasy abusive messages on Twitter.

“The best way to rape a witch, try and drown her first, then just when she’s gagging for air, that’s when you enter,” one of the messages read. He later asked, “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point of having them.”

Richards – who launched Paladin, the new National Stalking Advocacy Service – first became involved in another case of a feminist journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez, who was advocating for a female to be on he British banknote and she began getting viciously attacked on social media after the Bank of England agreed to adding a female to the currency.

“Within literally 24 hours, she had already received a tsunami of – you might call it hate tweets – it certainly turned into threats very quickly, and Caroline felt very much under siege,” Richards said. “She was receiving 50 threats an hour.”

She explained that this is how she initially got involved in talking to police about the threats and also set up a meeting with representatives from Twitter.

According to Richards, Peter Nunn is actually the third person to face charges in court for trolling activities - the previous two individuals were discovered by an investigative journalist and not the police.

She said it was somewhat of a challenge to get Twitter company officials involved in the investigations, although the social media giant did send representatives to a meeting when called by the British parliament. Another challenge was a Twitter policy that each threat had to be reported separately.

“If you’re getting 50 an hour, there is no way you can possibly do that. So we were talking to them about a red flag button for people in trouble,” Richards said, adding that currently the relationship with Twitter is much better.

“You get hundreds of messages, but who is actually behind that anonymity, and tracking it back to their IP address – where hey originate from – and actually unmasking them. For us, we feel very strongly that these people should be unmasked. There shouldn’t be anonymity to the point where you can send whatever you want.”

So where does one draw the line between fair social media criticism and the territory that moves into the realm of real threats?

“When you’re in a public job you expect that, there’s always going to be comments and criticism,” said Traquair, who has herself been the target of countless social media jabs. “People tend to go for your Achilles’ heel. If there’s something they don’t like about you, they’ll just go for that,” Traquair said.

“But of course with some cases – the tsunami – you can’t ignore that. You can’t just turn the other cheek and it’s not just name-calling. When it does kind of border on threats or violence, or words like rape being thrown in there – that’s scary.”

She added: “That is the tip of the iceberg of this problem, it’s huge. Normal people in normal jobs who aren’t on television, who aren’t on the Internet, are attacked in exactly the same way. But they don’t have any help, and they have no one to go to.”

Traquair said this is a far greater problem than just the high-profile cases and the problem is not much is being done about it.

The question is also posed as to why so many trolls turn to misogyny, whether it be against Amanda Knox, a female political leader, etc.

“We see a lot of the misogynistic views, which is about entitlement, and unfortunately whether people like it or not, patriarchal society, if it’s male dominated, will try and protect and further - women owe men,” Richards said.

“And you see this coming out of people in terms of what we see on Twitter. What we see on social media is really just that magnified even more, they just have a platform to launch from.”