Women and trolling

Oh I think it should be discussed - why not? Without wishing to be overly blunt, there is no risk of prejudicing a future trial in her case. I wasn't making that sort of a link - I was suggesting people think their behaviour online can be different to how it can be elsewhere - the idea that defamation / contempt etc are not as important and people are guaranteed freedom of speech. They aren't.

Oh piss off, dagee.

Look - she committed a criminal act. Twitter has a greater audience than Sky News. It was the online form of a poison pen letter. People have this peculiar idea that what you put online is any different from saying it on the radio or circulating a pamphlet door to door. It isn't. There's nothing special about the internet - it behaves like the Wild West but it isn't. The law is slowly catching up with this - which is one of the reasons this was a story, actually. We've gone from the twitter airport jokey bomb threat to Stella Creasy and the fiver to this. If I was a betting woman I'd say the next big story (eventually) will be a site like Mumsnet halting a criminal trial because of the way it rides roughshod over the contempt of court laws. Even the slightest discussion of the guilt / innocence of someone being tried on the radio can potentially halt a case (see Rock FM and the Shipman trial news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1268966.stm ; something similar also happened in the Soham trial. ) The law is exactly the same but Mumsnet discusses ongoing court cases openly. Sooner or later a defence lawyer will notice.

Which woman dagee?

I also feel very sorry for this poor woman. She doesn't deserve this, she's a female.

I feel very sorry for this poor woman. She didn't send the McCanns threats or try to contact them. She had a twitter account which expressed her belief that they had gotten away with murder. Maybe she did it in a nasty way but that doesn't justify doorstepping her. If her account was abusive they should have made a complaint to close it down.

What I think is concerning is that everybody who has an opinion not promoted by pr companies through the media is now being called a 'troll'. Being labelled a 'troll' seems to entitle the media (or the people who are paying them) to harass, humiliate and target those who challenge 'accepted by the media' beliefs.

Wondering about the changes the McCanns made to their story (the doors were locked they told police until it was proven that nobody had entered or left through the window and there was no tampering of the locks, only then did they remember that they had left the back door unlocked) doesn't make someone a 'troll'. Being suspicious of their story, not trusting their body language is not a hate crime. It's a strange story, nobody knows what really happened apart from those involved who know their own parts.

I don't think that those who obsessively believe them guilty and spend their life screaming to the rooftops about this perceived injustice are any more crazy than those who obsessively believe them innocent and spend their life writing books about it and hunting those who fail to agree with intent to publicly bully them into silence.

I'm not sure about your final assertion, but I do take it on board. With the caveat that my biases are different coupled with the fact I am less educated on that point, you may very well be right.

I do worry that a lot of the time the media vilify someone it all ends up being massively dependent on how much of the general public agree. I do not recall many rushing to the defense of the woman that deposited the cat in the bin. Would that have happened if suicide came into it there?

This does dovetail neatly into concerns I have about the media at large. Many bang on about freedom of speech to which I broadly agree, but it isn't the ideological paradise that phrase conjures.

When one considers how much of an impact the media has on society it is quite frankly frightening how little it is regulated, we don't elect newspaper editors or media moguls, so what ends up happening is the great and powerful have much louder voices and exert much more influence over what we are all exposed to. You are quite right to point out the power disparity.

i think they are available online somewhere but i haven't sought them out

Surely it's not possible to form an accurate judgment here, without actually seeing the tweets in question? my understanding is that none has actually been published

WhyTheCagedBirdTweets Where do we best think a line could be drawn? Anything that involves threats and hate speech should be illegal of course, but aside from that can we not have freedom of speech? I mean perhaps in this case Leyland has the right to express her opinion, but so too did that reporter in uncovering and exposing what he thought to be an unpleasant, obsessed woman who was obsessed with a couple in a desperate situation and saw fit to sully their names with her comments, yet presumed her own identity was safe and she was free to say whatever she wished unchallenged?

The whole problem with trolls is the cowardice of sitting behind a screen typing away and being as nasty as possible on the presumption no one will find out.

You may be entirely right about her being targeted specifically and actually odds are you are right. However how much of that was just because she was a woman? I think it likely her class, education level played a part. In short I suspect she was targeted precisely because she was not the sort of person one expects to behave that way.

I think we could do better in terms of defining trolling. In my experience online trolling is general online asshattery.

I think what happens to a lot of women in online spaces is actually something much worse and more sinister.

Threats of rape and violence, revealing personal details etc are harassment and in my view acts of violence in and of themselves.

I think that Leyland was the former and not the latter and I don't think is comparable. That is not a defense as I think what she did was unpleasant.

I also struggle to see the media disparity. If anything the media brought mysogyny to my attention more and not less, and I didn't take away from the coverage that it was in any way acceptable to post rape/death threats to women.

I'm not denying a general media bias against women, just in this instance I don't see it. That said I remember the daily mail running an article naming and shaming the men who had posted abuse over the banknote campaign. I DO think in that instance that was in the public interest, as I was surprised and saddened by the breadth of backgrounds of the men who had done it. However it did serve to highlight the problem.

More could have been done in the reporting to analyse the causes rather than writing it off as a few bad eggs.

I was listening to a report on this on R4 yesterday afternoon and I think it's quite interesting that she was called a twitter troll when it seems like she really was a conspiracy theorist.

To me, a troll is someone who is trying to intimidate or control someone by making attacks of a personal and threatening nature to them.

By contrast, this lady was trying to rally media, friends, the police etc to reinvestigate the McCann case because she thought there was a miscarriage of justice. She did not tweet at the McCanns once and didn't make a single threat towards them that would have warranted investigation by the police. That doesn't mean that what she said wouldn't have been offensive to the McCanns, but it does mean that the lack of threat in her actions means she'd be protected by freedom of speech laws.

I disagree with doorstepping full stop - it encourages vigilantism and is, in itself, very threatening, intimidating and bloody hypocritical

Sorry, and noted for the future.

They always post in the same way don't they. Enormous long posts with carefully highlighted select quotes and spluttery ripostes.

"Actually if a man and woman were to go naked in public, the woman would be cheered while the man would end up in a police van and on the sex offender registry." Vivacia was talking about an actual case in which the woman was shamed and the man applauded and no one was arrested. So the complete opposite of what you suggested then.

What I stated about the power disparity, was just a fact. Or are you denying that to be the case? Who has what power is pertinent to this case as WhentheCagedBirdTweets states much better in her post at 11:58.

And no-one has defended her obsession. We are discussing how she was treated.