This whole thing and the online hatred for Meghan and Harry, including by Samantha, reminds me of this story about Brenda, a woman who trolled the McCann’s.
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*Her trolling and subsequent suicide resulted in a number of newspaper stories: about the toxic culture of Twitter; the danger of people hiding behind avatars and fake names on social media; the biliousness of Brenda’s attack on the McCanns; and the tragedy of her death. What could have led a woman to post hundreds of tweets attacking a couple she had never met, and why did she think there was nothing left to live for when she was caught out?
Ben knew his mother had the capacity to rage, and that she had strong opinions about the McCanns, but he had never seen anything like this. Tweets included: “#mccann Q ‘How long must the mccanns suffer?’ Answer ‘For the rest of their miserable lives’”; “I think Kate #mccann sees herself as a modern day Eva Peron beautiful, suffering, instead of a booze filled nymphomaniac”; “Hate a powerful emotion, it is a compliment to Maddie that we ‘hate’ her parents who betrayed her”; “You can move to France, anywhere, but social media is everywhere, our memories are long”; “To Kate and Gerry, you will be hated by millions for the rest of your miserable, evil, conniving lives, have a nice day.”
Did she have any sense of the pain that the tweets might cause the McCanns? “It’s difficult to say. I think she lost sight of their humanity, and they were just the target of the ‘investigation’.”
He uses the word investigation deliberately. Ben was later to discover that Brenda didn’t think of herself as a troll, but as a journalist investigating the McCanns. “In her last will and testament, she said her job title was investigative journalist. That was the role she had assumed,” he says. Had she ever done any journalism? “No.”
Two weeks after Brenda took her own life, the then justice secretary Chris Grayling quadrupled the maximum custodial sentence for trolling to two years. Grayling said: “These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media.”
Brenda Leyland spent her life hiding – by making things up, and concealing herself behind fake names and avatars. After she died, Ben examined her Twitter account closely. There were friends in the McCann trolling community who grieved her passing. But, by and large, after she was exposed people on social media were cruel and unforgiving. In her final days, the troll was trolled mercilessly.
As Brenda had forgotten about the McCanns’ humanity, so her critics forgot about hers. Ben believes in her final hours she would have read some of these tweets.*
The question is why are they like that. What has happened that has created people who are only able to find joy in venting their spleen and displaying their resentments in this way?” He talks about how many people feel alienated from society, the number living in poverty, the paucity of mental health support. “If you treat the symptom, you never get to the heart of the problem. The problem is: why are people so angry and afraid?”
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/18/my-mother-troll-of-madeleine-mccann-parents