Women and trolling

[WhyTheCagedBirdTweets]

I find myself very upset this morning concerning reports of a so-called 'Twitter Troll' that has committed suicide after she was shamed on national
Tv.

I should make a confession here - I, like many people on the internet, get completely furious sometimes when I see obstinacy, arrogance etc etc. and sometimes go a bit OTT in my reaction. I like to think I stay within the bounds of decency and legality though! I guess not everyone understands where those boundaries lie, however. I think teenagers are probably most vulnerable on this point, but not exclusively as this morning's papers make clear.

What worries me most about this is how the media lumps people together. Not everyone is going to be as appalling as the types that were abusing Stella Creasey, but clearly 'Twitter Troll' is now a label that can be easily applied. The irony is that the trolls then become trolled themselves.... I just see the whole thing as yet another battleground where, ultimately, women will be the losers. Shaming doesn't seem gender-neutral.

Sorry this is a ramble. Can anyone make sense of this?

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.

The internet seems to facilitate the 'lynch-mob' mentality. Animal rights also provoke mass hysteria amongst some quarters; there was a far greater outpouring of grief for the Manchester Dogs than there was for anyone involved in any of the concurrent human tragedies. The media, of course, will
simply generate the stories that get read as that's what produces revenue at the end of the day. That's why they create heros and villains. Nine of this is new if course... As I said in the OP, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, I just suspect that it's women that come off worst.

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

Which woman dagee?

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.

longtail, I can't help thinking there's a correlation between dagee's posts and the time that he posts them .

You raise some interesting points and I see what you're saying. Off topic, but do not think that there's a problem with treating this as a story - I think you're condoning it being a story, but may be wrong - and then expecting that people won't discuss it? You clearly disagree, but any people - me included - are unsure whether this was a criminal act. That's going to prompt a problematic discussion isn't it?

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.

Yep, agree.