Tag Archives: online misbehaviour

Turning the tables on the stalkers

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On 13th November, I presented a talk at a joint Paladin/Collyer-Bristow event. Paladin, the National Stalking Advocacy Service, assists high risk victims of stalking throughout England and Wales. Collyer Bristow’s Cyber Investigation Unit (CIU), which is headed up by partner Rhory Robertson, comprises a dedicated team of lawyers who advise victims of cyberstalking, cyber harassment, cyber bullying and internet trolls/trolling.

The major discussion of this event surrounded the notion of cyberstalking, how it affects victims, and how to combat this increasingly prevalent crime. My talk covered the research we are currently undertaking on the DOOM project, and how networks of abusive individuals can form online, potentially leading to escalation. Other speakers at the event included:

  • Nadine Dorries MP, Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, and a cyberstalking target
  • Betsy De Thierry, Founder Director of the Trauma Recovery Centre, and a cyberstalking target
  • Laura Richards, CEO of Paladin, the National Stalking Advocacy Service
  • Steve Slater, Computer Forensics Manager, Devon & Cornwall Police
  • Alison Morgan, Barrister at 6KBW

Several points clearly emerged from this event, including the fact that there is much work to be done around stalking and harassment, that victims need to be taken much more seriously, that the correct legislation needs to be applied when prosecuting, and the recognition that online stalking can be just as damaging – if not more so in some cases – as physical, offline stalking.

Two plead guilty over Twitter rape threats

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Trial

Tuesday 7th January saw John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley plead guilty to sending messages “menacing” in nature to Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy via multiple Twitter accounts.

In July 2013, Criado-Perez had been successful in campaigning for author Jane Austen to appear on the £10 bank note. Shortly after in final days of July and spilling into August, a torrent of abuse was directed at Criado-Perez including numerous threats to sexually abuse, rape, torture, and kill the campaigner. After lending Criado-Perez support on the social networking site, Creasy was also targeted by abusive users.

The prosecution identified abusive traffic from 86 different Twitter accounts, several of which belonged to the defendants.

The court heard from prosecutor Alison Morgan that Criado-Perez felt “significant fear” due to the menacing nature of the tweets which have had “life changing psychological effects”, Creasy reported that both her personal and professional life were impacted upon by the messages.

Sorley held her face in her hands as the prosecutor read aloud some of her offending tweets, which included;

“You’re wasting shits loads of time because you can’t handle rape threats, pathetic! Rape is the last of your worries!!!!”

“rape?! I’d do a lot worse things than rape you!!”

“I will find you and you don’t want to know what I will do when I do, you’re pathetic, kill yourself beforeI i do #godie”

When arrested in October of 2013, Sorley admitted to sending the abusive tweets, saying that she was “bored” and that “I was off my face on drink” at the time, although she accepted that some tweets could be perceived as death threats.

Nimmo, on the other hand was arrested in July of 2013 after having been tracked down by a Newsnight reporter and gave no comment when arrested. His defence claimed that he is a “social recluse” whose “social interaction, social life, is online” as a result of being “systematically bullied at secondary school, both physical and verbal”. As a result of social exclusion, his defence claims, Nimmo has “no social life, no friends, he strives for popularity” and that his “outrageous comments [were] made for retweets”.

Both Sorley and Nimmo plead guilty under Section 127 of the Communications Act (2003) and are to appear before the Westminster Magistrates court later this month.

CASS investigates

I travelled to the court to witness the trial as part of work being undertaken as part of a research project on Discourse of Online Misogyny (DOOM) here at CASS. Our initial aim is to investigate the ways in which language was used as part of the threats made against Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy on Twitter. Building on this, we will produce sophisticated analytical tools to provide critical analyses of language and other kinds of behaviours which emerge during instances of online abuse (such as network building).

CASS outputs

Newsnight

Claire Hardaker, Lecturer in English Language and Principal Investigator of the DOOM project, appeared on the 07/01/2014 edition of Newsnight.

CASS: Briefing

CASSbriefings-trolling

You can also read a summary of this work in a complimentary CASS: Briefing.

View and download it here: Researching online abuse: the case of trolling     

Web of words: A short history of the troll

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Over the past fortnight, various broadsheets and media outlets (see bibliography) picked up the story of my recent article, ‘“Uh…..not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”: An overview of trolling strategies‘ (2013), which came out in the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. Of the thousands of comments collectively posted on those articles, one particularly interesting point that came through (out of many) was the general sense that there exists a single, fixed, canonical definition of the word troll which I ought to be using and had somehow missed.

So what is the definition of troll? In my thesis, I spent a rather lengthy 18,127 words trying to answer precisely this question, and very early on I realised that trying to discover, or, if one didn’t exist, to create a clean, robust, working definition that everyone would agree with would be close to impossible. There are at least three major problems, which for simplicity’s sake are best referred to as history, agreement, and change.

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