Panorama went hunting the internet bullies this week. Some of the cases they explored chilled your blood, not least because the programme’s interviewees emphasised over and over again how difficult it is to find and prosecute these bullies. Take that of 15-year-old Natasha MacBryde, who her father told the programme was bullied on Formspring and then after her suicide, a memorial site set up by friends was trashed by trolls. Or that of Jessi Slaughter, an 11-year-old from Florida who had to be placed under police protection after the global trolling community unleashed its rage on her. There are many other such extreme examples, too.
Steve Rotheram, Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, is planning on taking the trolls on himself. After the case of Georgia Varley, a girl from the Wirral whose memorial page was targeted, he’s set himself the task of trying to find, and plug, the gaps in the law.
“Simply by having a look at how many people have been sent to jail for trolling, compared with the overall volume of people who are carrying out these sorts of terrible acts, you can see there's demonstrably a gap somewhere,” he says. “Very very few, a handful, have actually been sent down. Those ones who have been are quite high profile.”
Footage of a convicted troll’s police interview shown during the programme provided a stark explanation of the motivation behind this behaviour. It’s all about provoking a reaction without ever having to have any contact with the person. If a troll gets their victim to delete their account, they consider that a victory.
The major opposition to the kind of changes that Rotheram is exploring comes from people who are concerned that they could infringe an individual’s right to free speech. Rotheram, though, is clear that you can protect free speech but combat the trolls at the same time:
“I get some quite barbed ones, like ‘you’ve got Aids’ and stuff like that. I try almost to justify someone’s right to have a go at me, but not be happy with the way they do it. While I agree with free speech, it’s like having a free society – there are responsibilities that go along with that. I don’t really like it, if I’m absolutely honest, but I think I have to take it on the chin. I think that’s far different to someone who sets up a memorial site to a lost loved one, and someone goes and desecrates it, like they would a grave.”
Tricky legislative issues like this often get raised in the Commons without any expectation of action being taken – raising awareness being the primary goal. That’s not enough for Rotheram on this, though. He wants concrete change that will lead to more convictions.
“I’m not going to do it just as a token gesture. I’m not going to stand up there for ten minutes and deliver it after spending however many days and weeks working on it, and everyone says ‘yeah, that’s great’ and it gets kicked into the long grass and forgotten.
“I don’t want to go at this Mickey Mouse. If we can do it, we’ll do it, if not, I’ll just raise it in an adjournment debate. If we don’t think it’s appropriate to try and put forward a bill, we’ll try and change people’s perceptions.”
There’s been more discussion recently of the kind of abuse that writers, especially female writers, receive online. Laurie Penny of the New Statesman has been a high-profile example in recent weeks – Matt Wardman has a very good analysis of a recent incident involving her here. It’s widely agreed that it’s unacceptable, yet it continues. Many writers now admit that they rarely venture ‘below the line’ on their articles, since ‘there be monsters’. The free-speaking debate that is supposed to have its natural home online is being curtailed. Obviously, the kind of serial trolling that Panorama investigated and that Rotheram is in the main aiming to tackle is the more extreme cases, but this kind of ‘casual’ abuse is in his sights, too.
“You’d hope that it would become socially unacceptable and that these people would become pariahs and stop it. But I don’t always believe in that kind of utopian society. If we’ve done nothing else but change people’s behaviours, not the really bad ones, but the ones who think ‘I’ll call her a slut, it’s a good laugh’, then I think that’s a good thing. If not then this place [Parliament], despite its complexities, isn’t doing things right. If we’re saying that there isn’t an awful lot that we can do, then does that send out a message that it’s ok to do it?”
Comments
Be the first to comment on this article!