ANOTHER recent news story reports that a young girl has reportedly committed suicide after harassment by online ‘trolls’.

When combined with the recent news of the bomb and rape threats delivered to certain women in the public eye via Twitter, including the historian Mary Beard, it suggests that we really need to get our act together about the issue of policing the ‘virtual’ world.

Of course we should defend free speech as we defend a free press, expecting the police and the legislative process to mop up those who abuse both, but the bile that pours daily from expected and unexpected sources online is something which should cause any person of sane mind to worry where we’re all headed. 

Civilisation – note the first part of the word – often relies on a fine line, and this line is something which we have to police and defend. As much as people have the right to freedom of speech, they do not have the right to spout vitriol which threatens the safety of anyone else, or harasses them to the detriment of that person’s mental health and wellbeing.  

The rules that apply in the ‘real’ world must be those which govern the ‘virtual’ world, given that they are one and the same.

Companies which desire that people use them have a duty of care to then protect those users. Their general reluctance to effectively police their sites to prevent abuse suggests they just don’t take this issue seriously enough and it is time that numbers of people were galvanised to insist that changes are made. 

You never have any idea how serious this all is until it happens to you. Around five years ago, a man emailed me at The Gazette stating that he wished I had cancer and invited my death in various ways. These arrived out of the blue and then stopped.

Words can be harmful enough when spoken aloud in anger in the heat of the moment, but when written down, I have always felt that their power increases exponentially.

When my husband attempted to trace the source, the email address and every other detail of this person’s computer data was a fiction, invented solely for the purpose of randomly attacking myself and whoever else.

Currently, some of the messages we receive from anonymous sources are breathtakingly coarse, their arrogant cruelty beyond belief.

No one who possesses any sense would argue that someone should be allowed to threaten, harass or relentlessly intimidate anyone else, be it in person or online.

It is time we acted to demolish any refuge for the twisted torturers.