Following the episode that several bloggers (myself included) had with Dickie Doubleday and our efforts to track him down, Chuck sent me this link to another case of Internet abuse whereby the perp was tracked down using his IP address.
But yesterday the internet troll who threatened to kill one of Tory MP Louise Mensch’s children finally faced justice.
Frank Zimmerman, 60, had been found guilty in his absence last month of sending an electronic message that was ‘grossly offensive or of an indecent, offensive or menacing character’.
Zimmerman threatened to kill one of Mensch’s children. To be fair to Dickie (yes, ‘fraid I must in this case) he never threatened that – he was just a bloody nuisance. He could, however, have fallen foul of the same legislation given the content of some of his comments. We didn’t take the matter up with the police, although Pat Nurse did try when she was facing it alone and they didn’t take any notice. But, then, smokers need not apply, eh? Personally, I didn’t want the police involved as I felt it would be excessive, given the problem. I just wanted it stopped and complaining to his ISP appears to have resolved it – certainly to my satisfaction.
Some of Zimmerman’s comments – such as demanding that Mensch stop using Twitter were similar to Dickie’s demands that we remove content, for example – so, yeah, some similarity. However, once again, I feel that the term “troll” is being misused by the media to cover a range of sins, when, in fact, a troll is someone who infects a blog or forum posting contrary and annoying comments with the specific intention of winding up others in the hope of causing a ruckus – trolling comes from a fishing reference, rather than the brothers Grimm. Indeed, given the way things developed with Dickie Doubleday, I’m not sure we should have been using the term troll to describe him. I’m coming round to simply calling him an arsehole. Pretty much says all really.
On that note; it’s been nearly a month now and all has been quiet, so it looks as if the hunt did its job.