The banality of evil: The day I confronted my troll
He drove me off Twitter, hacked my Facebook, and abused and terrified my family. Yet the biggest shock of all was meeting him: by Leo Traynor
I'm back on Twitter.
I can imagine the cries of "I knew he wouldn't last!" from the Twitterati.
But give me a few minutes of your time and I'll tell you why I'm back and the real truth about exactly why I left in the first place.
In my blog of 12 August entitled Walking, Not Running, I talked about my time on Twitter and my basic reasons for leaving. I stand over a lot of what I said. The atmosphere there has changed and there have been negative stories in the media about trolling, etc, for months now. The brand has been damaged and Twitter needs to act fairly swiftly to repair it. At the time of writing that blog, for reasons that will become obvious, I was very sketchy about my own personal experience.
When I left Twitter numerous people thought it was as a result of an overreaction on my behalf. That my departure was a kneejerk reaction to a couple of "trolling" or "flaming" incidents or that I was attention seeking. The reality of the situation is that my wife and I were targeted for over three years.
It started in July 2009. I'd been on Twitter for over two years at that point, having joined in May 2007, and I'd never had a problem. My account was followed by a fairly innocuous looking one which I followed back and within 10 minutes I had received a direct message (DM) calling me a "Dirty fucking Jewish scumbag". I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DMs, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. So I made my account private and the problem went away for a short while. There were no problems on Twitter but my Facebook account was hacked, my blog was spammed and my email address was flooded with foulmouthed and disgusting comments and images. Images of corpses and concentration camps and dismembered bodies.
Again, it eased off for a couple of weeks. I relaxed. Thought they'd finally tired of failing to get a reaction from me. Boy, was I wrong.
I didn't mention it to my wife. Didn't see the point of worrying her. But then she joined Twitter to see what it was like and grew to enjoy it. It wouldn't have been immediately obvious to outsiders that we were man and wife. She made the mistake, though, of changing her profile to state that she was "The long suffering wife of @LeoTraynor". Not a good idea. She received a DM stating: "Your husband is scum. A rotten bastard and you're a whore." She laughed it off. Blocked and reported and then the pattern started again. We got to the point of not accepting new followers at all and then one day my wife received a torrent of abuse via DM and on the timeline that was so vile she's never been on Twitter since – which is a real shame as she has so much to share and is far more interesting than I am.
People kept asking me, "Why you? Why would these guys want to have a go at you?" I couldn't answer them other than it was a couple of random idiots who didn't appreciate my political views or ethnic origins. Or even someone who couldn't solve my cryptic crosswords!
The whole thing escalated in June, July and August this year. I received more and more abuse on the timeline and via DMs. A crossword clue account I'd started (@Leo'sClue) was inundated with abuse too.
Then one day something happened that truly frightened me. I don't scare easily but this was vile.
I received a parcel at my home address. Nothing unusual there – I get lots of post. I ripped it open and there was a Tupperware lunchbox inside full of ashes. There was a note included, saying, "Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz". I was physically sick...
