45 
We all suffer trolls badly; some of us are even guilty of a bit of trolling ourselves. But have you ever wondered what they look like in real life? Wonder no more — the BBC managed to track down the prolific troll Nimrod Severn and confronted him for Panorama.
Darren Burton is his real name, and he’s a nasty racist that loves to dump all over RIP pages on Facebook with his vicious bile. He doesn’t look exactly like I thought he would (no slime green hair and broken teeth), but he’s just as militant. Although I was of the opinion that trolls only did their trolling under the illusion of anonymity the internet provides, it seems at least for Burton, trolling is an unfortunate life choice.
Check out the full episode over at the BBC for the full skinny on “internet bullies”. [YouTube via The Next Web]
If we are talking about people who troll on websites, I feel it’s only fair that this gentleman gets a mention http://gizmodo.com/5879213/i-just-banned-jesus-diaz
Trollolol – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRMBxnxWiNQ
I really don’t like that man (Diaz). I don’t know whether it’s all a façade and he’s just good at getting hits and thus money or whether he is genuinely like that, but either way I hate what he posts. It’s all just troll and I shouldn’t get annoyed but I really do.
You are not alone, in fact, I bet his fanbase is very small.
Oh god, so many comments to make about Jesus Diaz and small. I won’t say any of them, though. #notgettingbannedagain
What a sad case…
Indeed, mindless racist dick are the words that come to mind.
Even better he set up a Facebook page and attracted thousands of angry comments, I don’t think people understand how trolls work.
I’m absolutely ashamed to see that this guy lives in the same city as me. Makes me feel sick.
That guy isn’t a troll, he is just a tug online.
perhaps if he did ‘tug online’ it’d offer some relife and he wouldn’t be such a troll
sorry typo, thug.
But this reminds of comical end of ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back’, as they fly around the USA taking revenge on trolls, watch this for a laugh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsXKAtpLm4I
I think there is a big difference between trollish pranks and cyber thuggery bullying. This gentleman certainly drops into the latter category. Trolling in my mind is more associated with humourly pranks that cause lulz at someone else’s expense, but not in a way that would truly upset an individual; harmless jokes, essentially. When it becomes just insulting people for no apparent reason, I think it crosses the line from trolling to cyber bullying.
Also, while I’m not defending this person, I have to criticise Panorama for the way they approached this situation; they essentially just walked up to him and accused him straight away, which is kind of blatantly going to get an aggressive response.
I’ve seen Panorama do that quite a lot actually, being very pushy when ‘interviewing’ people whom may have had done wrongdoings. It’s very much like they’re deliberately using to provoke a hostile response from these people.
While I have the deepest respect for Panorama and the work it does, I do think that those aggressive pushings don’t really help to get the truth out of the people.
I completely agree that this scumbag deserves anything that’s coming to him,
but is it legal in the UK to track somebody down like this? It doesn’t give technical details on how it was done, but if they managed to trace his IP address aren’t there laws to protect the “anonimity” of the internet?
Note: I am not saying BBC did anything wrong, I applaud their actions, just wondering what our ‘rights’ are online in this country.
You don’t need an IP address to find people online, most people tend to use their user names across multiple sites where they fill in varying amounts of personal information whether it be an e-mail address, real name, location information.
If one were so inclined they can find these scraps of information and together they tend to lead back to the real person behind the online persona.
Did we expect him to be a shrinking violet? Either that or a meek and nerdy kid. Not the sort of people you want to be in touch with either online or off.
He’s just a thug….
This Troll needs to be hunted down and put in a cage.
He should rot in piss just like he’s posted.
I feel sorry for his partner and child.
And about Mr. Diaz, well like many of you he’s my least favourite gizmodo writer too. I have nothing against him personally or anything but the articles he does I can spot before I’ve evern seen who wrote it. They are often written like a cheeky 16 yearold boy with crude language, disrespectful statements and terrible spelling and grammar. More articles from the likes of Jamie and Kat and this site will be a better experience for the readers.
Well, I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with the spelling and grammar. Everybody makes mistakes anyway.
But I agree, you can spot the articles a mile off without reading. He’ll often post some nice images or something awe-inspiring that make me think “that’s nice” (or sometimes “that’s a bit lame”), but I always get the feeling those articles of his only exist so there’s plausible deniability that he’s not just there for troll hits.
Thank heavens for Giz UK.
I have no idea where to post this… so I hope that someone can help me. I know that many of you enjoy the Giz UK site, but I really don’t. Every time I type gizmodo.com, I am redirected to the UK site, and even when setting blog.gizmodo.com in my bookmarks, it still redirects me back here, so I have to use google to find a giz US article and get to the site that way. Does anyone know how I can stop getting automatically redirected to the UK site using my bookmarks in Firefox?
You need us.gizmodo.com
Also there’s a link to Gizmodo US at the bottom of the UK page.
Enjoy your terribly slow, javascript-heavy spam-filled US site!
He’s a certified c u next tuesday
I never thought I would find myself saying this but he gives Trolls a bad name.
A bit of gentle trolling of a friend/co-worker is all well and good, it’s sad to see that in the eyes of the media trolling means abusing the families of those who have died.
Can’t we just call them internet scumbags instead?