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Internet trolls are a sad reflection of human society let lose on the internet. They spread their bile behind the protection of anonymity, and can follow you anywhere on the internet and out on the street. Now one woman is taking the fight to back to them; she has a court order forcing Facebook to unmask the vile hate mongers.
After being harassed everywhere she went online, including supposedly benign places like recipe forums, Nicola Brookes has finally won the right to pull the veil off the trolls and prosecute them.
It all kicked off when she left a supportive comment for one of the X Factor contestants. She was battered by abuse left, right and centre, and was even vilified as a paedophile, after someone created a fake profile of her and used it to approach young girls with explicit messages. Trolls also managed to get hold of her home address, publishing it in typical internet-scourge fashion.
Brookes went to the High Court for a court order to force Facebook to hand over the IP addresses of the trolls involved. Facebook didn’t contest the court order and released a statement saying:
“There is no place for harassment on Facebook, but unfortunately a small minority of malicious individuals exist online, just as they do offline.”
“We respect our legal obligations and work with law enforcement to ensure that such people are brought to justice.”
Legally, Facebook couldn’t do anything to help without a court order as it would have been a breach of privacy, so it was probably pretty happy to see the court order land on its desk. Still, as we all know by now, an IP address doesn’t automatically lead to the perpetrator, so the next step will be another court order to get the ISP to pull their records.
We’ve all suffered internet trolls at one stage or another, and we’ve even seen what one looks like in the flesh. I just hope Brookes really can get her payback and bring the abusive scumbags to justice. [BBC]
Image credit: Troll from Shutterstock
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“Legally, Facebook couldn’t do anything to help without a court order as it would have been a breach of privacy” – surely Facebook and others could have something written into it’s T&C that said “if you are in breach of our anti harassment policy we reserve the right to release your details to the authorities”?
Perhaps. Privacy law across various different countries is a bit of a minefield as I understand it. Anyway, I’m not sure a change in the T&Cs would cover any past actions either. You’d have to ask a lawyer I’m afraid.
No, and don’t call him Shirley.
Sorry I had to put that there
I’m no legal beagle by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps the authorities would also need the data to be recovered by court order for it to stand up in court?
Kinda like how some evidence is inadmissible because it was collected without a search warrant
Legally (at least in the UK), the Police can apply for an order forcing companies to divulge the timings and senders/receivers of emails (though not the content) and have for a long time been able to do the same with phone calls/text messages.
My understanding is that if a Facebook Message was involved in the contravention of a UK Law, then is is covered by the same legislation as other communications and Facebook don’t have a leg to stand on. RIM’s Lawyers knew this, which is why they fully assisted Police following the riots in London.
Right to privacy does not supersede law. What’s next? People calling for Paedophiles to be protected because their messages are SSL encrypted?
*it is
It’s a bit more complicated than that, it’s Facebook covering their backsides to prevent the Trolls coming after them- they raised no defence and did not contest the court order. It’s not them trying to protect the identity of the trolls.
As a previous commenter said, Facebook has to take a very safe line on this stuff as it acts Globally and privacy laws are applied differently in each country, the only safe way for them to do this is by having a court order in each country or a legitimate authority ordering the release.
But that’s just the problem. Instead of co-operating straight away when there has been an obvious breach of the law, they appear to be hamstrung by privacy laws that are making obtaining court orders necessary every time. I understand their reasoning, but surely there’s a more efficient way of dealing with things? RIM assisted the Met without being prompted or waiting for a court order last year. So far as I know…they haven’t been prosecuted under privacy laws.
Ideally, Facebook would deal with these kind of things at source via their own account sign-up and harassment procedures…which are clearly failing.
I’m just saying, a change in the law is needed to make this all easier…and Facebook need to be more proactive.
I get it completely, I think the difference here is that in the RIM case, there was a criminal case in play, where the police could pursue the evidence on the BBM servers, in this case, the victim is taking up a civil suit, therefore it’s on her onus to obtain the evidence.
But I’m in agreement with you- there has to be a line somewhere that sits between blanket anonymity and no privacy whatsoever. It’s just finding that line so it can’t be abused.
The best part of this article is the fact you pulled the old switcheroo on the most annoyingly misspelled word on the internet.
Sorry, but we gotta have the trolls, to keep the balance (assholes in general)