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TROLLS of the worst kind

  1. johninflorida
    Member

    I have complained to [Email Removed Please Do Not Feed The Spam Bots.] an address given to me by support about a troll slandering my name. It is not only me but others also and a search on his screen name pulls up thousands of hate post all over crime blogs and forums.

    It has been over four days and I have no idea if my mail was received as they did not acknowledge it to me. What is the proper way to get communication with responsible people to resolve this. I am in contact with the police in the town the troll lives in as I tracked him to his address. The comment by the police was that he is well known to them and they are working on it. However this guy needs to be kicked off wordpress as he is creating havoc as well as he continues to slander me and others.

    Pleas give us a little help here.

    The blog I need help with is johninflorida.wordpress.com.

  2. tellyworth
    Staff

    Hi,

    If there's a police investigation there's little we can do until they contact us.

    Regarding trolls: WordPress.com staff don't have the ability to suspend someone off the face of the planet.

  3. johninflorida
    Member

    Thanks, that is not what I was led to believe but will live with it. If you want to see a troll at his worst do a Google search on michellefrommadison one word.

    Hmmmm, if I can not be kicked off then it would be fine if I exposed his full name on my blog right? I have been very careful not to do that Yet.

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    As far as I know, using someone's legal name isn't illegal. Why would it be?

  5. 88namaste88
    Member

    raincoaster, I don't see "staff" after your name, I sure would like to see that statement from the staff.

  6. raincoaster
    Member

    Staff are not legal experts, so in this matter they don't have any more authority than me.

  7. johninflorida
    Member

    I guess being somewhat new to blogging and only seeing a little corner of WordPress, I don't see many people using their or someone else legal names. I guess if I looked more they are all over the blogs here. I have been subject to attack by trolls and sometimes know who they are but have refrained from exposing their full legal name. I'm not so sure it would do any good to help chase them away anyway.

    If people break the rules on wordpress who kicks them off the face of the planet or off wordpress, can people get kicked off?

  8. tellyworth
    Staff

    Staff decide when to suspend an account or blog.

    Only courts in countries that have capital punishment can kick someone off the planet. (Though I think I know a guy who might know a guy who.. nah).

    My point about trolls is: suspending an account doesn't make the person who owned it disappear. It usually has no effect other than to make them angry. They just create more accounts, more blogs, use anonymous proxies, distribute their stuff further and wider and louder.

    If a law has been broken then that's what courts are for.

  9. johninflorida
    Member

    I liked where you were going with the capital punishment thing, haha! I think exposing who the trolls are seems to work the best. They just seem to fade away when everyone knows who they are. In time they grow up and leave but there is a constant supply of more. With better birth control we could end all trolls. :-)

  10. feartheseeds
    Member

    If you want to know what laws cover blogging you can start with these:

    The Bloggers' Legal Guide
    http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/index

    And a list of FAQ&A's about defamation maintained by the legal departments of Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, University of San Francisco among others:
    http://www.chillingeffects.org/defamation/faq.cgi

  11. timethief
    Member

    I'd also like to add another reources that IMHO every blogger ought to consider bookmarking:
    100 Essential Legal and Privacy Guides for Bloggers
    http://www.criminaljusticeusa.com/blog/2009/100-essential-legal-and-privacy-guides-for-bloggers/

  12. ellenbrandtphd
    Member

    Tellyworth,

    No, you can't banish someone from the face of the earth, but you certainly CAN remove links one of your customers wants removed from their blog site.

    I've had a situation similar to John's brewing for a couple of weeks.

    I said something on Twitter this silly little girl in the UK did not like.

    She proceeded to write the most extraordinarily defamatory blog about me - by name - on her blog site on Type Pad.

    Now, I don't particularly care about getting her blog taken down. She is clearly a psychopath, and anyone who knows me realizes her instant hatred of me because of a Twitter post! is utterly beyond all reason and all human decency.

    What I DO mind is her putting link after link on my Word Press blog. I complain to customer service, she gets scared and takes the links off. Customer service goes away. She puts the links back up, over and over and over.

    Customer service tells me her links are invisible to everyone except me.

    But that is not the point.

    First of all, these constant links the little scumbag is posting are a variety of Psy War designed to make me unhappy and sap my emotional strength, as it were.

    But more important, if the idiot girl is a hacker - and psychopathology and illegal hacking usually go together, in my experience! - she could well be using these incessant links to infiltrate the code in my blog, screw with my stats, harass my readers - who knows what she is capable of.

    When a customer of Word Press says - "Remove this link forever. I don't want it on my blog" - you should not argue with us or give us excuses. Just remove the links!

    Dr. Ellen Brandt

  13. raincoaster
    Member

    If the links are defamatory, take legal action. There are far too many examples of the misuse of exactly the kind of power you ask for; the Australian child who had over 500 legitimate YouTube videos taken down by claiming he was the copyright holder, for instance. The power you are asking for is far more abusive than the example you provide.

  14. raincoaster
    Member

    On re-reading, are you talking about links ON your WP blog? If so, remove her posting privileges. If they're links in comments, block her comments. If they're links TO your WP.com blog, you can no more stop people from linking to you than you can stop them pointing at you in the street. In any case, links are not defamatory. Text may be. If it is, take legal action, as I suggested above.

  15. johninflorida
    Member

    Taking legal action is not an option for most of us unless you are an attorney. Here are a couple examples of taking or not taking legal action: For more than five years my wife and I have spent over $60,000 (US) fighting a settlement with her grandmothers estate. My wife was clearly the beneficiary of her estate in a legal trust. Remote relatives got involved to try and get a piece of it so it went to the courts. We won but lost out on a lot of money to attorny's. Legal action always feeds the pockets of the lawyers.

    I have stuff on youtube and someone copied my art work, (with my name on it) so I filed a complaint. He filed a counter complaint and youtube sent me mail saying if I did not get a court order his video would be reinstated. Well hello, how much would it cost me to hire a lawyer and go to court over a stolen photo? This again is legal action.

    It is not worth hiring a lawyer in most cases to do anything. My best friend is a lawyer and we joke about what people hire him to do. For things on the internet it is almost impossible to win any comfort from a law suit.

    I have a troll following me now and he is in Venezuela. He leave me death threats where ever I post on a blog or forum. I have his IP address and have complained to his server, yeah right! Like that will go anywhere. I have complained to the FBI and had a nice half hour talk with them on the phone. Their comment, There are no internet police, hide yourself. This is what I have done for the most part.

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