FREE SPEECH NEEDS BORDERS

A spokesman for South Wales Police said: “We can confirm the sudden death of a 43-yearold man at a property on July 25. There are no suspicious circumstances. Next of kin have been informed.”

The dead man was a member of a sub forum of the video chat site used to trade insults. The dad’s neighbours said they could hear vile abuse through the flat walls.

The tragedy comes seven months after plasterer Gregory Tomkins, 39, took his own life on Paltalk on Christmas Day.

The site saw its first British suicide 11 years ago. The coroner at the inquest of Kevin Whitrick, 42, of Wellington, Shropshire, then called for insult chat rooms to be banned.

A Paltalk user last night told how the latest victim would move chatrooms to try to escape the bullies, but they would follow him and continue the abuse.

When he opened up about being depressed – revealing he felt “desperate” – they would tell him to kill himself.

She said she begged him to quit the website and is furious with the chatroom admins for failing to DR Linda Papadopoulos, an ambassador for the online safety group Internet Matters, said: “We want people to be able to express their thoughts and their emotions but even free speech comes with some parameters.”

But she said sites where those rights are taken to extreme and potentially very vulnerable people get no protection are not the way forward. She said: “We rightly speak about the impact on children a lot, but that vulnerability extends to adults, too.” She said there was interesting work being done analysing words that signify if someone is in distress and people are offered support. “Different things have been tried. Things like ‘press this button if somebody is bullying you’. But we are still learning what works best. There needs to be a bigger concerted effort on this and we need to make some of these parameters mandatory when websites are set up.” More info at internetmatters.org.