Let’s call internet trolls what they are – real-world bullies

I T’S been a bad week for women on the internet. Singer Lily Allen got floods of cruel tweets about her child’s stillbirth. The singer tweeted that she had lived with PTSD ever since the event but Twitter users could only blame her for her own son’s death.

So there we have it. A vile example of the world of trolling and unfortunately, cases like Allen’s have been cropping up with increasing regularity.

Another victim, Irish blogger Rosemary MacCabe, generated 120 Boards.ie pages of personal bile this week after writing a blog post about why she didn’t report her rapist. Hello world, we have a troll problem and we’ll have to figure out what we’re going to do about it.

Trolling is now the catch-all term for attacking people online: the virtual assaults that veer between threatening female writers with rape to logging on to Facebook tributes pretending to be the dead person those pages commemorate. You often hear that internet trolling just happens because it’s the internet.

Trolls troll the internet. We’re just supposed to accept that psychological abuse is built into every online interaction, that it’s inevitable.

It’s like catcalling at a woman from a car. They’re just doing it because they can, and because the world has taught them that that’s all right.

But the internet is the real world. What you say online is still you saying something, even if you’re saying it as an egg. People online are still people, just like people at the end of the telephone line are people. Technology doesn’t make somebody’s behaviour inconsequential or pretend.

Of course, online harassment has been around ever since the dawn of the web but now we’re all online and the majority of us have witnessed name-calling and bullying. Tales of online harassment are as predictable as they are frightening. It happens on Tinder, on Twitter, on Tumblr and right across the online world.

According to a 2014 Pew survey, 40pc of those questioned said they’d experienced trolling (or more severe forms of harassment) themselves. Many of these episodes went beyond name calling and included physical threats or sustained personal attacks.

Some 37pc of women reported online harassment, and much of the worst harassment was disproportionately targeted at women, especially young women.

If you still think that trolling affects everybody equally, a major analysis of ‘The Guardian’ comment section last year researched the 70 million comments left on the site since 2006. It found that eight of the 10 regular ‘Guardian’ writers who got the most abuse from commentators online were women and two were black men. The 10 regular writers who got the least abuse were all men.

‘The Guardian’ also found that, over a five-year period, articles written by women consistently elicited more abusive responses than articles written by men. “Articles about feminism attracted very high levels of blocked comments. And so did rape,” wrote ‘The Guardian’. The message to women is clear.

When I was on social media at least one stranger sought me out pretty much every week to tell me what they thought of me. I have had threats by email, often as a result of very harmless articles, and have got the attentions of borderline obsessives with grudges. I’m a writer and a woman and I write about things that make some people uncomfortable.

But the attacks were always intensely personal (shout out to the lad who always referred to me as a “Kerry cow”) and not simply disagreeing with one of my opinions and offering another argument. I closed my accounts.

Now is the time to mark the boundaries of what’s acceptable in the virtual world, just like in the real world.

Yes, we should protect and fight for freedom of speech but terrorising people who dare to voice an opinion with threats is not freedom of speech; it is intimidation.

It forces valid opinions underground and if we don’t do something now then we’ll end up with a dystopic online world that makes ‘Lord of the Flies’ seem like Disney World.

We’re more divided politically than we’ve maybe ever been, and with extreme views comes extreme anger.

But while we’re dismissing people as “trolls”, they’re doing the same to us. Besides, the word “troll” is too euphemistic for the people who lash out at women like Lily Allen and Rosemary MacCabe from the virtual darkness.

I’m taking the word “troll” out of my vocabulary. Words like bully and coward are far more suitable. I prefer to remember trolls as they originally were: fluffy, purplehaired figures standing on my book shelf.