Celia Walden

Let’s focus on real-life criminals rather than online trolls

While knife crime is still on the rise, the police are busy playing whack-a-troll

There is a corner of my local park that I take extreme lengths to avoid. Even when it’s pouring down, I’ll take the long way around; the east, west or south entrance – anything to bypass the huddle of hostile strangers crouching among the pigeon splatter, idly spewing bile at passers-by.

They are also why I am not on Twitter. Or Facebook. Because I have no desire to be cursed or threatened (albeit emptily) by people I don’t know, and because I don’t want to wake up to one of those strangers telling me he or she is going to murder my husband and rape me, along with every female member of my extended family (and, by the way, do I know that I look like an [insert farmyard animal of choice]?) I have chosen not to invite these people and the sewage splatter into my home and life.

And maybe if I had done, maybe if I had run screaming into the online scrum that’s causing unquantifiable damage to the minds of children and adults while its creators look the other way, I’d have more sympathy for the victims of trolls. Because right now, when I hear that Sadiq Khan’s “Twitter Squad” has brought only six trolls to justice in the two years it has been running, it’s not the trolls the unit was set up to tackle that I feel incensed by – but the existence of the Online Hate Crime Hub to begin with.

That Hub has cost us £1.7million – which works out at approximately £300,000 per troll caught. So, while knife crime is still on the rise and a whopping 43,516 knife offences were recorded in the UK between April 2018 and March 2019, while 20-year-old Tashan Daniel didn’t make it to the Arsenal game he was on his way to last month because he was stabbed to death at a Tube station, and a 17-month-old boy is shown shovelling earth into his father’s grave last week, the police are busy playing whack-a-troll?

I have a right to feel safe when I step outside my front door, but is it someone’s human right to feel safe in the online crazy town that they’ve willingly chosen to stroll through despite the risks? A hope maybe, a basic human expectation, but not a right. The pain we experience from being called fat, ugly, stupid and worse on social media is a privileged, first-world pain of those who have a roof over their heads, a screen in their hands and a repetitive strain injury known as “i-thumb” from the constant scrolling.

Let’s be clear: for every one of those six trolls “slapped down”, a thousand more have already sprung up. That’s the nature of the beast, and social media can turn even the civilised into, if not real beasts, then people who talk like beasts. How many of these go on to act like beasts offline? From the cowardly nature of the medium, I can only assume relatively few. And I’m not playing down the power of language here, or the despicable nature of hate crimes. Anti-semitic, racist and homophobic rhetoric should be cracked down upon, and when the Hub was first set up, our then home secretary, Amber Rudd, was right to point out that: “What is illegal offline is illegal online, and those who commit these cowardly crimes should be met with the full force of the law.”

But how can a team of five Scotland Yard officers hope to tame a techfrankenstein monster, knowing as they do that this particular monster won’t ever re-emerge eloquent, educated and well-mannered? Even the tech overlords who invented this stuff aren’t offering up any real solutions. As our current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, wrote in this newspaper just last week, creating “a digital blind spot where paedophiles and terrorists have free rein to conceal their crimes” is the only reason to encrypt messaging apps, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to do.

Still, as long as he keeps throwing the odd billion at his charitable foundation, and building “a better world for children and families to thrive in”, are we really going to hold that lawless virtual world against him?

Even if we did successfully hold the tech giants to greater account and force them to rid their own backyards of hate before they bask in the warm glow of philanthropy, there’s the question of what constitutes trolling. Because when the official definition of a troll – “a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the internet to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community” – also happens to be the definition of anyone active on social media, and we’re living in a time of infinitely delicate sensibilities – when one person’s strident opinion may prompt another’s 999 call – we have ourselves a problem.

A problem the police don’t stand a hope in online hell of solving – unlike the real life crimes that are so desperately in need of their time and attention, and our money.