Online trolls sent me and my children death threats, says Foster

NORTHERN Ireland’s former First Minister has talked about her determination to tackle social media trolls, revealing some issued deaths threats to her as well as her children.

Arlene Foster, inset, is due to leave local politics completely and said she wants to use her experience to tackle the problem of online abuse.

She stepped down as First Minister and DUP leader earlier this year following an internal party coup against her.

“As politicians, we have to be challenged and there has to be a space for debate. I’m not sure social media platforms is the best place for debate because it is so limited in terms of the space that you have to do that but it has become… a place of hate, a place of abuse,” she said in an interview with Talk Radio.

Mrs Foster added that some Twitter accounts with very small numbers of followers had been set up to attack other users.

“I feel there is a real need to stamp that out because I actually think it prevents some young people from getting involved in politics and getting involved in public life, which is really regrettable, especially young women, and because of that I think there is a real need to deal with it,” she said.

Mrs Foster said she stopped engaging on Twitter herself, with her staff instead handling engagement because the abuse was so bad it was beginning to impact on her.

“When you read that people think you should be strung up and killed. An example I’ll give you, when we (Mrs Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill) were doing our press conferences outside during the height of Covid last year, there were some beautiful trees behind us we had put up. We were doing our press conference and someone said ‘nice trees behind you, you should be hanging from one’,” she said.

Mrs Foster successfully sued TV personality Dr Christian Jessen for libel over a tweet that wrongly claimed she had been having an affair.

She added that she took the legal case because she “fundamentally felt that it was so wrong to make allegations about my family… and I wasn’t prepared to accept that”.

Mrs Foster said her children are aged between 14 and 21, and are all active on social media, but stressed they and her husband knew that the false affair rumour was not true.

“But it really got into the space where it was so hurtful because people were asking questions about our relationship… it became really invasive in my private life and my family, which I have gone some way to protect over my years as a politician,” she added.