Anonymous Internet Trolls Sued By Yale Women

I learned of this from TechCrunch , where Michael Arrington wrote "Although the case may well turn into an argument in relation to free speech online, it’s difficult to sympathize with the trolls. Free speech does need to be defended but it must be respected; with any power comes responsibility. Slandering people anonymously, particularly where that slander has direct consequences is a step too far."

I totally agree, yet there are people who pose as Anonymous Internet Trolls and lurk on sites like The Daily Kos , and seem to delight in trying to be insulting and hurful, and they do so behind a fake name and generally with no other website to track them down at.

I call them cowards who would not say what they write to anyone in public, and be considered pretty fucked up if they did.

As a Barack Obama supporter, I've got some weird comments; so many that after the last one, I elected to disallow comments from all but registered Blogger users.

According to Reuters,.. after facing lewd comments and threats by posters, two women at Yale Law School filed a suit on June 8 in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Connecticut, that includes subpoenas for 28 anonymous users of the site, which has generated more than 7 million posts since 2004.

According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.

The plaintiff, a respected Stanford University graduate identified only as "Doe I" in the lawsuit, learned of the Internet attack in the summer of 2005 before moving to Yale in Connecticut. The posts gradually became more menacing.

Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said.

This news certainly should come as welcome to bloggers like Kathy Sierra, who was the target of death threats by Anonymous Internet Trolls, some of which took to wildly insulting and scary methods of hurting her with words and pictures, and for no reason -- no good reason that is.

I for one do no allow Anonymous Internet Trolls to write on this blog save for the occasional person who's trying to make money by adding a link to some program they sponsor. I'm fine with that. But in other cases, forget it. I want names. I want you to be known so we can have the authorities track you down.

Now, someone reading that last sentence might cringe, thinking about the many politically motivated blogs that need to protect their writers. Hey, I've got no problem with protecting righfully subversive political figures, but that's where a need for a community of people who really protect these figures is needed. Look, if a government wants to find even a "blogger in hiding" it can do it; a system -- a social system to keep these change-agents protected, even if it means getting them out of the country itself and to America, is needed.

My point is that we have so many Anonymous Internet Trolls running around they've spoiled the soup for the nice and respectful bloggers. Perhaps we have to remove the good with the bad as the community does not seem to want to police itself.

We've got to do it for them.