Krypton Radio Newswire
Facebook trolls may be heading for jail if things go right for their Sussex, England victim.
Internet trolls attack the innocent behind the protection of anonymity, and can follow you anywhere on the internet and out on the street. Now one woman in Sussex, England named Nicola Brookes is taking the fight to back to them, possibly right to their front doors. She has a court order forcing Facebook to unmask them so that they can be prosecuted under U.K. privacy laws.
In a bid to cheer up Frankie Cocozza, a contestant on the U.K version of the popular TV show X Factor who was beseigned by trolls, Brookes wrote on Facebook, “Keep your chin up, Frankie, they’ll move on to someone else soon”. Within less than a day, Brookes received hundreds of hateful messages.
According to her solicitor, Rupinder Bains, trolls published her address and followed her on to other forums, including a recipe forum, to continue the abuse. They even went so far as to villify her as a paedophile after someone created a fake profile of her and used it to approach young girls with explicit messages. Trolls also managed to get her home address, publishing it in typical internet-scourge fashion in a practice trolls call “doxing” – publishing personal information or documents so that others can use that information to attack them in real “non-internet” life.
Finally Brookes went to the local police, but they did nothing – so she went to England’s High Court for a court order to force Facebook to hand over the IP addresses of the trolls involved. And in a landmark ruling, the court agreed.
