There is a vast difference between mockery and stalking. Trolls are usually just obnoxious people on the internest who can be ignored or blocked, whether it’s on a blog, FaceBook, Twitter, or just about anywhere that there’s an open forum. There are people out there who get off by getting others upset, and most are harmless jerks who may be dispatched with a simple click of the mouse.

Then there are some deranged individuals who are willing to take it a step further. The following story will creep you right out.

In my blog of 12th August entitled ‘Walking, Not Running’ I talked about my time on Twitter and my basic reasons for leaving. I stand over a lot of what I said. The atmosphere there has changed and there have been negative stories in the media about trolling, etc, for months now. The brand has been damaged and Twitter needs to act fairly swiftly to repair it. At the time of writing that blog, for reasons that will become obvious, I was very sketchy about my own personal experience.

[…]

It started in July 2009. I’d been on Twitter for over 2 years at that point having joined in May 2007, and I’d never had a problem. My account was followed by a fairly innocuous looking one which I followed back and within 10 minutes I had received a Direct Message (DM) calling me a ‘Dirty f*cking Jewish scumbag‘. I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DM’s, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. So I made my account private and the problem went away for a short while. There were no problems on Twitter but my Facebook account was hacked, my blog was spammed and my email address was flooded with foulmouthed and disgusting comments & images. Images of corpses and concentration camps and dismembered bodies.

Again, it eased off for a couple of weeks. I relaxed. Thought they’d finally tired of failing to get a reaction from me.

Boy, was I wrong.

Read the full story. The resolution did not involve violence, incarceration or lawsuits, and was handled exceptionally well, especially given the circumstances. Many, including myself, would not have handled it the same way.

h/t RSM via twitter