It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you.
But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.
In other words if you're making up a story, it is the kind of detail that you'd not noticed you'd gotten wrong. But if you're actually harassed, it is the kind of thing that wouldn't keep happening to you for years.
Seems like a good reason to conclude that the story is made up.
As for home address discovery, that bothered me far less. If I had tracked someone down to 3 IPs, one of which was close, I'd go looking for evidence that there was a personal connection. One of the standard things that I would think of is to look through all received emails, and look for the IP address there.
That would indeed track it down reasonably reliably to a specific household without any need for a court order. And if the person that I did this for didn't understand what I did, confused explanations about how it was done are only to be expected.
It looks to me like Traynor understood that the follow-backs enabled the DMs, but resisted changing his behavior (at first) to not let the troll win. If the follow-backs sometimes led to nice exchanges with new friends, it's reasonable to hope the troll would tire, or that handling via unfollow/Twitter-reporting would be enough, before going full "shields up".
The way Traynor describes it, after he eventually went fully private on Twitter, the harassment moved to other forums.
> But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.
He can't know in advance if he has a troll following him, and he likes to reciprocate followers. Should he, in a sense, penalize followers because of a troll?
I don't see anything in the original story about the delay between July 2009 and making his twitter account private. Is there anything to think it was years rather than weeks?
This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems legit before following them back.
If you have 20 new people a day following you and 2-3 are trolls, I'd still do it. No troll is going to make me change my polite behavior with other people.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you don't care enough about the person to research them before following them, then you shouldn't be following them anyhow.
But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.
In other words if you're making up a story, it is the kind of detail that you'd not noticed you'd gotten wrong. But if you're actually harassed, it is the kind of thing that wouldn't keep happening to you for years.
Seems like a good reason to conclude that the story is made up.
As for home address discovery, that bothered me far less. If I had tracked someone down to 3 IPs, one of which was close, I'd go looking for evidence that there was a personal connection. One of the standard things that I would think of is to look through all received emails, and look for the IP address there.
That would indeed track it down reasonably reliably to a specific household without any need for a court order. And if the person that I did this for didn't understand what I did, confused explanations about how it was done are only to be expected.