Exposing troll was the right thing to do
I DO NOT buy into this idea that Twitter troll Brenda Leyland should have been ignored instead of exposed.By CAMILLA TOMINEY
PUBLISHED: 09:31, Sun, Oct 12, 2014
There have been calls for Martin Brunt, the Sky News reporter who outed her, to be sacked after she was found dead in a hotel room two days later.
Talk about shooting the messenger.
Yes, Leyland was someone's mother, but so is Kate McCann, the woman she so mercilessly taunted online. Everyone on the receiving end of this kind of viral vomit is someone's daughter or someone's son. The solution is not for victims to simply grow a thicker skin.
Should Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who was threatened with rape for supporting a crusade to have women featured on the new £10 note, just have shrugged her shoulders and got on with it? Of course not.
Trolls like Leyland publish these online diatribes precisely because they have been able to get away with it for so long. Even Creasy said the police did not take the harassment seriously at first because it was happening online rather than in person. She was one of the lucky ones. Thanks in part to her high-profile position as a leading politician, her perpetrator, Peter Nunn, was jailed for 18 weeks last month.
However if the law cannot always bring these online offenders to However if the law cannot always bring these online offenders to justice then the task inevitably falls to journalists like Brunt. Some have criticised his decision to target Leyland because she did not actually threaten to kill the McCanns, unlike other trolls. But she did send thousands of hate tweets. Some days she would send more than 50 messages attacking the McCanns.
Had she hurled this abuse at the couple in the street, she would have been hauled off in handcuffs. Instead she continued to publish with impunity, safe from scrutiny at home in Burton Overy, just 15 miles from where the McCanns live in Leicestershire. Yes, these were the acts of an obsessed loner but "being an oddball" is not a defence to this sort of criminal behaviour.
Which brings us to Leyland's state of mind. As the inquest has not yet been carried out into her "non-suspicious" death, it would be wrong to pre-empt the coroner's verdict. But why has there been so much focus on Leyland's mental health and not the McCanns'? I cannot imagine they have been faring well psychologically since three-year-old Madeleine went missing in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in 2007.
There is an old adage that you should not dish it out if you cannot take it back.
We are all responsible for what we say, and that includes on social networking sites. What goes online, stays online. These words do not just disappear into the ether once you press "post", they are preserved for eternity.
A "Sack Martin Brunt" Facebook page has been set up in Leyland's memory which has already attracted more than 1,000 likes. While I feel sympathy for anyone who has lost a loved one, what are her supporters trying to achieve? Brunt was not trolling Leyland. All he did was reveal her identity. I hope he exposes as many others as possible.
Speaking after she was confronted, Leyland admitted: "I regret what I've done". She might have lived a lie but at least she died with the dignity of finally being honest with herself. Her death will not be in vain if it finally makes trolls think twice before tweeting, serving as a reminder that they are only ever a mouse click away from being unmasked.
https://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/camilla-tominey/521746/Camilla-Tominey-McCanns-trolls-wake-up-selfies-the-real-Prince-Phillip
