Reply #46: "Five ways to defeat blog trolls and cyberstalkers"

[Englander]

Five ways to defeat blog trolls and cyberstalkers
Trolling can lead to far worse things, including cyberstalking

>snip

The difference is, with 70 million blogs in existence today and 1.4 new blogs created every second, according to blog search engine Technorati Inc., there are just more people participating in online discussions, and "the more crazy people you've got reading them, the wilder the whole blogosphere can become," says Richard Silverstein, who advocates for a peaceful approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his blog.

And he should know. Like Sierra, Silverstein is the victim of online harassment, in the form of hostile comments on his own blog, in external discussion groups and on blogs created solely for the purpose of maligning him. Given the topic that he blogs about, Silverstein is no stranger to abusive commentary. "It's part of the territory -- if you want to write a blog like this, you're going to deal with unpalatable people," he says.

But when the external blogs -- whose creators were anonymous -- grew increasingly threatening, including what he saw as pornographic photographs, he began to feel personally harassed. "I've felt insecure and under threat," he says. "No one has said, 'I'm going to come and kill you,' but there were some comments that got me concerned. You hate to think of these things, but it's very possible that some wacko will escalate from a threatening comment to actually doing something."

Silverstein has been able to uncover the identities of the bloggers, but he's been unable to force the blogs' removal, despite repeated correspondence with Blogger.com, which cites Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act that shields providers of content creation tools from liability for the content users create. In an e-mail sent to Silverstein, Blogger.com said that the site "does not remove allegedly defamatory, libelous or slanderous material from Blogger.com or BlogSpot.com," pursuant to Section 230, although it did remove the photographs because they were copyrighted images.

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