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Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

resistradio.com

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Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#41

Post by ryguytilidie »

woodchuck64 wrote: post #34
btilly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 thin…

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.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#42

Post by ryguytilidie »

gojomo wrote: post #35
Evbn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0. He didn't change his behavior during the abuse, when he could have trivially stopped it by unfollowing. If your car was stolen, would you keep the loaner unlocked before your car was even recovered? 1. Only if they use non webmail 2. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like this are false or at least extremely embellished.

Traynor did change his behavior: but when he unfollowed one account, another took its place. It took him a while to change his habit of an optimistic follow-back -- if some of his follow-backs resulted in pleasant exchanges with new friends, why wouldn't he try to outlast the troll for a while? -- but it's clear he eventually did. And Traynor reports that when he made his Twitter account private, the harassment moved…

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possibly could have seen this coming. Seems pretty simple to me.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#43

Post by abalone »

Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home address without help from the ISP.

People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to ipttackeronline.com, which does not provide exact addresses.

Great point about the police procedure for handling credible death threats, too. We don't even have to get into the twitter stuff.

Why would he lie? For attention and sympathy, of course. People do it all the time.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#44

Post by sillysaurus »

philk wrote: post #11
Bill_Dimm wrote: post #6

This article is copied in its entirety from: http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-... as admitted in the intro. Why link to a copy instead of the original?

Because I'm functioning on little sleep and managed to miss that. If one of the mods could change the URL to point to the original I'd be grateful.

Why did you post this analysis?

No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this?

Who cares whether he's lying? (And why do you care?)

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#45

Post by tedivm »

bduerst wrote: post #24
zdw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what the "IT Genius" tried. For example, IP addresses (even internal unroutable ones) are frequently passed along in email headers. If he was able to find an IP and an email sent by his friend in the same timeframe, that would be a good correlation. I've done this on occasion when someone's external IP has dynamically changed but they sent email, in order to fix VPN connections. Pinning it on the son is th…

Even with the IP address from the header, which geolocation service did he use to pinpoint the street address? If it's like most ISPs, this IP address is subject to change every couple of days, so this IP location service would need to be updated with personal addresses, across the globe, that often.

Most ISPs don't change their IPs nearly that often. This isn't the 90s where everyone was dialing in, and changing an ip address would cause existing connections to fail, making the service look crappy. Most of the time the IP only changes when there's maintenance or something that requires it, or the modem gets disconnected.

Using a geolocation service isn't needed for the scenario you're replying to. If it was me, and I had this trolls ip, the first thing I would do it compare it to the other emails and connections that occurred simply to group the troll's crap together. In this situation the friend's email would have shown up to (being sent from the same house), and I doubt Mr. Traynor needed a geolocation service to look up the address of his friend.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#46

Post by gojomo »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #42
gojomo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traynor did change his behavior: but when he unfollowed one account, another took its place. It took him a while to change his habit of an optimistic follow-back -- if some of his follow-backs resulted in pleasant exchanges with new friends, why wouldn't he try to outlast the troll for a while? -- but it's clear he eventually did. And Traynor reports that when he made his Twitter account private, the harassment moved…

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possib…

He did change his behavior! He unfollowed/reported harassers and eventually rejected all new followers by taking his accounts private. And then the harassment came via other avenues!

What more are you expecting him to have done? And why wasn't it OK for him to try remaining open to possibly-friendly strangers for as long as possible? And he's not "screaming" or indeed complaining about anything, he's just describing a chain of events.

He's condensed around 3 years of on-and-off-again harassment and on-and-off-again countermeasures into a few paragraphs. You can either read it charitably, and assume other consistent and reasonable details for things unsaid, or read it in a hostile and suspicious manner (as '@ResistRadio' has).

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#47

Post by Bockit »

This is more of an aside than a comment specific to the article.

Over the past year I've felt that the term "troll" is increasingly being confused with what would have been called "griefing" back in my gaming days. My early encounters with trolling were that it was your fairly basic ribbing of friends, nothing particularly malicious. Nowadays, anything and everything seems to be labelled as trolling when I feel that the circumstances with malicious intent would be better labelled as griefing. Not only do I think griefing is a more apt description for the behaviour being associated with trolling, I think it allows for a distinction between harmless fun and out-to-cause-harm when describing activity on the internet.

Proper distinction between the two modes would, imo, help keep frames of reference and hopefully prevent knee-jerk reactions to what is currently labelled as trolling affecting a more wide variety of interactions.

Also, it would probably help a lot when the next newbie asks you what "trolling" means as well.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#48

Post by nicholas_tuzzio »

sillysaurus wrote: post #44
philk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm functioning on little sleep and managed to miss that. If one of the mods could change the URL to point to the original I'd be grateful.

Why did you post this analysis? No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this? Who cares whether he's lying? (And why do you care?)

I care if he's lying because his story was re-printed in The Guardian, where I read it, as truth. If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#49

Post by sillysaurus »

nicholas_tuzzio wrote: post #48
sillysaurus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you post this analysis? No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this? Who cares whether he's lying? (And why do you care?)

I care if he's lying because his story was re-printed in The Guardian, where I read it, as truth. If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

But why? Can you (or someone) please articulate what exactly is so bad about it?

Some of the best and most influential stories in human history were precisely that: lies presented as truth. Were the authors "bad" for doing this? At what point does it become bad? (And why?)

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#50

Post by [deleted] »

nicholas_tuzzio wrote: post #48
sillysaurus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you post this analysis? No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this? Who cares whether he's lying? (And why do you care?)

I care if he's lying because his story was re-printed in The Guardian, where I read it, as truth. If it's not a true story, it's wrong to present it as such.

[deleted]
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